Introduction

This chapter provides an introduction to the main ideas pertaining to interpreters’ ideological positioning in international conferences. The concept of ‘critical points’ of translators’ and interpreters’ decision-making is used as the starting point in this chapter (and in this book). Based on it, the key concepts of ‘shift’ and ‘evaluative potential’ are discussed from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics. The concept of ideology is then discussed briefly, in conjunction with an introduction to the Appraisal theory, which is used to provide a linguistic ‘toolkit’ in the forensic examination of interpreters’ reconstructions of the target text discourse. This introductory chapter also presents the three overarching research questions that guided the empirical investigations in this book.