Translating the Environment: A Challenge between Environmental Awareness and Apocalypse Fatigue

The anthropogenic impact on the environment is one of today’s pivotal issues in many news outlets. Environmental journalism can either persuade the readers to act to protect the environment or even steer them into unexpected positions, causing ‘apocalypse fatigue’. The role of translation in globally mediating information concerning the environment is relevant but not yet explored. Therefore, the link between ecocriticism and news translation (Alexander 2020) provides the basis for this critical investigation. Focusing specifically on the English-Italian language pair, this paper investigates the translation approach and frames observable in headlines and photographs of natural elements from articles published between January 2021 and August 2022 in specialized and non-specialized magazines (National Geographic Italia and Internazionale respectively). The contrastive translation analysis will be conducted using ultimodal Critical Discourse Analysis and ecostylistics and will reveal that some shifts in the TTs may contribute to softening the impact of the ST message, sometimes even contradicting it and conveying different frames towards the environment.