ABSTRACT:
Ideology, by any definition, was not an issue in the literature on interpreting until very recently. Indeed, when the subject of ideology emerged more broadly in translation studies in the late 1990s, interpreting researchers were only just beginning to move beyond the traditional concern with (conference) interpreters’ psycholinguistic processing skills and cognitive functions to include problems of cross-cultural interaction in their purview. This exploratory paper will therefore review the development of the interpreting profession and its academic discourse from the conceptual vantage point of ‘ideology’ in both its narrower, political sense and its more comprehensive use in recent scholarship. The positionality of interpreters as agents ‘between’ ideologies will be traced to the profession’s beginnings and its own professional ideology before an attempt will be made to show why and how interpreters - and in particular their training institutions - have become ‘involved’ in and with ideology. As will be seen, such a reconceptualization of the relationship between interpreters and ideology hinges not only on how one defines ‘ideology’ but also on the modeling of interpreting as a socially situated practice rather than a psycholinguistic processing skill.
