Rationale
The multifarious function of regional and social dialects in the fictional dialogues included in films and television series is at the core of this research project. A close look at the way dialects are handled in audiovisual products can reveal the changing attitude of readers and viewers towards this socially loaded lingua-cultural feature.
In its initial stage, the aim of this project is to render accessible through this website, for the benefit of students and scholars, a repository of files on films and TV series whose main or key characters use a variety of regional or social British English. These are categorised according to their function in the dialogues (Kozloff 2000, Richardson 2010, Hodson 2014).
Dialect “handling” also involves a reflection on the way accents and dialects are translated. Files thus include information on the translated version of films into dubbed Italian, although we aim at including details on other language pairs and other audiovisual translation modes in the future.
The fictional language used on screen, and that of dubbing in particular, is characterised by a degree of artificiality that seems to place it at the opposite end of British cinema and television’s quest for realism. It is this dichotomy that we intend to explore, as a first step, through an orderly rationalisation of data relative to the use of dialects in audiovisuals.
Although the gathering and collection of material on the varieties of English in cinema and TV has been Irene Ranzato’s work of several years, the way the files are organised owes a great deal to the collaboration and suggestions of her students and to the inspiration of the Trafilm project on multilingual films by Patrick Zabalbeascoa and his colleagues (Corrius, Espasa, Pujol, Santamaria, Sokoli) (http://www.trafilm.net) whom we wish to acknowledge.
Film and TV files can be filtered by title, year, dialect and function.
The bibliography includes works of reference to accents and dialects and to other relevant linguistic, film and television, translation and audiovisual translation studies.
This is an ongoing project: new files and new data are being added every week, so stay in touch.