In today's interconnected world, interpreting activities are increasingly playing a vital and indispensable role in inter/transnational communication (e.g., Schäffner, 2004, 2012; Perez-Gonzalez, 2012; Cronin, 2013). Such cross-language/cultural communication often happen in international conferences, whereby world leaders rely on the interpreted speeches to understand and communicate with one another, subsequently making decisions that potentially influence a country/region, even the entire world. The discourse reproduced from the source texts (STs) into the target texts (TTs) by conference interpreters, in fact, constitutes “part of the development” of the speaker discourse (Schäffner, 2004, p. 120), and the reproduced part in interpretations will be discursively “consumed” by world leaders.

Despite that political leaders in international conferences may tacitly assume that the interpreted speech “functions seamlessly as part of the discourse” of the source speech (Kang, 2009, p. 144), the interpreted speech does not often “mirror” the source speech due to the interpreter's agency. In the words of Hatim and Mason (1997, p. 147), conference interpreters may ideologically mediate/intervene and “[feed] their own knowledge and beliefs into a text.” Therefore, interpreters' ideological beliefs play a role in “editing” the source texts (STs) that may become a “different version” discursively in the resultant target texts (TTs) (Gao and Munday, 2022). In other words, it is the interpreters' “voice” rather than the speaker's “voice” that is heard by world leaders. The interpreting “shifts”¹ made “surreptitiously,” as it were, through the interpreter “voice” can reach afar, passing onto world leaders in situ the conference sites and feeding into a chain of media circulation in the world.

In conference interpreting research (CIR), there have been growing scholarly interests in interpreter ideological intervention with different terminologies, inter alia, stance-taking (Munday, 2012; Wang and Feng, 2017), mediation (Fu and Chen, 2019), agency (Gu, 2018; Gu and Tipton, 2020), and ideological positioning (e.g., Gao, 2021a,b; Gao and Wang, 2021; Gao and Munday, 2022), which more or less point to the same thing—interpreters' socio-cognition that shapes, conditions, and alters the ST discourse in the interpreting products. Pöchhacker (2006) discusses in-depth the role of the interpreters' socio-cognition, connecting it with the interpreters' “within-one-side” position rather than the “between-two-sides” position. In other words, the “super-norm” of impartiality and loyalty to the speaker (Zwischenberger, 2015), promoted by the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC), is challenged; interpreters introduce ideological shifts to the discourse (re)produced in international conferences.

The review primarily presents relevant studies in CDR from two perspectives: a macro-level perspective alongside a meso/micro-level perspective. The review with macro-level perspective looks at (a) international conferences (as the discursive events) and meeting/panel topics (as discourse topoi) that are considered as key contextual factors (cf., van Dijk, 1998) in discourse (re)production. Then, the review with meso/micro-level perspective covers the group of the interpreters' use of linguistic means that realizes discourse reconstruction in conference interpreting.

This brief review has covered the ground of conference interpreters' ideological intervention/mediation at international conferences from the macro- and meso/micro perspectives. Despite that only a few studies in CIR has focused on the ideological shifts introduced by conference interpreters, these studies have investigated some influential international discursive events and vital political topics of regional/global concern. These studies have also effectively utilized linguistic tools and approaches in CDA to reveal the interpreters' use of linguistic means that serve to alter the discourse structure.

While the existing studies seem to map out a promising research avenue for CIR, this avenue needs to be widened in the three aspects.

Firstly, how the interpreters respond to ideological stimuli during the process of interpreting is currently overlooked. This oversight is entrenched in the paradigmatic “divide” between the discursively reconstructed TT discourse (as the interpreted product) and cognitive processing operations (as the interpreting process) (Gao and Munday, 2022). It is possible to integrate the two sides by importing methods from the reference discipline of psychology. Future studies can benefiting from collaborations between CIR researchers equipped with neuroscience methods such as ERP and fMRI and CIR researchers who are experienced with CDA approaches.

Secondly, paralinguistic elements (such as prosody) that bear ideological values in conference interpreting are little talked about. The sound of language is the main medium for conference interpreting, and prosody can convey the “attitudinal position” (Munday, 2012, p. 67). With importation of methods and theories from phonetics and phonology into CIS (Ahrens, 2005; Gao, 2022), future studies can profitably examine the paralinguistic data to explore patterns of ideological shifts.

Thirdly, current studies only focus on a limited number of interpreter-mediated conferences, as discussed in Section International conferences as discursive events and meeting/panel topics as discourse topoi, largely due to the difficulty in building the interpreting corpora that derived from audio/video data. The task of transcribing the textual data for a corpus from the audio/video data is highly labor-intensive and time-consuming. Nonetheless, with the increasing affordance of speech-recognition technology, CIR scholars are able to develop more interpreting corpora and explore more influential international conferences attended by political leaders. For example, the speech recognition programs (Dragon Naturally Speaking and IBM Via Voice) were used to develop EPIC (European Parliament Interpreting Corpus), for which the speech recognition programs were trained to recognize the speakers' voices and produce a draft transcript automatically (Bendazzoli and Sandrelli, 2005). The fast evolving speech-recognition programs will surely facilitate CIR scholars to develop interpreting corpora of their interests in a more efficient way.

Overall, conference interpreters' ideological intervention is a promising research avenue that awaits harmonized views, methods, and theoretical accounts from different disciplines in future studies.

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

This work was supported by the Research Committee of the Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications with the grant number K2020-211, the Chongqing Social Sciences Planning Fund with the grant number KKY22220 and 2022WYZX15, and Chongqing Municipal Education Commission with the grant number 222083.

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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