1.1 Preamble Countries all over the globe are becoming increasingly interdependent fol lowing the globalisation process that has accelerated the demand for transla tion and interpreting (House, 2015). This demand is particularly strong in international conferences organised by international organisations, which, in international relations research, are found to be defining meanings and diffus ing norms of the world (Barnett & Finnemore, 1999), involved in law-making and law enforcement (Alter & Meunier, 2009) as well as conditioning world politics (Binder & Heupel, 2015). To perform these vital functions, confer ence interpreters are needed to bridge the gap between the various discourses produced by speakers from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. According to Schäffner (2004), cross-border communication relies on transla tion and interpreting, which is “in fact, part of the development of discourse” (p. 120) at the discursive site of international conferences. In these discursive events, interpreting activities play an increasingly vital and indispensable role (e.g., Cronin, 2013; Pérez-Gonzalez, 2012; Schäffner, 2004, 2012). World leaders attending these international conferences rely on the interpreted speeches to understand and communicate with one another, which often occurs through simultaneous interpreting. In this case, no sooner are the source texts (STs) rendered into the target texts (TTs) than the TTs are discursively consumed by world leaders and filtered into global media circulation. However, world leaders, as speakers and audiences in transnational commu nication, may tacitly assume that the “translated output functions seamlessly as part of the discourse” (Kang, 2009, p. 144) of the STs, which can be dan gerous because this may give rise to misunderstanding or miscommunication. Nonetheless, the TTs relied upon by political or business leaders from differ ent countries seldom faithfully mirror the STs due to the interpreter’s agency, through which interpreters “intervene…, feeding their own knowledge and beliefs into a text” (Hatim & Mason, 1997, p. 147), thereby introducing ideological shifts and creating a different version of the discourse in the STs. The reconstructed versions of TTs may ‘travel’ a long way from the source, creating a pleiotropic discursive chain that connects the conference speakers with myriad receivers (see Figure 1.1), such as the audience, media onsite as well as media offsite, and the world leaders and decision-makers who are sepa rated by time and space. In this pleiotropic discursive chain, conference inter preters create a critical discursive node that connects the speakers attending the international conference with the multiple ‘consumers’ of the discourses pro duced at the meetings. This discursive node can be agentive since ideological shifts are introduced during the discourse reconstruction process by confer ence interpreters. The discursive effect could be profound; the reconstructed discourse will then often be used or quoted verbatim by world political or business leaders, other audiences, and global media onsite or offsite. However, ideological shifts introduced into this pleiotropic discursive chain are often overlooked. Specifically, in an international conference, the inter preted versions of speakers’ speeches are not only passed onto world leaders (i.e., the immediate target audience) but are eventually fed into a chain of mul tiple media texts that are widely circulated in ways that the changes go “unno ticed” (Munday, 2007, p. 197). In simultaneous conference interpreting, the interpreted texts are usually no sooner articulated than they are consigned to history. Thus, changes made by interpreters stand no chance of being revised and are absorbed into derivative discourses and discursive practices, thereby potentially leading to social and political action or inaction. This discursive reconstruction of speakers’ discourse often occurs in high profile international conferences. For example, the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), also known as the Davos Forum, is a highly publicised and mediatised discursive event in which world business and politi cal leaders use conference interpreting for cross-language and cross-cultural communication. It also constitutes a discursive site in which interpreters reshape ideological orientations through various linguistic or paralinguistic means. Example 1 details an interpreter’s discourse reconstruction at the Sum mer Davos Forum and demonstrates the ways in which an American speaker’s discourse about the Chinese government is ‘edited’ through a Chinese inter preter’s linguistic ‘re-engineering’, thus reshaping the ideological orientation.
