Interpreters’ Ideological Positioning through Evaluative Language in Conference Interpreting

The concept of ideology is closely related to one’s self ‘social-cognition’ which manifests itself in text/talk. Conference interpreters’ ideology, being socially acquired, assimilated, conditioned, shared and used in institutional and (trans-) national contexts, finds its way, in situ the conference, into interpreters’ moment-by-moment discourse-reconstruction via linguistic means. This thesis intends to uncover conference interpreters’ ideological positioning manifested textually with a focus on changes in evaluative language, which is susceptible to interpreting shifts, succumb to discourse manipulation, and revealing of interpreters’ values in terms of stance-alignment with ‘us’ – the country/government of affiliation. With interpreting shifts of evaluative language as the lynchpin, the present study addresses three research questions: 1) what are the linguistic signs that point to interpreters’ ideological intervention in simultaneous conference interpreting? 2) how do they relate to discourse structures, and 3) why do they occur in the light of interpreters’ ideological positioning (or stance-taking)? This investigation is based on a corpus with ideologically-laden discourses from the 2016 World Economic Forum (WEF) in China (commonly known as the ‘Summer Davos’ meeting), which amalgamates world-leading voices in business, society and politics. The 2016 World Economic Forum in China becomes a ‘multi-voiced’ site of political/ideological contestation due to several geopolitical and economic-political upheavals and initiatives intercepted temporarily and transnationally. The discourses of source texts (STs) and target texts (TTs) thereof provide a profitable source to empirically investigate conference interpreters’ ideological positioning. Methodologically, corpus-driven/based methods are synergised the with CDA frameworks, as a ‘meta approach’, for the purpose of generating meaningful patterns at a global level, and describe, interpret and explain examples at a local level. Appraisal theory (J. Martin & White, 2005) that develops and extends from the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is the main linguistic toolkit that enables forensic analyses, contrasting systematically the STs and TTs in the self-built parallel interpreting corpus. Additionally, relevant theories and methods are imported from phonetics and phonology with the aim of analysing intensified evaluative meaning in the paralinguistic data. Main findings are summarised in four points: (1) there exists a lopsided ‘us’-vs.-‘them’ construct where interpreters’ ‘solitary-us’ ideology is more prominent than their ‘alien-them’ ideology, the latter of which is yet discovered in conference interpreting research; (2) local linguistic shifts of evaluation (in terms of Appraisal expressions) accumulatively alter the entire ST value orientation, discursively constructing a more positive-‘us’-and-negative-‘them’ presentation in the TTs; (3) conference interpreters’ ideology and cognitive processing stand in reciprocal relations, with the former hypothetically overseeing, monitoring and engaging with the latter in allocating cognitive resources for the working memory in the simultaneous interpreting process; (4) conference interpreters have a propensity to render the ST paralanguage of intensification through verbal means of adding lexical items. These findings bear original values because they add to our existing knowledge about conference interpreting with empirical evidence from ecologically valid data. In addition, the corpus, methods and approaches in this study, not least to the corpus-driven/based methods, the adaptation of Appraisal systems, and interdisciplinary methods for analysing paralinguistic data, are, by no means, restricted to the investigation here; they could potentially benefit future studies of relevant research avenues