1. One aim of the selection procedure was to find experienced professional translators, who had no professional difficulty translating argumentative newspaper articles. This criterion ensures that there will be no linguistic problems in the translations hindering the research and that the translators are skilled enough to tackle both linguistic and text type related challenges professionally.

2. Another aim was to find translators who regularly translate political texts and are, at least, intuitively, familiar with the challenges of the translation of political texts and can successfully identify the skopos of the texts in question. That is, they realise that the source and target texts are functionally meant for persuasion, and are familiar with the importance of careful word choice with reference to connotations, implicature, etc.

3. The next aim was to find translators who could and were willing to work on the translations alone. This is important so that the possibility of translation taking place as a non-individual translation effort can be excluded. This way it could be ensured that all texts are the exclusive products of the translators participating in the research. This can be guaranteed by requesting the participants to do the translations in their home and alone.

4. The last aim was find two translators who were politically committed and active, and supported the two major opposing Hungarian political parties, the left wing MSZP and the right wing Fidesz, respectively. This criterion is very important since this ensures that both translators have their own political bias, which potentially affects the target texts they produce. It is also important that the two translators have different and ideologically opposing political orientations, which may well influence their political and emotive attitudes to the source texts and the resulting target texts.

Intercontact Budapest Kft. was ready to offer help in finding the participants of the current research. This firm is a translation and interpretation services provider entrusted to do translations for the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office after successfully obtaining a public procurement tender for the 2008 fiscal year. At the end of September 2008, an assistant employed by Intercontact Budapest Kft. provided the researcher with the e-mail contact lists of those translators who regularly did written translation assignments from Hungarian into English for the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office on behalf of Intercontact Budapest Kft. An invitation to participate in the research (see Section A of Appendix 1 for the original text), describing the nature and objective of the research as well as the translation assignment, was circulated by e-mail among the 14 translators concerned (in fact, around 20 translators do such assignments on a regular basis; nonetheless, some of them were temporarily unavailable as they were staying abroad, engaged elsewhere, etc.). All in all, 8 positive replies were received, which may partly be attributed to the good and reliable professional relationship between the translators and the researcher: most of the translators knew the researcher – personally or through e-mails – in his capacity as an editor and proofreader. The translators interested were informed that for their participation in the research they would not be paid and that their anonymity would be ensured if they so wished.