"Audiovisual Translation and the language of science: a form of popularization?"

Knowing that a long-lasting relationship between scientific discourse and cinematic works has always existed and that films act as effective tools in stimulating discussion and raising interest in scientific and technical issues, the aim of this study is to reflect on the role played by Audiovisual Translation when dealing with such topics. Therefore, an ad hoc corpus of five films exploring scientific and pseudo-scientific contents has been selected and analysed, in order to investigate how the popularization of scientific discourse works within the time and space constraints of audiovisual products. A particular attention has been paid to some lexical aspects and syntactic features emerging from the language of science and pseudo-science in the English dialogues, analysing how their lexical density and morphosyntactic complexity have been translated in the Italian version. The contribution also reflects on the use of metaphors as a possibility to popularize scientific discourse, ultimately proving that varying degrees of ‘specialization’ or ‘popularization’ in the dubbed dialogues are heavily dependent on the linguistic mechanisms and on the translation choices underlying the construction of scientific discourse in both languages