Translations are a form of rewriting, together with criticism, anthologies, historiography, text books, reference works, etc., all of which construct images of writers and/or their works (Bassnett and Lefevere 1998:10). Factors of a sociopolitical, ideological and/or literary nature influence this image construction process. This paper has two main aims: to explore to what extent ideological factors play a role in the image construction process and to ascertain to what extent these images are the result of complying with or going against the dominant ideology of the target culture at the time of publication. These aims will be achieved by using as a case study the translations into English of Canto general by the Chilean laureate poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) published in the US in 1950.