DTRA 440
السعودية االلكترونية الجامعة
الجامعة السعودية االلكترونية
Translation in the Workplace
26/12/2021
Module 11- Week 12
Translation Ethics & Morals
Content
• Translation Ethics
• The Theme of Social Responsibility
• The Issues of Social Responsibility in the Academic Context
• Issues on Translation, Ethics and Social Responsibility
Learning Objectives
• Upon successful completion of this module, students will be able to:
• 1- Identify translation ethics
• 1- Identify the theme of social responsibility in relation to business and
professional settings.
• 2- Identify the issues of social responsibility in the academic context
• 3- Identify the issues on translation, ethics and social responsibility
Translation Ethics
• The professionalization of a certain social or cultural task, as it is the
case with translation, involves the regulation of the community that
carries out that role. Such rules and such codes arise and should be
pondered within the field of ethics.
• translation should be seen as an activity with ethical implications and
translators as its potential ethical agents, seeing that they play a
central role in the cultural systems, shaping societies and nations in
an increasingly globalized world.
• Translation is not merely seen as a linguistic exercise, but as an
action grounded in ethical principles and framed in a certain
ideological and political sphere.
• Translation is of interest to reflect about ethics in translation because
translations can, in a very pragmatic sense, affect the lives of the
people who might depend on them.
INTRODUCTION
• There is a large body of research on the theme of social responsibility in relation
to business and professional settings, such as banking, human resources (HR),
law or management.
• The theme of social responsibility emerged as a strong common concern across
diverse contributions on interpreting, translation and other forms of cross-
cultural communication.
• Some translation studies focus on the linked concepts of social responsibility
and ethics.
INTRODUCTION
• Research suggests that it makes sense to focus on social responsibility in
professional contexts because it is associated with wide-reaching positive
impact.
• The results of a large-scale empirical study indicated that ‘professions
should develop ethical standards to encourage social responsibility, since
these actions are associated with enhanced employee ethical attitudes’
(Valentine and Fleischman 2008, 657).
Issues of Social Responsibility in the Academic
Context
• The question arises as to how the concept of social responsibility intersects
with other perspectives and scholarship on ethics in Translation and
Interpreting Studies.
• Recent scholarship that explores the relation between translation and
development studies (e.g. Marais 2014), translation and ecology (Cronin
2016), or translation and migration (Inghilleri 2017) reflects new thinking
about the role of translation in human understanding, communication and
survival.
• The nature and scope of global communication needs have been
pressing translators and interpreters into service on an unprecedented
scale and in ways that often require highly reactive approaches to
practice.
• This comes as a double-edged sword for the profession that challenges
the ethical landscape.
• For instance, although individuals are increasingly empowered through the
availability of translation technologies, this is not without risk.
• The sidelining of human input in institutional interactions in favour of
expedient technology assisted translation solutions generates new
professional and disciplinary imperatives to inform public understanding of
the ethical bases of interlingual and intercultural mediation.
• In promoting ‘responsibility’ as a dynamic feature of translatorial activity, it
is important to recognise the now well-documented shift in the past 20
years away from oriented approaches to translator ethics towards
differentiated approaches.
• The whole communicative situation is brought to bear on decision making,
particularly in relation to dialogue interpreting.
Issues on Translation, Ethics and Social Responsibility
• The concept of an ethics of service, promoted through the notion of
translation as a commissive act (Tymoczko 2000; Chesterman 2001), has
influenced a considerable amount of scholarship in the intervening
period.
• In the professional sphere, key questions remain, namely the problem of
normative authority and the difficulty some professionals encounter in
moving beyond the idea of the translator and her/his ‘text’ as the
central ethical question.
• Drugan reports on experimental training in how to work effectively
with interpreters and translators, delivered to social workers and
advanced social work students who were about to undertake their
first work placement.
• Drugan argues that social responsibility means ‘extending our
concern’ to actors who are often neglected.
• Another issue is that McDonough Dolmaya examines translation
flows and language policies in crowdsourced translation platforms
and revisits the relation between contested notions of minority and
majority languages.
• Harding and Ralarala also take up the issue of minority and majority
languages in the context of police officers interpreting for civilian
complainants in South African police stations.
• Gallai explores interlingual communication in police investigative
interviews from a relevance-theoretical perspective, drawing
examples from a corpus of authentic interpreter- mediated
interviews.
• He shows how pragmatic interference on the part of the interpreter
can disempower the interviewee and impact on the effectiveness of
the Enhanced Cognitive Interview.
• Theoretical and methodological perspectives, provided examples of how
translation practice may be rearticulated as a form of social responsibility
help enhance our understanding of what translators and interpreters do to
promote social and procedural justice in relation to vulnerable groups and
relevant inter-professions.
References
● Joanna Drugan & Rebecca Tipton (2017) Translation, ethics and social
responsibility, The Translator, 23:2, 119-125, DOI: 10.1080/13556509.2017.1327008
● Xénon Cruz, “Translation Ethics: From Invisibility to Difference”. Panorâmica:
Revista Electrónica de Estudos Anglo-Americanos, série 3, nº 6, 2017: 95-105. ISSN:
1646-4728. Web: http://ler.letras.up.pt/.
Thank You
