Between the 1930s and the 1950s a series of books on Tibet written by Italian explorers were translated into English. This article analyses the way in which the Italian texts present the 'personae' of the authors and their respective relationship with national, international and imperial discourses of the period. The analysis then moves on to describe how, by operating shifts in such narrative devices as authorial voice and tense structure, the English translations modified the relationships between narrator, reader and object of the narration, thus appropriating the texts and rewriting them in accordance with the conventions of the English travel writing tradition, the expectations of the British public, and the discourse of Empire (or, later, the post-colonial discourse of tourism).