Abstract
This chapter starts off by analysing the oppositional frames of reference animated by a translated text used by a Greek broadsheet newspaper during the December 2008 riots in Athens: a skewed modern Greek translation of an excerpt from Isocrates’ Areopagiticus speech that decries the equation of real democracy to unlimited freedom/anarchy. Taking the contextual embeddedness of this short text as the point or departure, the chapter discusses how translators, interpreters and subtitlers as mediators have a pivotal role to play in identifying dividing lines between ‘us’ and cultural and political ‘others’. Dynamic groupings and (counteractive) regroupings of textual repertoires, of ideas, and of social groups thus map out three areas of investigation: ‘rewriting’, including the texts with the ideas or poetological values that characterise them and the institutions of patronage that allow patterns of action and value-formation to emerge; the active agency of translators, subtitlers and interpreters who may decide to align themselves with structures around them or oppose them; the interacting social fields involved, that is, the greater (often conflictive) social forces that provide a context for action, with distinct ‘stakes’, conditions, and gate-keeping rules.