With its critical views on the representational function of texts, Discourse Analysis should be a fruitful approach to the study of documentary discourse and documentary translation. After a short introduction to this approach, a close reading of a subtitled documentary about Brazil is undertaken in order to look for discrepancies between reality, the documentary and its subtitles. The reading addresses these meaning gaps from a predominantly textual angle, revealing them as ideologically biased. Finally, in section three, the paper critically reassesses this interpretation by resituating the texts in their material, institutional and agential setting. The borderline between idiosyncrasies and normative behaviour – between contingency and telos – turns out to be particularly difficult to trace.