Forlixt 1 – The Forlì Corpus of Screen Translation: Exploring microstructures

This paper will complete and conclude the Forlixt presentation, linking with that of Cristina Valentini in this volume. In a bank of multimodal and multilingual data about film dialogues the methodology for extracting and analyzing data differs fundamentally from the approaches which have to date been applied to corpora of written texts. In addition to the methods and examples used for a macrostructural analysis which Valentini’s paper has already stressed, we show all the aspects of research that are possible on a microstructural level through a complex system of tagging which can be combined with a free text search. In particular, the potential for microstructural analysis is fully apparent when linguistic information is linked with iconic, aural and situational details accessible from video clips. We will thus present an analysis (contrasting Italian with German) which relates to a discourse element closely connected with the pragmatic aspect of communication in diverse situations. The different stages of analysis have the aim not only of broadening knowledge about one specific case, but chiefly to illustrate one of a number of possible ways in which dialogue can be studied. As well as indicating differences and similarities between the linguistic and pragmatic structure of the two languages, the system allows for a focus on all the problems that characterize the strategies for translations and adaptations. Finally, we will also give examples of how to seek out clues, on a diachronic level, about the appearance and disappearance of linguistic phenomena, which may at the same time refer back to semiotic codes according to the relative social and ethnocultural context.