Communicating urgency to prevent environmental damage: insights from a linguistic analysis of the WWF24 multilingual corpus

Abstract

Contemporary environmental discourse focuses on effectively communicating ecological vulnerability to raise public awareness and encourage positive actions. Hence there is a need for studies to support accurate and adequate discourse production, both by humans and computers. Two main challenges need to be tackled. On the one hand, the language used to communicate about environment issues can be very complex for human and automatic analysis, there being few resources to train and test NLP tools. On the other hand, in the current international scenario, most texts are written in multiple languages or translated from a major to minor language, resulting in different meanings in different languages and cultural contexts. This paper presents a novel parallel corpus comprising the text of World Wide Fund (WWF) 2024 Annual Report in English and its translations into Italian and Brazilian Portuguese, and analyses their linguistic features.