ABSTRACT
Although linguistics has, until recently, focused on the study and description of written language, the turn of the century has witnessed a shift to the study of spoken language as a domain of research in its own right. Significantly, for the purposes of this chapter, ‘research into the features of faked casual conversation in audiovisual conversation has . . . begun to surface’ as a particularly productive research theme within the field of audiovisual translation (Valdeón 2011: 224). Back in the 70s, Gregory and Carroll were the first to recognize that, while dialogues in audiovisual texts are scripted in nature, they are ‘written to be spoken as if not written’ (Gregory and Carroll 1978: 42). In doing so, they paved the way for the debate on the authenticity of film language when they argued that this is a genre of its own, where naturalness is the result of detailed planning. Today, much of the current research on audiovisual translation (AVT) touches upon the comparability between filmic dialogue and spontaneous dialogue, and consequently also translated dialogue (in particular, dubbing).
