This study investigates how novice translators construe and reconstruct “action” when translating politically sensitive newspaper headlines between English and Persian, and how their subjective, in-process decisions shape the final product. Challenging product-only Translation Quality Assessment, the paper argues that headline translation—especially on high-stakes topics such as Iran’s nuclear programme—requires attention to how translators distribute agency, responsibility, and intensity of events through lexico-grammatical choices. Methodologically, the research combines product and process perspectives. A corpus of 400 headlines (2020–2023) from international and domestic outlets was compiled; 42 headlines rich in explicit “action” were purposively selected. Eighty translation students translated the set into Persian over two weeks and provided written justifications for their lexical and structural choices. Using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, headlines and translations were analysed via six process types (material, mental, relational, behavioural, verbal, existential). For focused comparison, five diverse student versions per headline were examined alongside students’ rationales. Findings show that process types are often preserved, yet their linguistic realisation varies substantially. Verbal processes (e.g., reporting/circulating) tend to be retained, sometimes strengthened by explicit reporting structures. By contrast, behavioural/material construals of conflict (e.g., clash) are frequently re-framed as verbal dispute or mental disagreement, thereby softening or re-calibrating confrontation and shifting ideological framing. Additions, omissions (e.g., modality), nominalisations, and restructuring reveal how target-language norms, perceived journalistic style, and political sensitivity interact with translator agency. The paper proposes a dialectical evaluation stance in which process evidence (justifications, decision traces) complements product analysis. Pedagogically, the study supports reflective training that makes action-construal choices visible—also offering a functional template for auditing MT/LLM headline drafts where subtle shifts in agency and process type can entail major pragmatic consequences.