In political fictions of the current Hollywood cinema, ‘symbolic’ and ‘descriptive’ representation are increasingly in conflict. The right to descriptive representation, e.g. to represent ethnically tagged minorities by persons belonging to those minorities itself, leads to complications, especially in genres and films, where the issue of political representation is a key issue. The article focuses on the figure of the white translator employed in Sydney Pollacks The Interpreter and Denis Villeneuves Arrival as mediators in this conflict. Using different generous elements — the politician and the alien invasion movies — these works are working on an ethics of translation that seeks to overcome representative violence by emphasising the distance between representatives, rather than combating them, that is creating for each representation.