The Discreet Charm of Manipulation

The act of translating is not, and has never been, an innocent activity in which a set of linguistic items are permutated by their ‘dictionary equivalents’ in a different language and the manipulation of (audiovisual) texts has been a constant over the times and continues to be rife, irrespective of the political and cultural regimes that happen to be in power. As active and engaged agents in the transmission of social values and ideas, translators become a dynamic force for cultural and political evolution, a catalyst for deviations or compliance, often triggered by ideological motives and allegiances, that the translation scholar is called to unmask.