Interpersonal metadiscourse, through engagement markers, attitude markers, and epistemic markers, determines how writers position themselves in relation to their readers, influencing both the strength of their authorial voice and the perceived reliability of their claims. Through engagement markers, the reader becomes involved in the text, through attitude markers, the writer signals her evaluation of given statements and advice, and through epistemic markers, she expresses her degree of certainty. Together with the graduation of evaluative meanings, these resources determine how confident, persuasive, or cautious a text appears, ultimately affecting whether the advice offered is perceived as trustworthy.

The primary source in this paper was a handbook about buying a property in Spain, which was translated and contrastively analysed for interpersonal metadiscourse. This paper found that the frequency of interpersonal metadiscourse differs widely among cultures. A higher degree of interpersonal metadiscourse in the English source text, particularly attitude markers and boosters, contributes to a more informal text, illustrating the writer’s perspectives and stance. By contrast, the translated text, with a lower degree of attitude markers combined with a higher degree of engagement markers, particularly imperatives, appears more formal and potentially more trustworthy to the reader. The question is: can you trust the advice? These differences may be partly culturally determined. English texts in this genre tend to favour a more personal and informal style, whereas Swedish texts tend to favour a more restrained and formal one. These differences do not necessarily indicate that the advice is better or worse; rather, they reflect different ways of using interpersonal metadiscourse to convey trustworthy guidance.