Abstract
Ideology and Conference Interpreting: A Case Study of the Summer Davos Forum in China by Fei Gao presents a corpus-based study of English <=> Chinese simultaneous interpreting at selected panel discussions held during the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in China (2016 edition), also known as the Summer Davos Forum, an event conceived as a transnational site of ideological contestation.
The author’s primary objective is to investigate interpreters’ ideological positioning by exploring their use of evaluative language—said to embed speakers’ and interpreters’ values and world views—at what Munday (2012) terms “critical points.” These are moments in which a shift occurs in the interpreted output as a response to certain ideological stimuli, and which may reveal something about an interpreter’s values.
The work offers theoretical and methodological innovation by bringing together Appraisal Theory (AT), Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Two further innovations concern (1) the application of van Dijk’s (1998) socio-cognitive approach to ideology and his context model (van Dijk, 1999) and (2) expanding AT to include attitudinal meaning encapsulated in prosodic elements such as loudness and pitch movement. The extent to which interpreters maintain, omit or verbally compensate for such elements is investigated as a potential manifestation of their ideological influence on target discourse production.
Conference interpreting is conceptualised throughout the work as a “discursive node” in multi-voiced events, connecting different recipients or “consumers” of discourse and having the potential to shape speakers’ positioning in both the event itself and the wider socio-political landscapes beyond. Gao reminds readers of the potential for interpreters’ output to be quoted verbatim and presented by media outlets as though it were the original speaker’s and circulated around the globe. The real-world consequences of ideological shifts realised through interpreting, and the apparently taken-for-granted nature of edited values in media circulation processes, underscore the importance of research on this topic and its significance beyond interpreting studies.
Ideology has long been a research concern in translation and interpreting studies both implicitly (e.g., through a focus on interpreter agency) and explicitly, as the author observes. Whether there has been a discernible “ideological turn,” however, is open to question. The author views both Munday (2013) and Leung (2006) as champions of the idea of a “turn” in the wider evolution of translation studies; however, both authors offer a more nuanced appraisal, unpacking disciplinary influences of cultural, gender and postcolonial studies and drawing attention to the interconnections between concepts such as power, ideology, language, culture, identity and discourse. Furthermore, by highlighting the potential of CDA, which Gao’s work embraces, Leung (2006) captures what perhaps might be better termed “moments of acceleration” in the study of ideology, rather than a discrete “turn.”
In common with other scholarship in conference interpreting studies (e.g., Beaton, 2007; Gu, 2019) Gao adopts a non-pejorative and inclusive understanding of ideology (Chapter 2), drawing on van Dijk’s (1998) socio-cognitive approach. This supports a focus on the value systems of particular groups and marks a clear move away from more negative conceptualisations deriving from the classical tradition through which ideologies are construed among other things as false beliefs, beliefs that others have, and as concealing real social relations and deceiving others (van Dijk, 1998).
AT is the principal theoretical framework in the study, the key tenets of which are set out in Chapter 3, drawing on the work of Martin and White (2005). Three systems within AT drive the analysis: Attitude (linguistic resources such as adjectives used to express attitude); Engagement (linguistic resources used to articulate inter-subjective positioning) and Graduation (linguistic resources used in ways that permit engagement values to be graded, e.g., intensifying or down-toning).
Given the analytical focus on “appraisal shifts in relation to discourse structures, and not on linguistic resources that fit into the typological classification of Appraisal Theory” (p. 60), several adaptations are proposed. These include van Dijk’s (1998) principles of ideological reproduction in discourse, which are invoked due to the importance of accounting for the interpreters’ overall strategy of ideological communication in relation to the “us”/“them” discourse structure. The four “moves” in van Dijk’s Ideological Square help to map out the interpreters’ contextual strategies of expressing/emphasising or supressing/de-emphasising information in relation to their in- or out-group position.
Despite the differences in analytical levels between AT and van Dijk’s theory of ideology—linguistic and discourse levels, respectively, Gao contends that AT offers a useful toolkit to explore positive or negative evaluations at a granular level and “in relation to the upper level in- and out-group discourse structures” (p. 149). Further adaptations involve integrating Positioning Theory (from the field of social psychology) with the Engagement system in AT to analyse the impact of interpreting on the speaker’s intended positioning, and the incorporation of paralinguistic elements.
Van Dijk’s (1999) contextual model informs Chapter 3 where different contextual properties are fleshed out in relation to the Forum in question, serving to inform the subsequent analysis. Of note is the discussion about the interpreters’ background. The idea of interpreters making rational choices to protect the national interest underscores their partial positioning at this event in which social membership categories and duties as a citizen/national and professional duties as an interpreter overlap. While the study draws parallels with other studies in which interpreters are found to express a stance that aligns with the country or institution they are working in or for, readers outside of the Chinese context would benefit from understanding the extent to which dual membership of these categories is tacitly assumed to inform contemporary interpreting practice or explicitly incorporated into interpreter training and even in interpreter contracts (see Ren [2020] for historical analysis of this topic).
Furthermore, in this section there was scope to extend the discussion of contextual properties about the event to include types of interaction as something that influences the interpreters’ mental structures. In other words, in this study simultaneous interpreting ostensibly supports a dialogue-oriented event in which there are assumed to be clear turns at talk. The way in which the panel discussions unfolded, i.e., short, quick-fire exchanges or statements and responses delivered in a less conversational manner, could have implications for the analysis. An example arises in Chapter 7 where the findings show that interpreters actively re-position a speaker’s intended positioning, with the author claiming that “such a positioning shift tends to pass unnoticed and be absorbed into the subsequent communication” (p. 95). This may indeed have been the case at this event, but it is not confirmed and cannot necessarily be assumed of all panel-based events. This opens up the possibility of considering other types of critical moments, for instance, in which the interpreter’s re-engineering of utterances and the subsequent response leads the original speaker to repeat the question with the same or different emphasis and content, thereby posing a new interpreting challenge in terms of linguistic choices and cognitive effort.
Chapter 4 sets out the data used in the study, which are taken from publicly available recordings of the 2016 Forum online and encompass 13.48 hours of recorded material. Eight panels were selected on the basis of their political, geopolitical and economic-political focus, with the author drawing attention to the eventful political backdrop to the 2016 edition of the Forum, including events in the South China Sea and the presidential elections in the United States. Of note is that five of the panels involved interpreters working into English from Chinese, that is working into the B language, and three where the interpreters worked bi-directionally.
GraphColl and Paraconc software programmes were used to organise the data and conduct corpus procedures. Evaluative expressions were annotated manually using an annotation system based on the three Appraisal systems of Affect, Engagement and Graduation, and intra- and inter-rater reliability were tested involving 20% of the data set.
Chapter 5, appropriately titled “Global analysis,” is the first of four analytical chapters. It provides a quantitative perspective on appraisal patterns in the data as a first stage of analysis and involved a three-step process: (1) comparative analysis of B-A and A-B language pair directionalities in terms of the overall appraisal profiles of the two directionalities and the extent to which appraisal meaning is interpreted accurately in the two directionalities; (2) frequency-based contrastive analysis informed by AT and (3) keyness and collocational analyses.
The findings show greater similarity than difference between the two directionalities. This is surprising, as the author observes, because of evidence that working into a B language (here, English) can lead to lower quality renditions. Another finding is the marked difference in the number of tokens in relation to language directionality (131,036 B-A compared to 37,451 A-B), which is underscored by dominance of English at the event, including many Chinese speakers opting to use English, which also carries ideological implications. Appraisal meaning and its rendering by interpreters is assessed in this chapter in accordance with three measures: accuracy, inclusion and precision, opening up directions for analysis at the more granular level, the findings of which are discussed in subsequent chapters.
Chapter 6 focuses on “evaluation proper” drawing on Attitude and Graduation systems in AT to identify, interpret and explain ideological shifts in the target language renditions arising from in-group or out-group discourses. By identifying patterns in linguistic shifts in the corpus, rather ambitiously, the author seeks to shed light on the extent to which they offer empirical evidence of the relationship between interpreter ideology and cognitive operations in simultaneous interpreting.
The quantitative analysis shows the interpreters’ strong propensity to adopt ideological positioning about China. Further analysis using a Chi-square test on two categorical variables—lexical shifts in positive or negative evaluation and interpreters’ in- or out-group positions—show that the interpreters are moderately likely to omit evaluative words based on their in- or out-group positions. In qualitative terms, the chapter sheds some light on the cognitive cost of such shifts, as revealed through the omission of sentences as opposed to omission of lexical items only, but cannot offer conclusive evidence of the relationship between ideology and cognitive process in simultaneous interpreting. This point is acknowledged in the Conclusion as a limitation.
Chapter 7 moves to a focus on “evaluation supra,” integrating the Engagement system with Positioning Theory (developed in the field of social psychology). Engagement is described, drawing on Martin and White (2005, pp. 94–95) as a “cover-all term of resources of interpersonal positioning” and positioning as “linguistic means used by speakers to negotiate relationships of alignment and dis-alignment” (p. 101). Acknowledging the dynamic and dialogic nature of communication and, hence, of position negotiation, the Bakhtinian concept of “heterogloss” guides the analysis of linguistic resources of Engagement, selected for its potential to “[acknowledge] the possibility of alternative viewpoints in the potential responses of discourse receivers” (p. 101), and which is divided into dialogically contractive and expansive types. The former restricts possible responses, manifested through the use of high probability markers such as “of course” and “obviously,” whereas the latter opens up other potential viewpoints and manifested through low probability markers such as “perhaps,” “could” and “may.”
The quantitative findings show the interpreters actively reposition speakers for instance in amplifying positive-China discourse and down-toning negative-China discourse. Qualitative analysis highlights, among other things, the use of dialogically contractive expressions in interpreted renditions pertaining to the “positive-us” representations. The author points to the cumulative effect of the interpreters’ choices as having the potential to “[shift] all the speakers’ positioning at the discursive sites of cross-language communication” (p. 112). This is a bold statement, the implications of which merited further discussion.
A key contribution made by this study is demonstrated in Chapter 8 where the author extends the Graduation system in AT to investigate paralinguistic phenomena. The creation of a corpus that facilitates analysis of such phenomena poses several challenges for the analyst and here, the author, wisely given the scope of the study, opted to annotate only a selected segment of audio data as a case study. The segment (approx. 31 minutes) concerned a single speech delivered by an American political scientist and interpreted by four interpreters. Readers would benefit from additional information on the rationale for the data selected, given that a single speech is not representative of the wider panel discussion event, and some insight into why four interpreters interpreted this particular segment.
The chapter problematises speaker-interpreter relationship in terms of source and target language prosody. The author hypothesises that interpreters’ renditions may be impacted by instances of ST discourse which is paralinguistically emphatic (e.g., where there is prosodic emphasis) and ideologically charged, carefully distinguishing between “stress” understood as “conventionalised and lexicalised attentional modulation” (p. 117, following Chen & Gussenhoven, 2008), and emphasis, which “is controlled by ongoing discourse and associated with emphatic meaning” (p. 117). A particular innovation concerns the application of methods from acoustic phonetics and phonology-oriented theory to explore ST prosodic properties and their corresponding renditions in the target language.
The analysis shows some promising initial findings that demonstrate the potential for developing the method in interpreting studies. While over 50% of prosodic emphasis in the ST was not maintained in the interpretation—which the author highlights could be explained in part by AIIC norms regarding interpreter loudness—the data shed some light on the efforts employed by interpreters to verbally compensate for prosodic elements and their triggers. Future research using this analytical lens could also usefully incorporate confounding factors such as interpreter fatigue and speaker accent.
Overall, this is a well-conceived and theoretically complex study that achieves high ecological validity and offers ample theoretical and methodological originality. Gao makes a compelling case for combining AT with data-driven corpus methods, which support the mapping of differences and making comparisons between ST and TT appraisal profiles, and interpreting shifts of evaluative meaning. Detailed explanations of theoretical and methodological decisions support replicability and, indeed, many interpreting students and more established researchers interested in exploring the potential of corpus-based approaches will derive considerable inspiration from this work.
The reading experience is unfortunately impacted by some awkward expressions (including in some of the chapter titles), spelling errors, and instances where several words are bunched together, possibly introduced in the production process. Nevertheless, the nine chapters flow logically, and the research limitations and future research agenda are clearly articulated.
The voice of interpreters is typically absent from studies exploring ideological shifts, whether for practical reasons such as the impossibility of contacting the interpreters involved and/or perhaps an unwillingness to participate out of concern for professional reputation. The incorporation of interpreters’ own reflections on practice in such studies is, however, worth pursuing in future studies where possible. Finally, given that some of the findings echo those in other studies about interpreting in the Chinese context, I expected to see a clearer set of statements in the Conclusion about where author sees this study sitting in relation to other work on ideology in conference interpreting both in China and more generally.
