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Ideology was not an issue in the literature on interpreting until very recently. When the subject of ideology emerged 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 therefore reviews the development of the interpreting profession from the conceptual vantage point of 'ideology', focusing on the common pejorative, political sense of the term. The positionality of interpreters as agents 'between' ideologies will be traced through the profession's development before some examples will be given of how interpreters, their professional organizations and training institutions have become 'involved' in and with ideology, and to what extent such involvement has been …