A Multimedia Database for the Training of Audiovisual Translators

Abstract

This paper sets out to describe a multimedia database, the Forlì Corpus of Screen Translation, developed at the University of Bologna's Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in Translation, Languages and Culture (SITLeC), emphasizing the advantages it offers for audiovisual translator training. The database is actually a corpus of 20 original and dubbed films, fully indexed on the basis of a set of predefined linguistic, cultural and pragmatic categories. The tagging of the corpus makes it possible to extract concordances in the form of transcripts of film dialogues along with the original audiovisual scenes. Thanks to these features, the database is a valid tool to be used as a component in the training of audiovisual translators, in that it can help develop traditional linguistic, but also communicative and cultural skills. In addition, from a methodological point of view, it offers an ideal basis on which to ground empirical and quantitative research, thus helping establish a scientific approach in the new discipline of audiovisual translation studies.