The scientific investigations commissioned by Greenpeace in the context of the Detox my Fashion campaign have identified a series of toxic chemicals that are commonly used in the fashion industry and regularly discharged into public waterways. In the light of these findings, Greenpeace has challenged top fashion brands to eliminate all hazardous chemicals across their entire supply chain; moreover, it has also aimed at raising awareness at the grassroots level by expounding chemistry and toxicology concepts for the benefit of world consumers. The study focuses on the three editions of the Dirty laundry reports and also investigates their translations into Italian, entitled Panni sporchi; the corpus, composed of source texts (STs) and their respective target texts (TTs), thus, provides material to study activist discourse not only in a monolingual perspective, but also considering its translational implications. A mixed-method approach relying on Multimodal Discourse Analysis, drawing on the literature on popularisation and building on the concept of translation as rewriting is adopted to examine the extent to which the knowledge dissemination strategies enacted in the STs are reproduced into the TTs. The findings suggest that, together with cultural and linguistic barriers, multimodality often renders translation problematic; while English-language idioms generally appear to be replaced by their Italian equivalents, their interplay with pictures often does not survive the translation process and results in the choice to relinquish pictures in favour of words. The occasional presence of anglicisms and semantic calques shows that the TTs are subject to source-language interference and further points to the fact that they present themselves as abridged and “depleted” versions of STs, that nevertheless succeed in getting the activist message across.
