We analyse film translation in order to discover and describe features and tendencies that arise from rendering linguistic diversity for dubbing, subtitling and accessibility. We focus primarily with translations from English, but other languages can be added to the database. Even though Spanish and Catalan are the target languages of the academic, professional and social context of the main research team, associate members are welcome to work in other target languages.

The project pays special attention to gathering a representative number of samples of how the phenomenon of multilingualism has been dealt with in 21st-century films. There is no restriction on the number or type of languages that constitute the “third language,” i. e. the variety that is not the main language of the source text, since this research intends to analyse the forms and functions of this variety in order to better understand the scope of criteria for dealing with it in audiovisual translation.

We also study the case whereby the presence of the “other” language (L3) happens to be exactly the same language as the main target language for the translation (L2). For example, when English-language (L1) films which include scenes in Spanish (L3), are dubbed or subtitled into Spanish (L2). Thus, we intend to provide reliable data for refining existing theoretical models of multilingualism in audiovisual translation, and to compare tendencies across translation types.