Abstract

Climate change is a crisis that threatens humanity and has for this reason become the focus of several studies. This needs to be highlighted in academic studies across all disciplines to raise public awareness. The present study focuses on analyzing the translation of documentaries addressing the climate crisis. The form of translation under study is audiovisual, or the translation of multimodal texts that convey meaning through the interplay of different modes. Audiences who are not familiar with the source language of audiovisual multimodal productions rely on their subtitles to form meaning. This study aims to explore the challenges involved in the transfer of key syntactic structures such as adjective phrases and compounding in multimodal texts during the process of subtitling. It attempts to investigate how syntactic differences can be a challenge in the process of subtitling between Arabic and English, due to the different nature of the structure of both languages. This study is based on Hartmut Stöckl’s (2004) categorization of core modes. It also employs Kress and van Leeuwen’s Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach (2006). The study investigates the subtitles of two climate documentaries aired on Netflix as case studies, namely Kiss the Ground (2020) and Seaspiracy (2021). The analysis seeks to form a link between academic theorizing and the practices employed by professional subtitlers. The findings reveal that subtitlers rely on strategies such as omission and changing the cutting to maintain multimodal balance.