Christopher Taylor

University of Trieste

The Language of Film: Notting Hill – a case study

As part of a wider research project (DIDACTAS) involving three language departments in Italian universities, the question of the ‘authenticity’ of film language has been put under considerable scrutiny. Experiments using a large corpus of English language film and television material, compared with a major corpus of general spoken language (the Cobuild Bank of English) have shown that significant discrepancies exist between the two genres, at least in terms of particular variables (discourse markers, hedges, tag questions, lexical density, etc.).

The transcribed dialogue of the film ‘Notting Hill’, the original script of the film and the translated, subtitled version in Italian have all been studied with a view to gaining greater insight into the language of film in general. Within this study, the systemic-functional approach has proved particularly useful, both for (multimodal) text analysis and in defining criteria for a didactic methodology for the teaching of subtitling to advanced translation students.

The paper will present the results of the study.