rmed conflicts are fought not only with weapons but also with language — through discourses designed to legitimize violence, mobilize empathy, or obscure culpability. In such contexts, translation is never neutral; it becomes an act of political consequence. As Susan Bassnett (2006) reminds us, translation is always implicated in power relations, and Mona Baker (2006, 2018) emphasizes that translators and interpreters are active agents in shaping narratives of war, rather than invisible conduits.
The wars in Gaza and Ukraine exemplify this entanglement of translation, ideology, and violence. Competing discourses — Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab in one case; Ukrainian, Russian, and Western in the other — must be mediated across languages through news reports, speeches, humanitarian appeals, and social media. The lexical and rhetorical choices of translators determine whether terms are received as legal claims, moral testimonies, or propaganda.
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Lawrence Venuti’s (1995 ,2012) critique of translator “invisibility” highlights the risks of smoothing foreign discourse into the target language, which can obscure power asymmetries. In war reporting, this becomes evident when the word مجزرة (majzara, “massacre”) is reduced to “incident” or “blast,” softening its moral charge, whereas “collateral damage,” rendered literally into Arabic or French, strips away its euphemism. Maria Tymoczko (2003, 2007) underscores this as a form of reframing, in which translators must confront their positionality when mediating violence.
Interpreting in conflict zones presents similar dilemmas. Fieldwork in Iraq and Afghanistan shows interpreters negotiating between professional codes of neutrality and the moral demands of witnessing atrocities (Inghilleri, 2010, 2017). As “reluctant witnesses,” they embody the same tensions faced by translators of Gaza or Ukraine: whether to reproduce euphemisms favored by state actors or preserve the accusatory force of local registers.
Narrative theory further reveals how translation constructs collective memory in times of crisis (Baker, 2006; Harding, 2012). Rendering المقاومة (al-muqāwama, “resistance”) as “militant activity,” for example, reframes liberationist discourse as a security threat. Similarly, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s appeals, translated differently for Russian or Western audiences, either underscore solidarity or reinforce division.
Translation in wartime is therefore more than linguistic mediation: It is an ethical practice. Translators negotiate a dual allegiance — fidelity to the semantic texture of the source and responsibility to the ethical horizons of the target audience. To translate is to intervene: to reveal or obscure, to amplify or neutralize, to resist or comply. As Walter Benjamin (1923) observed, translation grants texts an “afterlife.” In war, that afterlife is profoundly political.
The next section turns to Gaza, where siege, displacement, and devastation have generated a discourse of suffering and resistance. Examining how Arabic media discourse is translated into English and French shows how narratives of legitimacy, morality, and atrocity are reframed in the global arena.
An Al-Jazeera report in September 2025 read: «شهداء في يوم آخر من الإبادة بغزة وأونروا تحصي 1.9 مليون نازح» (shuhadāʾ fī yawm ākhar min al-ibādah bi-Ghazza wa-ʾUnrwa tuḥṣī 1.9 milyūn nāziḥ, “Martyrs in another day of genocide in Gaza as UNRWA counts 1.9 million displaced”). The term shuhadāʾ (a widely used Arabic term for those killed in war) is not a neutral synonym for “dead.” It sacralizes loss, framing the deceased as witnesses to injustice. Translating it as “victims” or “killed” effaces this resonance, while the English “martyrs” lacks its cultural ubiquity. French poses similar dilemmas: martyrs exists but is often replaced with victimes, softening the moral register. The same report used نزحوا قسرا (nazahū qasran, “forcibly displaced”), a phrase that resonates with the Nakba of 1948 and collective memory of dispossession. United Nations–standard renderings such as “forced displacement” flatten this intertextual charge, whereas “uprooted from their homes” or arrachés de leurs foyers preserves its emotive force. Such examples demonstrate what Baker (2006) calls “narrative framing”: Lexical choices shape not only understanding but also how conflicts are morally adjudicated.
Al Mayadeen (2023a) described the conflict as: «جيش إسرائيلي ثقيل في مواجهة حرب عصابات» (jaysh isrāʾīlī thaqīl fī muwājaha ḥarb ʿiṣābāt, “a heavy Israeli army facing a guerrilla war”). Here, jaysh thaqīl (“heavy army”) emphasizes Israel’s technological superiority, while ḥarb ʿiṣābāt poses a translational dilemma. The literal “gang war” delegitimizes Palestinian resistance; “guerrilla war” acknowledges asymmetry but reframes it in terms of insurgency. French (guerre de guérilla) conveys the imbalance without pejoration, but in English “guerrilla” often evokes illegitimacy. Each option encodes a political stance, exemplifying Tymoczko’s (2003) notion of ideological transfer.
Another Al Mayadeen (2023b) article, citing Worldcrunch, warned: «أورويل في غزة: كيف تتلاعب إسرائيل بالكلام» (Orwell fī Ghazza: kayfa tatalaʿʿab Isrāʾīl bi-l-kalām, “Orwell in Gaza: how Israel manipulates words”). This text explicitly invokes Orwell’s critique of doublespeak, highlighting euphemisms such as “surgical strikes” (ḍarbāt jirrāḥiyya) and “collateral damage” (aḍrār janābiyya). In Arabic discourse, ḍarbāt jirrāḥiyya often carries ironic undertones, undermining the claim of precision. Translators must decide whether to reproduce such euphemisms, thereby sustaining their illusion, or expose them through glosses such as “so-called surgical strikes.” Venuti’s (1995) call for translator visibility is crucial: Neutrality here risks complicity in manipulation.
The term shuhadāʾ recurs widely. Asharq Al-Awsat (2023) reported: «مئات الشهداء» (miʾāt al-shuhadāʾ, “hundreds of martyrs”). In English, this often becomes “hundreds killed.” The difference is stark: One affirms dignity and testimony; the other anonymizes loss. Similar tensions appear in expressions such as ضحايا القصف (ḍaḥāyā al-qaṣf, “victims of bombardment”), often translated as “casualties of shelling,” or أرواح بريئة أزهقت (arwāḥ barīʾah uzhiqhat, “innocent souls extinguished”), softened into “innocent lives lost.” French renderings such as âmes innocentes arrachées (innocent souls torn away) preserve more of the brutality. As Venuti (2019) notes, domestication that neutralizes such terms is not neutral at all; it erases a cultural grammar of grief that itself constitutes testimony.
These asymmetries underscore the translator’s dual role as mediator and moral agent. Arabic war discourse carries rhetorical intensity that risks alienating international audiences accustomed to sanitized registers. A diplomatic solution is annotated equivalence: rendering majzara as “massacre” or shuhadāʾ as “martyrs.” Such strategies preserve cultural specificity while fostering accessibility, reflecting Chesterman’s (2001) ethics of accountability to humanity. The Gaza lexicon — majzara (massacre), shuhadāʾ (martyrs), tawaghghul isrāʾīlī (Israeli incursion), jaysh thaqīl (heavy army) — resists neutralization. Translators’ choices determine whether these terms preserve dignity and accountability or dissolve into euphemism. Translation in Gaza thus emerges not as a technical operation but as a form of testimony. It requires sensitivity to cultural registers, empathy for victims, and vigilance against erasure. By preserving the moral and historical gravity of Arabic discourse, translators sustain memory and foster a more honest global dialogue. The next section turns to Ukraine, where registers of legality, propaganda, and resistance present equally complex challenges. Here too, translation operates as a site of conscience, shaping international perceptions of legitimacy and justice.
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The war in Ukraine has unfolded as both a military confrontation and a battle of narratives, where rhetoric is wielded with almost as much force as weapons. President Zelensky’s speeches, Russian counter-discourse, and their mediation in Western and Arabic media illustrate how translation becomes a site of ideological struggle. Translators working across English, Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, and French must navigate the tension among propaganda, testimony, and legality.
A striking case is Zelensky’s choice to address Russian citizens in their own language, described by The New York Times (Gessen, 2022) as a “counter-discourse” to state propaganda. This act was itself translational: It reframed Ukraine as part of a shared cultural community. In Arabic, خاطب الروس بلغتهم (he addressed Russians in their own language) emphasizes inclusivity, whereas the French version il s’est adressé aux Russes dans leur propre langue highlights persuasion. Yet translation risks flattening the symbolic boldness of speaking “in the enemy’s tongue,” which carries its own ideological charge.
Equally telling is Zelensky’s characterization of the invasion as a “war of annihilation.” Rendering “annihilation” into Arabic as حرب إبادة (ḥarb ibāda) situates the conflict within international legal discourse on genocide, while softer versions like تدمير (destruction) diminish its juridical weight. Here translators are not merely finding equivalents but deciding whether to frame the conflict as existential assault or as generic devastation — a clear example of ideological reframing (Tymoczko, 2003).
The affective dimension of war reporting poses similar challenges. Keith Gessen (2022) notes that “the news and the images out of Ukraine became bleaker.” The comparative form “bleaker” enacts a slide toward despair, demanding careful affective calibration in translation. Arabic equivalents range from كئيب (kaʿīb, “melancholic”) to قتيم (qātim, “dark”), but a more elevated option — ادلهمت الظلماء (idlahammat al-ẓulmāʾ, “the darkness thickened”) — carries Quranic resonance and cosmic intensity. Possible French renderings range from plus sombre (restrained, journalistic) to l’obscurité s’est épaissie (the darkness thickened), which heightens the metaphorical charge. Such choices illustrate how translators negotiate not only meaning but also register, tone, and cultural memory.
The rhetoric of legality illustrates how translation can unsettle seemingly universal categories. Western media frequently deploy terms like “rules-based international order,” “self-defense,” and “proportional response.” While authoritative in English, their translations destabilize this clarity. In Arabic, النظام القائم على القواعد (rules-based order) may evoke authoritarian rule rather than liberal legality; الدفاع عن النفس (self-defense) carries existential or religious undertones; “proportional response” has no direct equivalent and often requires circumlocution. In French, légitime défense and réponse proportionnée retain legal nuance but can serve as rhetorical hedging. Venuti’s (1995) critique of domestication is particularly relevant: Uncritical translations risk embedding audiences in Anglo-American legal frameworks, while glosses or annotations can expose their ideological freight.
Propaganda makes these stakes even clearer. Russia persists in describing its invasion as a “special military operation,” a euphemism that obscures aggression. Literal translation risks perpetuating the illusion, while substitutions such as “war” or “invasion” obscure the manipulation. Conversely, Ukraine often valorizes its fighters as “defenders of the homeland.” Rendered literally, this may sound archaic in English, but it resonates deeply in Ukrainian and Russian cultural memory. Translators thus decide whether to normalize propaganda, challenge it, or recalibrate it for international audiences.
The Ukrainian war demonstrates how translation mediates among legal, affective, and propagandistic registers. Choices over terms like “annihilation,” “bleaker,” or “rules-based order” are not neutral acts of equivalence but interventions in how the conflict is narrated and remembered. Translators, far from invisible conduits, are visible agents shaping international understandings of sovereignty, resistance, and justice.
The following section undertakes a comparative analysis of Gaza and Ukraine, mapping their distinct discursive registers and examining how translators negotiate the dual pressures of fidelity and ethical responsibility.
Although geographically and historically distinct, Gaza and Ukraine converge in one crucial respect: Both demonstrate how language becomes a weapon of war. Each conflict produces discursive registers that are deeply ideological — Gaza foregrounding sacral-moral vocabulary and Ukraine emphasizing juridical and military rhetoric. For translators, these registers are not interchangeable codes but cultural systems of meaning. Mediation across them reveals what Baker (2006) calls “narrative entanglement” — the translator’s inevitable participation in reframing worldviews across linguistic boundaries.
The challenge lies in how these registers clash. Arabic discourses of Gaza infuse terms with moral indictment and cultural memory, while Ukrainian and Western discourses lean toward legality and statehood. French, meanwhile, often seeks juridical clarity. Translation mediates among these divergent modes, revealing points of friction and exposing ideological gaps. It is at these fault lines that translators most clearly navigate the dual allegiance between fidelity to source discourse and responsibility to target audiences.
The intersections of euphemism, valorization, and legality illustrate the most consequential asymmetries. Anglo-American discourse relies heavily on euphemism to soften atrocity; Arabic discourse valorizes suffering in sacral terms; Ukrainian discourse mobilizes patriotic tropes; and French discourse turns to juridical formulations. Table 1 illustrates how translators confront these contrasts. Euphemism is not merely stylistic; it is ideological. The English phrase “collateral damage” exemplifies bureaucratic language that reduces mass death to incidental mishaps.
When translated literally into Arabic as أضرار جانبية (aḍrār janābiyya), the absurdity becomes stark, clashing with the gravity of loss. Arabic terms like مجزرة (majzara; “massacre”) instead function as unequivocal moral indictments, akin to how Shoah preserved historical specificity in Holocaust discourse. Yet when majzara is softened into “incident” or “blast,” causality and agency vanish. French adds a further layer with frappes chirurgicales (surgical strikes), medicalizing destruction under the guise of precision. Translating such terms into Arabic tends to strip away this veneer, often with added glosses to signal irony. In all three cases, translation determines whether violence is normalized or unmasked. Valorization registers reveal how societies encode sacrifice (see Table 2).
In Gaza, شهداء (shuhadāʾ; “martyrs”) frames death as testimony to injustice, comparable to Christian or anticolonial martyr traditions. Translating it as “victims” collapses its moral charge into statistical neutrality. Ukraine’s patriotic formulation — “defenders of the homeland” — recalls Soviet-era invocations of rodina (motherland), mobilizing a sense of collective guardianship. Yet literal renderings often sound archaic in English or Arabic, exposing unevenness in cultural resonance. French discourses, by contrast, invoke héros de la résistance, tied to World War II memory. Translated into English, however, it risks evoking nostalgia rather than immediacy. These divergences exemplify Berman’s (1985) “trial of the foreign”: Cultural memory resists seamless transfer, forcing translators to decide whether to preserve resonance or adapt for intelligibility. Legal registers illustrate how authority itself is refracted through translation (see Table 3).
Again, English expressions such as “rules-based international order” project universality but in Arabic evoke authoritarian imposition, recalling colonial or autocratic “orders.” Arabic’s التهجير القسري (forced displacement) encodes dispossession with historical resonance, yet is often softened into “evacuation” in English reporting, transforming atrocity into bureaucratic relocation. French legal categories such as crime contre l’humanité (crime against humanity) maintain juridical gravity, but English reporting frequently hedges with qualifiers like “alleged,” weakening accountability. Across all three registers, translation either preserves or dilutes the force of law, deciding whether it functions as a tool of justice or as rhetorical cover.
These comparisons highlight the translator’s predicament of dual allegiance. Choices such as rendering Zelensky’s “war of annihilation” as حرب إبادة (ḥarb ibāda) or softening it to تدمير (destruction) exemplify how meaning is reframed along legal or affective lines. Translators working within institutional settings may be pressured to avoid terms like “massacre,” while independent translators may prioritize fidelity to local intensity. As Simon (1996) argues, invisibility is itself political: Neutrality often amounts to complicity.
The juxtaposition of Gaza and Ukraine underscores the need for an ethics of transparency. Strategies such as annotated equivalence — rendering “martyrs” as shuhadāʾ, or glossing “rules-based order” as a Western diplomatic formula — resist domestication while preserving intelligibility. Such practices align with Chesterman’s (2001) call for accountability to humanity rather than institutions.
Euphemism, valorization, and legality emerge here as competing grammars of war. Translators mediate these grammars not as passive technicians but as civic actors shaping how violence, dignity, and justice are narrated and remembered. Their dual allegiance — to linguistic fidelity and ethical responsibility — marks translation as both craft and conscience.
The comparative cases of Gaza and Ukraine demonstrate that translation in wartime is inseparable from politics, ethics, and conscience. Across Arabic, English, and French registers, words are never innocent: They bear the weight of ideology, memory, and legitimacy. To translate war-related terms is not a neutral decision but an intervention that determines whether violence is obscured or exposed, whether testimony is preserved or silenced.
Translation’s duality of allegiance cannot be reduced to neutrality, for neutrality itself is a political stance that often favors the powerful. Venuti’s (1995) warning against the “invisibility” of translators remains pertinent: Invisibility is not the absence of politics but its concealment. The translator who refuses to choose already chooses — to align with silence, euphemism, or erasure.
What unites Gaza and Ukraine is the translator’s role as custodian of memory. Arabic sacral-moral registers, Ukrainian patriotic and existential appeals, and Western juridical idioms all converge in translation, where choices decide whether victims are anonymized or dignified, whether law functions as cover or accountability, and whether suffering is reduced to cliché or recognized as testimony. Translators mediate not only between languages but between narratives of domination and resistance, denial and remembrance.
In times of war, translation ceases to be a secondary craft and becomes a civic act. It preserves dignity against erasure, testimony against silence, and justice against denial. To translate is to affirm humanity’s refusal to allow violence to vanish beneath euphemism. It is to ensure that words continue to bear witness when lives cannot.
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Hammouda Salhi is a researcher and freelance conference interpreter with extensive global experience, having served top-level conferences, leaders, and institutions. He is a professor of translation and interpreting at the University of Tunis El Manar and holds a PhD in translation studies.
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