Multimodal Challenges in Subtitling Climate Documentaries: An Analysis of Arabic-English Transfer. | ||
| CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education | ||
| Volume 91, Issue 1, July 2025, Pages 317-336 PDF (533.06 K) | ||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/opde.2025.461455 | ||
| Author | ||
| Maha Ashraf Mostafa | ||
| Abstract | ||
| The climate crisis presents an existential threat to humanity, making its discussion paramount across all fields of study to enhance public awareness. This study contributes to this effort by examining the audiovisual translation (AVT) of climate change documentaries. AVT involves translating multimodal texts, which are texts that convey meaning through the interaction of different modes (e.g., image, sound and text). For audiences unfamiliar with the source language, subtitles are crucial for meaning construction. This research specifically investigates the challenges in transferring key syntactic structures, such as adjective phrases and compounding, during the subtitling process between English (Source Language) and Arabic (Target Language). The fundamental structural differences between these two languages present significant syntactic obstacles for subtitlers. The study employs Hartmut Stöckl's (2004) categorization of core modes and draws upon Kress and van Leeuwen's Multimodal Discourse Analysis (2006) approach. Two Netflix climate documentaries, Brave Blue World (2020) and Our Planet (2019), serve as case studies. The analysis bridges academic translation theory with the practical strategies utilized by professional subtitlers. The findings indicate that subtitlers frequently employ strategies like omission and modifying "cutting" (text segmentation/line breaks) to effectively manage the syntactic transfer while maintaining multimodal balance which is the harmonious interaction between the on-screen audiovisual elements and the subtitled text. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Climate Change; Multimodality; Subtitling Challenges; Compounding; Adjective Phrases; Core Modes; Visual Grammar; Climate Documentaries | ||
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