The text under analysis falls within the domain of socio-political document writing and translating in an international context. The documents investigated here are the English text and the Italian translation. A close reading of the English text reveals that it is not an informative, impersonal representation of data, an official statement of facts, but, instead, an ethically biased report – as not infrequently happens in the domains of socio-political and scientific communication. Discourse analysis has shown over the years that neutrality is not always to be expected in these fields. The parallel reading of the two texts, within the Applied Descriptive Translation Studies framework, shows that in the documents under investigation many different types of strategies, both covert and overt, are at work. The analysis highlights how the expected language of the report – a neutral statement of facts – is not characteristic of the State of the World’s Children 2004 Report. On the contrary, many different types of strategies are observed, both covert and overt, that witness the author’s undeniable involvement and their (un)conscious attempts to influence and enhance the reader’s response. The authors discuss lexical and semantic shifts, explicitations and implicitations, paraphrases and omissions and commitment vs. distancing.