Translation is a site of struggle between multiple and at times competing understandings of ethics, professionalism and religious imaginaries within Islamic media production. While a growing body of scholarship within Middle East Studies focuses on new forms of televisual preaching in the region, little attention has been paid to the subtitles that render such preaching intelligible to non-Arabic speakers. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork with Islamic television workers in Egypt, this paper shows how attending to the micro-practices of Arabic-English audio-visual translation helps us to theorize broader questions of transnational religious mediation, including the role of language in engendering certain communities of sentiment while discounting others. Specifically, I explore the ways in which Islamic media producers frame the translation of Arabic programming into English as an act of “cultural mediation” aimed at countering perceived Western stereotypes about Muslims. I detail and analyze the specific linguistic strategies adopted to “translate Islam” in a way that at once resonates with translators’ understandings of Western sensibilities but undermines negative Western discourses of Islam as a violent, misogynistic and intolerant faith. Understanding translation as performative of wider cultural logics, I focus on the discursive and material processes through which individuals become constituted as subjects capable of properly “translating” Islam for a non-Muslim audience. I show how for the translators I worked with, “manipulation” of the source text is a skilled enactment of cross-cultural competence. At the same-time, I show how the linguistic strategies adopted by translators in subtitling Arabic-language media into English often spring from a sense of moral responsibility as they imagine themselves to be “preachers by proxy" more attuned to the needs of their audience than the preachers whose programs they are subtitling.