Posted on 12 May 2020 by BaerbelW

We already have the FLICC-taxonomy and its history, but now we also have the FLICC-Poster!

This poster is the result of a successful collaboration between us and our German language partnersite klimafakten.de. Our partnership goes back to 2011 when Klimafakten started out with German translations of several of our rebuttals and this short announcement tells the story: Klimafakten.de - Leveraging Skeptical Science content. Since then, Klimafakten has added many more fact checks to their site and we have leveraged this by simply cross-linking from many of our translated rebuttal "stubs" to their German versions.

Collaboration

Over the years, there were many other opportunities for us to stay in touch and to work together on various topics and publications related to climate science communication. Most of the necessary back and forth about these projects happened between Toralf Staud and myself.

When Toralf and I met in Karlsruhe at last year's K3 conference in Karlsruhe in September he briefly floated the idea to create a poster based on the FLICC taxonomy. By November plans were getting more concrete and we approached John Cook to get his feedback about the idea to create a poster based on his taxonomy but in German. To nobody's surprise - well at least not to mine! - John liked the idea and Toralf set things in motion on Klimafakten's side of things.

A couple of months went by and in March 2020 a first rough draft of the poster - put together by graphic designer Marie-Pascale Gafinen -  had taken shape and it looked great. Echoing my initial impression, John reacted with this when he saw the draft:

"Wow, that poster is fantastic! Do they have any intent to make it available in English?"

So, not only did John like the poster, the seed to create an English version had also been planted! We however decided to shelve this idea until after the German version had been completed.

During April and over several iterations between Toralf, the graphic designer and myself we slowly but surely ironed out all the typos in the German version getting it ready for publication which happened on April 28. In parallel, we started to work on the English version for which we could leverage John's definitions listed in his FLICC-history blog post as far as the descriptive texts were concerned.

Getting creative

But, the texts were not everything, as some of the techniques have different names in English and German, like for example "Rosinenpickerei" (picking raisins) in German which is "Cherry Picking" in English. In addition to the text, the graphics needed to be adapted as well:

In the German version of the poster the logical fallacy of "misrepresentation" was creatively depicted as flipping an "M" to a "W" to turn "Mut" (courage) into "Wut" (rage). It proved to be quite a challenge to find a good and equally creative equivalent in English, so Toralf and I enlisted the help of our respective teams at Klimafakten and Skeptical Science. In the end we settled on "plucking" the "D" from "Danger" to turn it into "anger":

Since getting involved with Skeptical Science more than ten years ago I have been working on many translations into German, several of which involved translating play on words or challenges like fitting the often long-winded translation into the available space. Working on this translation of the poster for sure added some creative challenges to the mix!

Links to resources on klimafakten.de:

F-L-I-C-C: The most common disinformation tricks of science deniers

You can download the infographics from klimafakten.de: in pdf format (approx. 1.3MB), in jpg format (approx. 1MB) and in png format (approx. 1MB). It can also be ordered free of charge from Klimafakten's editorial office as a coloured poster in A2 format. Like all klimafakten.de content, the graphic may be distributed and used – provided the source is cited (CC BY-ND 4.0).

Note:

If you'd like to translate the FLICC poster into another language or help with a translation currently in progress, please contact us by selecting "Enquiry about translations" from the contact form's dropdown menu. We'll then get in touch with additional information.