Abstract
The issue of climate change is a crisis that threatens humanity as a whole. That is the reason it has come to the fore and became the focus of several studies. Awareness needs to be raised about the matter, and it needs to be highlighted in academic studies of all disciplines. The present study focuses on analyzing the subtitles of documentaries addressing the climate crisis. 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. It is based on Stöckl’s (2004) categorization of core modes, submodes, and medial variants. It also employs Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach (2006, investigating how they come to be translated and the impact of that rendering on raising awareness about the issue of climate change. The study categorizes the strategies used by subtitlers in dealing with the multimodal incoherence from syntactic differences between English and Arabic. The study investigates the subtitles of twelve climate documentaries aired on Netflix as case studies. The analysis seeks to form a link between academic theorizing and the practical practices employed by subtitlers in the professional realm of subtitling climate-related productions by exploring the techniques they employ to maintain the balance between the modes of the audiovisual product when dealing with different syntactic structures. The findings can be utilized in shedding light on the importance of properly awareness-raising messages about the issue of climate change.
Presenters
Maha AshrafAssistant Lecturer, Al-Alsun (Langauges) and Mass Communication, Misr International University, Al Jizah, Egypt
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Climate Change, Awareness, Multimodality, Subtitling Challenges, Audiovisual Translation, Climate Documentaries
