Homogenizing Discourse and Intersemiotic Strategies in FAO’s Youth Action Music Videos

This paper investigates the multilingual and intersemiotic strategies used by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to raise awareness, across various languages and cultures, about the global impact of food and water waste in terms of environmental sustainability and social equity. Framed within Translation Studies as a socially and ecologically engaged discipline (Cronin 2017), this study explores the various campaigns produced by schoolchildren from different countries as part of FAO’s Junior World Food Day initiative, inaugurated in 2021, to convey its core mission of “ensuring universal access to nutritious food for sustainable and healthy living” (https://www.fao.org/multimedia/en). More specifically, the study focuses on how the theme of equal access to food/water is represented in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)-oriented, multilingual discourse of three Youth Action Music Videos (“We can all become food heroes”, 2021; “Leave no-one behind”, 2022; “Water is life, water is food”, 2023). The analysis addresses two main questions: whether, in these campaigns, cultural diversity is preserved or homogenized by the global scope of FAO’s mission, and which verbal and non-verbal strategies contribute to such effects. Special attention is given to subtitling practices, especially where adaptations across languages generate ‘anomalies’. By exploring the interplay between language, culture, and environmental advocacy, the study aims to provide insights into the effectiveness of translation choices when fostering a global dialogue on pressing ecological issues (Hu 2020).