The present research is aimed at describing the differences and similarities of mitigation, as a politeness strategy, between the source text (ST) and the target Text (TT), on the transcription of TED talks about environmentalism. In the methodology of this qualitative study, we tracked down morpho-syntactic particles that showed mitigated criticism based on Leech’s model of the pragmatics of politeness (2014) and analyzed the speech acts that shaped the criticisms in the contexts of the ST. In order to do so, we compiled a corpus in which we carried out a morpho-syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis to determine whether the intention, from Nord’s approach (2005) the sender’s mitigated criticism on the ST is preserved in the TT. The main outcome of this study revealed that the most common speech acts were affirmative and the most common strategies were the litotes which also showed differences between the ST and TT, and the passive voice which was similar in the TT. The mitigation of criticisms in the semantic and pragmatic levels were preserved in most of the studied contexts. It is concluded that mitigated strategies tend to be translated in a literal way, maybe due to the fact that they have similar structures in both cultures and generate much more acceptability on the receiver by making use of words with positive semantic charge and by hiding the target of the criticism