Political news usually provides ample grounds for ideological confrontations. This research analyzes the strategies used by translators when translating English political texts into Persian and determines translators’ most frequently used strategies. In addition, this study shows how translators use several different strategies at once to change a syntactic structure and accomplish their ideological goals. For this purpose, a news item from the Washington Times about Iran-China relations was compared with its Persian translation in Fars News Agency. The analysis was guided by Hatim and Mason’s theoretical framework and van Dijk’s model. The findings show that the most frequently used strategies were expansion, addition, contraction, omission, lexical cohesion, polarization and description of the agent. The translator, however, mainly relied on the two strategies of omission and contraction to polarize the target text.Political news usually provides ample grounds for ideological confrontations. This research analyzes the strategies used by translators when translating English political texts into Persian and determines translators’ most frequently used strategies. In addition, this study shows how translators use several different strategies at once to change a syntactic structure and accomplish their ideological goals. For this purpose, a news item from the Washington Times about Iran-China relations was compared with its Persian translation in Fars News Agency. The analysis was guided by Hatim and Mason’s theoretical framework and van Dijk’s model. The findings show that the most frequently used strategies were expansion, addition, contraction, omission, lexical cohesion, polarization and description of the agent. The translator, however, mainly relied on the two strategies of omission and contraction to polarize the target text.