A diachronic study of familiarizers (‘man’, ‘guys’, ‘buddy’, ‘dude’) in movie language

Abstract

The present paper aims to illustrate the applicability of corpus linguistics (CL) to audiovisual translation (AVT) and to provide an empirical description of familiarizers in movie conversation as an example of such applicability. The paper is conceptually divided into two main parts: the first, which is introductory, illustrates the benefits that AVT can gain by adopting CL as a methodology, describes the modus operandi followed, and briefly introduces the linguistic items analyzed. The second part, which is more practical, first focuses on original American movies, by investigating the frequency, collocations, colligations and the lexical bundles of ‘guys’, ‘man’, ‘buddy’ and ‘dude’; and then focuses on dubbed Italian movies, by exploring the ways in which these familiarizers are translated. Results show that: the functions that familiarizers traditionally carry out in spoken interaction are also present in original movies; their use in more recent original movies is closer to spoken language than older movies; they tend to be less dubbed after the year 2000; and despite such cut, the function of the linguistic features used to dub them in more recent movies is closer to that of the original movies than those produced in older times.