‘The deadliest error’: translation, international relations and the news media

Translators in international contexts are often invisible, though their role in the making of international politics is crucial as shown in this paper by Zanettin. The paratextual material concerning two crucial political episodes in times of crisis pave the way to the analysis of translation in the hands of mediating agents such as “journalists, revisors and editors”. Apparently, the intralingual translation that occurs in the rewriting and recontextualization of political speeches follows a domestication process that satisfies the expectations of the public, sometimes even manipulating the source translation in terms that fit existing political currents. Therefore, translation can become a “rather powerful political weapon” to redefine international relations for specific purposes.