Jane Austen’s "Pride and Prejudice" from the page to the screen: A diachronic analysis of source texts and Italian translations

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) has been adapted for the screen multiple times. This paper compares two film versions of Pride and Prejudice, namely the 1940 film directed by Robert Z. Leonard and the 2005 film directed by Joe Wright, and their Italian dubbed versions. To get a fuller picture, reference is also made to two Italian translations of the novel that were published roughly at the time of the release of the two films, namely the first translation ever published in Italy (Caprin 1932) and a recent one by one of Italy’s leading literary translators (Pivano 2007). More specifically, the analysis presents a diachronic study of politeness features and conversational routines in the selected source texts and translations. Quantitative data on terms of address, honorifics and vocatives were collected by means of corpus tools (SketchEngine); this was complemented by a qualitative (manual) analysis of selected conversational routines (i.e., introductions, invitations, and marriage proposals). The aim of the study is to provide a diachronic perspective on language usage differences in the two English language films, the two Italian dubbed versions and the two translations of the novel.