this article about what exactly ahmadinejad said about israel, brings up some interesting issues of translation.
"wiped from the map" is an expression in english that has certain connotations. when someone says it they're not really talking about cleaning the surface of a map. when you're trying to translate an expression like that into another language, you can either try to come up with an equivalent expression in the other language, or just summarize the meaning of the idiom to the best of your ability.
the problem is that summarizing can be really difficult. sometimes the connotations of a phrase are too complicated to reduce to a simple phrase. the reasons idioms like that are so popular is that, with only a few words, the speaker can get across a concept that would take longer to explain. and so if you spell out the idiom your translation of a couple of words can end up adding a whole other paragraph, just to encapsulate the entire sense of what the speaker might have been saying.
coming up with an equivalent phrase in the translated-to language seems like a better solution. you get to maintain the economy of the original turn of phrase, without going off on a long tangent discussing what the phrase meant. but if you're not explaining it all, there's a good chance some sense of the phrase won't translate right. it's a rare case that different languages have different idioms with exactly the same meaning. so instead, you try to come up with something close, something with roughly the same meaning, even if it's not perfect. but unless you have perfection, you're translation will inevitably add some foreign meaning that doesn't belong, or leave out something that should be there.
it's really a lose-lose proposition. and yet, so much of our foreign news comes through the filter of translations. this sort of problem must happen all the time.
