In this paper we study the translation of political texts. These texts are marked by a deeply ideological character, by a historical and cultural specificity directly dependent on their relationship with a particular situational context and by a sociopolitical relevance --both national and international-- that contribute to make their cross-lingual transfer an activity in which much care and expertise must be applied in order to avoid any distortion of the original message on its way from the sourcelanguage/ culture to the target-language/culture. Our objective in this context is, on the one hand, to underline the social importance of the political texts and their translations and, on the other, to describe and explain their translational difficulties, with special reference to the problems posed by political terminology and the specific features of this discursive class, among which we foreground culture, ideology and style. In relation to the latter we take into consideration campaign and parliamentary speeches. Both forms of discourse are directly related to the deliberative genre of rhetorical discourse, because they deal with matters, projects or situations of the future and the receivers have to make decisions based on them. In conclusion we propose to consider the rhetorical-cultural analysis --based on the understanding of texts as pragmatic-cultural constructions in a social framework-- of political texts as an analysis which could contribute to a deeper and more justified knowledge of their specific features and of their translational difficulties, thus enabling the translator to find the most successful and relevant solutions in each case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]