Translating the English Figurative Frames in the UN Secretary-General’s Messages on Climate Change into Arabic in the Light of Skopos Theory

This study aims to analyze the Arabic translation of the climate-change figurative frames within six English messages by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres on International Mother Earth Day from 2019-2024. It focuses mainly on exploring how the crisis of climate change is portrayed via figurative frames in English and whether translators preferred to maintain or modify them during the process of translation into Arabic. The theoretical framework of the study consists of two theories: the Figurative Framing Theory developed by Burgers, Konijn, and Steen (2016) and Reiss and Vermeer's Skopos Theory (2014). The former is used to deconstruct the figurative frames, while the latter is resorted to in order to analyze the translation strategies adopted to render these frames into Arabic. The results show no definite strategy to transfer figurative framing and that the decision depends on the translator's judgment of the target recipients' linguistic and cultural expectations. The study recommends further research on figurative framing in Arabic to steer translators' decisions through a robust theoretical framework