Reply #42: I was totally with you until your last sentence...

[MLFerrell]

I will gladly argue that "vanish from the pages of history (or time)" is possessed of a radically different connotation in English than "wiped off the map". As you correctly observed, the semantic meaning of the latter phrase is largely innocuous, but in its common usage, it denotes clear hostility. To "vanish from the page of time (or history)" implies a much less belligerent stance.

The Soviet Union "vanished from the page of time (or history)" in 1991.

Poland was "wiped off the map" in 1939.

The mistranslation of Ahmadinejad's words is deliberate, to deleterious effect, and is intended to create a popular perception of him amongst Westerners as dangerous and bellicose. I fully concur that translation is a tricky business, and that subtle nuances are inevitably lost in transposition. Idiomatic expressions are imbued with particular and distinct meaning amongst dialects of the same language, let alone radically different tongues. But that being so, translators of dual-fluency almost invariably have a sufficient understanding of BOTH cultures to account for these differences, and to accurately express BOTH the rhetorical intentions of the speaker as well as the literal definition of their words.

Example: I'm in grad school. For my studies, I was recently reading a book (in English) on the history of Madrid. The quotes were presented in both Spanish and English. The Spanish phrase was: Me invitaron conocer la Zona Sur. The English translation provided by the author read "The invited me to see the southern zone." A more accurate translation would be "They invited me to get to know the southern Zone."

The latter implies a degree of familiarity or intimacy that the former does not. Additionally, to "get to know" a thing in English implies an active role that mere "seeing" does not. Mind you, this example is quite simplistic in comparison, but in my opinion, is also quite illustrative.

Just my $0.03 (inflation). :)

EDIT: included example