The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Ethics 2020031492 9780815358237 9781003127970 - Compress

The Routledge Handbook of
Translation and Ethics
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Ethics offers a comprehensive overview of issues
surrounding ethics in translating and interpreting. The chapters chart the philosophical and
theoretical underpinnings of ethical thinking in Translation Studies and analyze the ethical
dilemmas of various translatorial actors, including translation trainers and researchers.
Authored by leading scholars and new voices in the field, the 31 chapters present a wide
coverage of emerging issues such as increasing technologization of translation, posthumanism,
volunteering and activism, accessibility and linguistic human rights. Many chapters provide
the first extensive overview of the topic or present new takes on established areas. The book is
divided into four parts, with the first covering the most influential ethical theories. Part II takes
the perspective of agents in different contexts and the ethical dilemmas they face, while Part III
takes a critical look at central institutions structuring and controlling ethical behaviour. Finally,
Part IV focuses on special issues and new challenges, and signals new directions for further study.
This handbook is an indispensable resource for all students and researchers of translation and
ethics within translation and interpreting studies, multilingualism and comparative literature.
Kaisa Koskinen is Professor of Translation Studies at Tampere University, Finland. She has
authored several articles and monographs, including Translating Institutions: An Ethnographic Study
of EU Translation (2008) and Translation and Affect (2020).
Nike K. Pokorn is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

She is the author of several articles and monographs, including Challenging the Traditional Axioms:
Translation into a Non-Mother Tongue (2005) and Post-Socialist Translation Practices (2012).
Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies
Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies provide comprehensive over-

views of the key topics in translation and interpreting studies. All entries for the handbooks are
specially commissioned and written by leading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible and care-
fully edited, Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies are the ideal resource
for both advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students.
The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation
Edited by Luis Pérez-González
The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation
Edited by Kelly Washbourne and Ben Van Wyke
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy
Edited by Piers Rawling and Philip Wilson
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics
Edited by Rebecca Tipton and Louisa Desilla
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Technology
Edited by Minako O’Hagan
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education
Edited by Sara Laviosa and Maria González-Davies
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Cognition
Edited by Fabio Alves and Arnt Lykke Jakobsen
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism
Edited by Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian
The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender
Edited by Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization
Edited by Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Ethics
Edited by Kaisa Koskinen and Nike K. Pokorn
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbooks-in-

Translation-and-Interpreting-Studies/book-series/RHTI.
The Routledge Handbook
of Translation and Ethics
Edited by Kaisa Koskinen

and Nike K. Pokorn
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Kaisa Koskinen and Nike K. Pokorn;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Kaisa Koskinen and Nike K. Pokorn to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Koskinen, Kaisa, editor. | Pokorn, Nike K. (Nike Kocijancic) editor.
Title: The Routledge handbook of translation and ethics / edited by Kaisa Koskinen
and Nike K. Pokorn.
Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge
handbooks in translation and interpreting studies | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020031492 | ISBN 9780815358237 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781003127970 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting—Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC P306.2 .R665 2020 | DDC 174/.941802—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031492
ISBN: 978-0-8153-5823-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-0031-2797-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of contributors viii

Acknowledgements xiv
1 Ethics and translation: an introduction 1

Kaisa Koskinen and Nike K. Pokorn
PART I
2 Virtue ethics in translation 13

Andrew Chesterman
3 Translation ethics in the Chinese tradition 25

Xin Guangqin
4 Ethics in socialist translation theories 42

Brian James Baer and Christina Schäfner
5 Functional translation theories and ethics 58

Gernot Hebenstreit
6 Ethics in Berman and Meschonnic 72

Françoise Massardier-Kenney
7 The ethics of linguistic hospitality and untranslatability in

Derrida and Ricœur 87
Nike K. Pokorn and Kaisa Koskinen
8 The ethics of postcolonial translation 99

Douglas Robinson
9 Feminist translation ethics 114

Emek Ergun
v
Contents
10 Venuti and the ethics of diference 131

Jenni Laaksonen and Kaisa Koskinen
11 Translator ethics 147

Anthony Pym
PART II
12 Professional translator ethics 165

Joseph Lambert
13 Literary translator ethics 180

Cecilia Alvstad
14 Conference interpreter ethics 195

Wen Ren and Mingyue Yin
15 Ethics in public service interpreting 211

Sonja Pöllabauer and Iris Topolovec
16 Ethics of volunteering in translation and interpreting 227

Salah Basalamah
17 Ethics of activist translation and interpreting 245

Julie Boéri and Carmen Delgado Luchner
18 Translation technology and ethics 262

Lynne Bowker
19 Translation and posthumanism 279

Michael Cronin
PART III
20 Ethics codes for interpreters and translators 297

Lluís Baixauli-Olmos
21 Ethics in the translation industry 320

Joss Moorkens and Marta Rocchi
22 Ethics in translator and interpreter education 338

Georgios Floros
vi
Contents
23 Ethics of translator and interpreter education 351

Raquel Pacheco Aguilar and Dilek Dizdar
24 Research ethics in translation and interpreting studies 365

Christopher D. Mellinger and Brian James Baer
PART IV
25 Ethics in child language brokering 383

Claudia V. Angelelli
26 Translating and interpreting in confict and crisis 398

Małgorzata Tryuk
27 Ethical stress in translation and interpreting 415

Séverine Hubscher-Davidson
28 Linguistic frst aid 431

Svetlana Probirskaja
29 Ethics of translating sacred texts 441

Hephzibah Israel
30 Ethics of collaboration and control in literary translation 458

Outi Paloposki and Nike K. Pokorn
31 Accessibility and linguistic rights 470

Maija Hirvonen and Tuija Kinnunen
Index 484
vii
Contributors
Cecilia Alvstad is Professor in Translation Studies at the Institute for Interpreting and Translation
Studies at the Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Stockholm University.
Current research interests include translation of Latin American literature, world literature and
translation and translation of children’s literature. Alvstad was Vice President of the European
Society for Translation Studies 2010–2013.
Claudia V. Angelelli is Chair in Multilingualism and Communication at Heriot-Watt University

(Edinburgh campus), UK; Emeritus Professor of Spanish Linguistics at San Diego State Univer-
sity, US; and Visiting Professor at Beijing University of Foreign Studies. Her research sits at the
intersection of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and translation and interpreting studies. She
is the author of Medical Interpreting and Cross-cultural Communication (2004), Revisiting the Role of
the Interpreter (2004) and Medical Interpreting Explained (2019). Her work appears in The Annual
Review of Applied Linguistics, The Critical Link, Communication, Medicine and Ethics, Cuadernos de
ALDEEU; European Journal of Applied Linguistics, Interpreting, Journal of Applied Linguistics and
Professional Practice, META, MONTI (Monografias de Traducción e Interpretación), The Translator,
TIS (Translation and Interpreting Studies) and The International Journal of the Sociology of Language
and numerous edited volumes.
Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University and
Leading Research Fellow at National Research University School of Higher Economics in Mos-
cow, Russia. He is Founding Editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies, co-editor of
Researching Translation and Interpreting, and author of Translation and the Making of Modern Russian
Literature and Queer Theory and Translation Studies.
Lluís Baixauli-Olmos is Associate Professor at University of Louisville. He has co-edited a vol-

ume in the journal European Legacy. Current research interests include interpreter ethics, inter-
preting as an element of social justice, Interpreting Studies bibliometrics and interpreter training.
Salah Basalamah is Associate Professor at the School of Translation and Interpretation at the
University of Ottawa, Canada. His fields of research include the philosophy of translation, trans-
lation rights, social and political philosophy, postcolonial, cultural and religious studies, as well
as Western Islam and Muslims. He is the author of Le droit de traduire. Une politique culturelle pour
la mondialisation (The Right to Translate. A Cultural Policy for Globalisation) for the University
of Ottawa Press (2009). He is currently working on a book about the philosophy of translation
and its implications beyond translation studies, in the humanities and social science.
viii
Contributors
Julie Boéri holds a PhD in translation and intercultural studies from the University of Manches-
ter (UK). Currently faculty at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (Doha, Qatar), she has worked as
Assistant Professor in Interpreting at the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain) and Asso-
ciate Professor in Communication Studies at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis (France).
She is a co-editor (with Carol Maier) of Translation/Interpreting and Social Activism, published by
ECOS. Her work focuses on the socio-politics of T/I and on the double mediation of technolo-
gies and translators-interpreters in digital and non-digital environments.
Lynne Bowker is Full Professor at the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University
of Ottawa, Canada, where she also holds a cross-appointment at the School of Information
Studies. She is author of Computer-Aided Translation Technology (University of Ottawa Press) and
co-author of both Working with Specialized Language (Routledge) and Machine Translation and
Global Research (Emerald).
Andrew Chesterman was born in England but moved to Finland in 1968 and has been based
there ever since, working at the University of Helsinki until he retired in 2010. His main subjects
have been English and translation theory. His research interests have been contrastive analysis;
translation theory, translation norms, universals and ethics; and research methodology. His most
recent book is Reflections on Translation Theory. Selected papers 1993–2014 (Benjamins, 2017).
Michael Cronin is 1776 Professor of French and Director of the Centre for Literary and Cultural
Translation in Trinity College Dublin. He is author of Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages
and Identity (1996); Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation (2000); Translation and Globaliza-
tion (2003); Translation and Identity (2006); Translation Goes to the Movies (2009); Translation in the
Digital Age (2013); Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (2017)
and Irish and Ecology: An Ghaeilge agus an Éiceolaíocht (2019). He is a Member of the Royal Irish
Academy and the Academia Europaea and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin.
Carmen Delgado Luchner holds a PhD in interpreting studies from the University of Geneva
(CH). She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Global Studies Institute (Geneva, CH)
after completing a post-doctoral fellowship funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation
at the University of Reading (UK) and the University of the Free State (RSA). Her research
focuses on interpreter professionalization, the positionality of dialogue interpreters in Switzer-
land and the multilingual communication practices of development NGOs and humanitarian
organizations in their interactions with local communities.
Dilek Dizdar is Professor of Intercultural German Studies and Translation Studies and Director
of the Centre for Intercultural Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (Germany).
Her research focuses on the areas of translation theory, deconstruction, translation politics as well
as migration and translation.
Emek Ergun is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Global Studies at the
University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is a co-editor of Feminist Translation Studies:
Local and Transnational Perspectives (Routledge, 2017) and Feminist Theory Reader: Local and
Global Perspectives, 5th edition (Routledge, 2020). She is also an activist feminist translator, and
her most recent translation is of Octavia E. Butler’s classic novel, Kindred, published in Turkey
in 2019.
ix
Contributors
Georgios Floros is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Cyprus. He

teaches translation theory and methodology, as well as text linguistics. His research focuses on
culture and translation theory, on cultural issues in localization and transcreation, on the politics
and ethics of translation, and on terminological issues in bilectal contexts.
Xin Guangqin is Associate Professor of Translation Studies and English at Shenzhen University,
with a PhD from Hong Kong Baptist University. His research interests include TS, translation
ethics and trans-ethics informed by Confucian ethics. Having authored journal essays on trans-
ethics, he is currently engaged with a research project in the developing of Reciprocal Ethics in
Translation funded by the Ministry of Education, China.
Gernot Hebenstreit holds a doctoral degree in translation studies and is working as a senior
scientist at the Institute of Translation Studies at the University of Graz (Austria). Research
interests comprise translation theory, translation ethics, multimodal translation, terminology
theory and standardization.
Maija Hirvonen is Associate Professor of German Language, Culture and Translation at Tampere
University, Finland. She is principal investigator of the project MUTABLE (Multimodal Transla-
tion with the Blind) and a former principal investigator of the project MeMAD (Methods for
Managing Audiovisual Data). She is a co-editor of a forthcoming book on accessible communi-
cation (in Finnish) and one of the leading team members in an interdisciplinary pilot education
programme on accessibility at Tampere University. Her research areas are accessibility (especially
audio description and automatic video description), intermodal and multimodal translation and
interpreting, and multimodal interaction.
Séverine Hubscher-Davidson is Senior Lecturer and Head of Translation at The Open Uni-
versity in the United Kingdom. She has authored articles in journals such as Target, Meta and
Translation Studies, and is the author of the Routledge monograph Translation and Emotion – A
Psychological Perspective. She currently serves on the editorial board of Perspectives: Studies in
Translatology.
Hephzibah Israel is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies, University of Edinburgh. Her cur-
rent research interests include translation and religion, literary translation, literary practice and
translation in South Asia. She led an AHRC-funded research project (2014–2017) under their
“Translating Cultures” theme, focusing on the role of translation in the movement of religious
concepts across languages and the ways in which this impacts religious conversion and autobio-
graphical writing about conversion experiences. Her monograph entitled Religious Transactions
in Colonial South India (2011) offers an analysis of the translated Bible as an object of cultural
transfer in South Asia in the context of evolving attitudes to translation in the Tamil sacred land-
scapes from the eighteenth century onwards. She has guest edited (with John Zavos) a special
section on Indian traditions of life writing on religious conversion for South Asia (41:2, 2018)
and a special issue (with Matthias Frenz) entitled “Translation and Religion” (2019) for Religion.
Tuija Kinnunen is University Lecturer in German Translation at the University of Helsinki.

She is co-editor of a forthcoming book on accessible communication (in Finnish). Her major
research topics come from the field of legal translation, court interpreting, and multimodal
interaction.
x
Contributors
Kaisa Koskinen is Professor of Translation Studies at Tampere University, Finland. She has
authored several articles and monographs, e.g. Translating Institutions: An Ethnographic Study of
EU Translation (St. Jerome 2008) and Translation and Affect (Benjamins 2020). Ethics is Koskinen’s
longstanding research interest, and her PhD Beyond Ambivalence. Postmodernity and the Ethics of
Translation (Tampere University Press 2000) is a classic reference in the field. Since 1994, she has
also published numerous articles on the topic, including the ethics of training and the ethics of
Translation Studies research.
Jenni Laaksonen is Doctoral Researcher of Accounting at Tampere University, Finland. Her

research focuses on the challenges of translation and translated communication within different
accounting contexts. She holds a master’s degree in both accounting and translation studies.
Joseph Lambert is a teaching fellow in translation studies and French at Durham University and
an experienced freelance translator. His primary area of research interest is the ethics of transla-
tion, with his work drawing upon ideas from a range of fields (including hermeneutics and moral
theory) as well as considering various forms of applied ethics.
Françoise Massardier-Kenney is Professor of French and Translation Studies, Director of the

Institute for Applied Linguistics, and Co-Director of the Global Understanding Research Initia-
tive at Kent State University. She is the General Editor of the American Translators Association
Scholarly Series. Her publications include Translating Slavery, Literature in Translation, Translators
Writing, Writing Translators and the translation of Antoine Berman’s Toward a Translation Criticism.
Christopher D. Mellinger is Assistant Professor of Spanish Interpreting and Translation Stud-

ies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is a co-author of Quantitative Research
Methods in Translation and Interpreting Studies, Editor of the Routledge Handbook of Interpreting and
Cognition, and managing editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies.
Joss Moorkens is an assistant professor at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural
Studies at Dublin City University and a funded investigator at the ADAPT Centre. He has
authored over 50 articles, book chapters and conference papers on translation technology,
machine translation post-editing, user evaluation of machine translation, translator precarity and
translation ethics. He is General Co-Editor of the journal Translation Spaces, and he co-edited the
book Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice (2018) and special issues of Machine
Translation (2019) and Translation Spaces (2020). He sits on the board of the European Masters in
Translation network and is a member of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies.
Raquel Pacheco Aguilar is a postdoctoral researcher in translation studies at the Faculty of

Translation Studies, Linguistics and Cultural Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University of
Mainz (Germany). She is the author of Translation, Lehre, Institution. Eine dekonstruktive Annäher-
ung. Her current research interests include T&I education, educational philosophy and transla-
tion politics.
Outi Paloposki is Professor of English at the University of Turku (Finland), Department of

Languages and Translation Studies. She is editor and author in the two-volume history of lit-
erary translation into Finnish, published by the Finnish Literature Society in 2007, and in its
companion volume, history of non-fiction translation into Finnish (2013).
xi
Contributors
Nike K. Pokorn is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Ljubljana and the current
director of the International Doctorate in Translation Studies network. She is co-editor of Why
Translation Studies Matters and author of Challenging the Traditional Axioms: Translation into a Non-
Mother Tongue and Post-Socialist Translation Practices.
Sonja Pöllabauer is Professor of Interpreting Studies at the Centre of Translation Studies at the
University of Vienna. Her research focuses on interpreting in public service interpreting settings.
Svetlana Probirskaja is University Lecturer of Finnish-Russian Translation at Helsinki Uni-

versity. Her research interests include everyday life translation, non-professional translation and
translation as a form of aid.
Anthony Pym is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Melbourne, Distinguished

Professor of Translation and Intercultural Studies at Universitat Rovira i Virgili and Extra-
Ordinary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch. He edited The Return to Ethics and is the
author of Pour une éthique du traducteur and its English version On Translator Ethics. Principles for
Mediation between Cultures.
Wen Ren is Professor in Translation and Interpreting Studies at the Graduate School of Transla-
tion and Interpretation, Beijing Foreign Studies University, China. Her research interest focuses
on translator/interpreter ethics, interpreting studies from a sociological perspective, interpreting
pedagogy, and foreign language education.
Douglas Robinson recently transitioned from his professorship in English at HKBU to a pro-
fessorship in translating and interpreting at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.
Widely considered one of the world’s top translation scholars, he is author of the world’s leading
textbook on translation and 15 monographs on translation, from The Translator’s Turn (1991)
to Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address (2019). He is also editor of the world’s leading
anthology of translation theory readings, Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche
(1997, 2002, 2015), and coeditor of Target: An International Journal of Translation Studies.
Marta Rocchi is Assistant Professor in Corporate Governance and Business Ethics at Dublin
City University Business School and member of the Irish Institute of Digital Business. She holds
a PhD from the University of Navarra, with a specialization on the ethics of finance. She was
awarded the Society for Business Ethics Founders’ Award in 2016 as Emerging Scholar of the Society
for Business Ethics, and the first prize ex-aequo of the Ethics & Trust in Finance Global Prize of the
Observatoire de la Finance in 2019. Marta teaches business and finance ethics, and her research
focuses on virtue ethics in business and finance, the new perspectives of business ethics in the
future of work and the ethical dilemmas of the digital world.
Christina Schäffner is Professor Emerita at Aston University, Birmingham, where she was the
Head of Translation Studies until her retirement in 2015. Her main research interests are political
discourse in translation, news translation, metaphor in translation and translation didactics. She
is co-editor of Interpreting in a Changing Landscape. Selected Papers from Critical Link 6 (2013) and
Political Discourse, Media and Translation (2010).
Iris Topolovec is a PhD student at the Department of Translation Studies at the University of
Graz. In her research she examines the role of trust in healthcare interpreters.
xii
Contributors
Małgorzata Tryuk is Full Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Head of the Depart-
ment of Interpreting Studies and Audiovisual Translation and local Coordinator of the European
Masters in Conference Interpreting (EMCI) Programme at the Institute of Applied Linguistics,
University of Warsaw. She is the author of papers and publications on conference and com-
munity interpreting. In 2015 she published On Ethics and Interpreters. Her areas of teaching and
research interest include translation and interpreting ethics and history with a particular focus
on interpreting in conflict and crisis situations.
Mingyue Yin is a lecturer and researcher in the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures at
Sichuan University, China. Her current research focuses on ethics of interpreters, profession-
alization of interpreting markets as well as development and policies of the language service
industry.
xiii
Acknowledgements
Several of the authors who contributed the chapters to this handbook would like to acknowl-
edge financial support of different funding bodies. The chapter “Feminist translation eth-
ics” by Emek Ergun was supported by “Bodies in Transit: Difference and Indifference” (Ref.
FFI2017–84555-C2–2-P; Ministry of Science, Education and Universities, Spain). The chap-
ter “Ethics in the translation industry” by Moorkens and Rocchi was supported by the ADAPT
Centre for Digital Content Technology at Dublin City University, funded under the Science
Foundation Ireland Research Centres Programme (Grant 13/RC/2106) and co-funded under
the European Regional Development Fund. Maija Hirvonen would like to thank Academy of
Finland for financing her research project “Multimodal Translation with the Blind” (grant no.
295104), which supported the writing of the chapter “Accessibility and linguistic rights.” Nike
K. Pokorn acknowledges the financial support from the Slovenian Research Agency (research
core funding No. P6–0239), and the DIFeREns2 project (grant no. 609412), funded under
the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme, which supported the writing of the
chapters “The ethics of linguistic hospitality and untranslatability in Derrida and Ricœur” and
“Ethics of collaboration and control in literary translation.” And finally, Wen Ren would like
to thank the National Social Science Fund of China (grant number 18BYY102) for financing
the writing of the chapter “Conference interpreter ethics.”
xiv
1
Ethics and translation
An introduction
Translators or interpreters, translation students and teachers, researchers, promoters of translation

or interpreting, readers of translation, users of interpreting, clients or employers of interpreters
and translators, their collaborators in language industry or publishing, developers of tools and
reference materials used by translators and interpreters – all of them are often faced with a ques-
tion: what is the right thing to do? Whose expectations should I respond to and fulfil? Do I owe
loyalty to the author of the source message, to the one who is financing my work, to the end
user, to the codes and standards of the professional body I belong to, to other professionals work-
ing in the field, to my political agenda, to the society, to my religious affiliation, to my people,
to my gender, to technological development, to the liberal market, to a balance of nature, to
the greater good, or to myself, my well-being and my own beliefs and values? What if different
people involved in the production of translation or interpretation have opposing expectations?
How do I resolve ethical dilemmas?
Ethics is indeed a perennial question of translation, be it in written or spoken form. Ethical
issues have therefore always been debated and discussed, both by practitioners and by research-
ers. Still, focused scholarly work on ethical issues has remained sporadic in Translation Studies,
and only a handful of monographs (Pym 1997/2012; Koskinen 2000; Meschonnic 2007/2011;
Inghilleri 2012) and special issues (Pym 2001; Baker and Maier 2011; Drugan and Tipton 2017;
Greenall, Alvstad, Jansen, and Taivalkoski 2019; Monzó-Nebot and Wallace 2020; Moorkens,
Kenny, and do Carmo 2020) have been devoted to the subject. The Handbook on Translation
and Ethics aims to bring together a wide array of issues relevant for a comprehensive picture of
ethics in translating and interpreting. This handbook will provide no watertight and univocal
answer to the persistent questions, but it will shed light on different takes on the issues of ethics
by outlining the state of the art in research and by identifying numerous emerging issues. Many
of the topics discussed are here presented in a coherent manner for the first time, and many of
our authors report on collecting the various threads of argument from a variety of fragmented
sources. Because of this foundational role, we believe this handbook will become a valuable step-
ping stone in the future development of ethical thought in Translation Studies. Hopefully it will
also open up and encourage formulations of new perspectives and critical thoughts on ethical
issues connected to the work of translators, interpreters and other translatorial actors.
1
1 What is ethics?
The term ethics is derived from the Greek word “ta êthika,” meaning “things pertaining to
ethos, i.e. to character” (Luce 1992, 163), and is used in a range of slightly different but
related meanings. First, the term may refer to any code of moral rules, principles or values
aiming to provide an answer to the question of how we should act. This means that moral
codes, such as the Code of Hammurabi or the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament,
are regarded and studied as texts pertaining to ethics. Second, the term ethics may also be
used for any system or theory of moral values or principles. Most commonly, however, we
use the term ethics to refer to the philosophical study of morality, i.e. a branch of philoso-
phy called moral philosophy, the discipline concerned with what is morally right and wrong
(Singer [1991] 2000, v–vi).
The origin of ethics, understood as the systematic study of what is morally right or wrong,
began with the formulation of the first moral codes and was often closely linked to religion.
The earliest surviving ethical writings could thus be traced to the ethical teachings of ancient
Egypt and Babylonia. Indian ethics could be found in the Vedas, the oldest of Indian writings
(c. 1500–800 BCE), in the Upanishads (post 500 BCE) and in Buddhist teachings. Around that
time, in the 6th and early 5th centuries BCE, also two important moral philosophers of ancient
China, Laozi and Confucius, developed their specific ethical thoughts (see Hansen [1991] 2000,
69–81). And finally, the major Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, formed
their own ethical traditions as well.1 These great ethical traditions have all affected, to varying
degrees, translation practice and the behaviour of translators and interpreters. However, even
more decisive influence should be attributed to philosophical ethics.
If ethics is understood as a guide to behaviour, its meaning is close to that of morality, and
in many contexts, both terms are used interchangeably. It is quite common to discuss ethical
principles or ethical judgements of individuals like politicians and not their moral judgements
or moral principles. In this volume, however, we have attempted to make a distinction between
the terms and understand ethics as wider in scope than morality (cf. Gert and Gert 2017). The
term morality here denotes a moral code an individual adopts as their own guide to life, and
it therefore refers to an individual’s idiosyncratic principles defining what is right and wrong,
while the term ethics or ethical system is used for guidance that the individual views as a proper
guide for others as well. This distinction, however, is often fluid, and many thinkers have seen
it more meaningful to blend the moral and the ethical, the personal and the communal, in their
argumentation.
The origin of Western philosophical study of morality can be located in ancient Greece,
where it found its most developed expression in the thought of Socrates (469–399 BCE) and
the works of Plato (c. 427–347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE). Socrates was the phi-
losopher that seems to have been responsible for placing ethics in the centre of philosophical
enquiry when he defined the very aim of philosophy, according to his pupil Plato, as the care
and worry about the knowledge of good “and the perfection of your soul” (Plato 1914, Apol-
ogy 29d–e). Philosophy was therefore, according to Socrates, intrinsically connected to ethical
issues. There is a clear line of continuity in ethical thought from Socrates’s claim that a virtu-
ous person is the one who knows what virtue is and insists on self-knowledge as a necessary
path to good living (Luce 1992, 91), through Plato’s definition of justice as the harmony of
intellect, emotion and desire and his equation of the good life to a good moral life (Rowe
[1991] 2000, 123), to Aristotle’s treatises devoted to ethics in which he explored how human
eudaimonia, i.e. happiness or well-being, can be realized in the individual and in the society
through the practice of moral virtues (Luce 1992, 123). In later periods, alternative paths were
2
taken by Greek and Roman Stoics pursuing the ideal of apatheia, i.e. complete absence of
passion and emotion, which they believed would enable reason to take complete control of
conduct, and by Epicureans, who aimed to maximize refined pleasure and reduce pain (Luce
1992, 136, 144–148).
These ancient schools of thought paved the way for the development of ethics as moral
philosophy. Ethics as a philosophical discipline thus studies morality and researches how human
communities socially constrain behaviours and relations and set value-based goals, and it ponders
on the possibilities of good life, virtuous behaviour and happiness. However, although ethics
has been developed by philosophers, it should be added that it is also distinct from other philo-
sophical disciplines (cf. Bykova 2016). For instance, in his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle insisted
that ethics is not a theoretical discipline and does not focus on acquiring factual knowledge,
which might be the case in other sciences like physics. He argued that when practicing ethics,
we are engaging in a practical discipline, since “we are inquiring not in order to know what
virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no
use” (Aristotle [1908] 1994–2000, 1103b26–29 (Book II.2)). Ethics is thus praxis-oriented in
the Aristotelian sense that it presupposes agentic human actors capable of making choices, that
is, of choosing the more or less moral option in the situations they find themselves in. In other
words, the foundation of ethics lies in a humanist view of free will and personal responsibility. It
is also praxis-oriented in a Kantian sense, that is, it is likened to practical reason which operates
by applying theoretical thought to one’s particular situation (cf. Kant [1785] 2002). And finally,
ethics is also theoretical in the sense that it seeks to theoretically understand and explain human
morality and ethical practice, and to provide conceptualizations and abstract theoretical founda-
tions to everyday ethical dilemmas.
Within Translation Studies, ethics is the subfield that aims to understand what is good and
bad, right and wrong in translatorial praxis. A traditional tripartite division of ethics that dif-
ferentiates between normative ethics, applied ethics and metaethics can be usefully adopted in
Translation Studies as well. Normative ethics studies ethical reasoning and seeks to set norms or
standards for conduct, answering the questions such as what one ought to do, why some acts
are right and others wrong or why some people are virtuous and others not. In the realm of
translation, most early commentaries can be read as either explicitly or implicitly prescribing
what a good translation is or how to be a good translator. Applied (or practical) ethics attempts to
apply normative ethical theories to practical problems and formulate ethical judgments relevant
to one’s decisions in everyday life, while metaethics remains in a more theoretical and abstract
realm and studies the foundations of ethical statements.
Since in Translation Studies principles and theories of moral philosophy are applied to those
particular areas of life that this discipline covers, ethics in Translation Studies can in its entirety
be classified as applied ethics. A particularly strong tradition is the one that aims to codify
translatorial behaviour in ways that guide and support the everyday actions of translation and
interpreting professionals. This activity, often conducted by practitioners rather than academics,
can be placed within the realm of deontology. Deontology refers to duty- or rights-based ethics
that aims to normatively guide what we ought to do, rather than how we should be or what
outcomes we should produce, and insists that our lives should be governed by moral rules that
should not be broken regardless of the consequences (Davis [1991] 2000, 205–218). Or con-
trastively, that a good or beneficial effect does not necessarily whitewash any course of action.
Conformance to a prior moral judgement is what matters, not the actor or the individual
outcome. In deontological thinking, moral obligation is “categorical” in the sense of not being
contextually negotiable. As a rule-based approach, deontology provides a framework for a sys-
tematic codification of conduct – this tie between codification and deontology is particularly
3
visible in Romance languages (for example, the code of ethics or conduct is called “code de
déontologie” in French). Since familiarity of and submission to existing ethical codes is often
seen as one cornerstone of training, in Translation Studies, deontology is closely connected to
another branch of applied ethics: ethics training for future professionals.
The current intellectual and social climate seems to favour applied approaches, with their
prescriptive tendencies responding to real-life issues that easily blend with deontology. Not
surprisingly, the applied branch has been a stronghold in ethics over the first decades of the 21st
century, as many fields have, similarly to Translation Studies, developed their own disciplinary
ethical thinking and constructed profession-based guidelines. This trend has shifted the perspec-
tive from theoretical/analytical ethical theories to more deontological approaches, as applied
ethics tends to be driven by pragmatic intentions and has a strong normative tendency. In
translation praxis, we have seen a global surge of institutional and organizational codification of
translation and, in particular, interpreting ethics. But since every deontological ethics addresses
the question of authority, it inevitably also raises questions such as: who gets to decide which
imperatives are deemed categorical? And if one does not accept or value a particular authority,
do the rules still apply? What if the codes demand behaviour that cannot always be displayed
in practice? In response to this, many deontological codes are therefore drafted collectively to
enhance commitment, giving an institutional imprint to add authority, and are also often revised
and amended.
In contrast, metaethics remains more theoretical and deals with questions about the nature
of moral judgments, such as whether moral judgements are objective or subjective or which
metaphysical, epistemological, semantic or psychological presuppositions have influenced their
formulation (Chrisman 2017, xv). Metaethical reasoning does not aim to give guidelines, pro-
hibitions or sanctions. This being said, we should keep in mind, however, that all ethical deci-
sions are embedded in a system and cannot be adequately understood independently of it,
therefore some issues discussed in normative ethics and metaethics are still very pertinent in
ethical research and ethical positioning in Translation Studies as well. The new millennium has
seen a steady growth in the interest in ethical considerations in Translation Studies, but a lot of
metaethical terrain remains to be charted, as most interest has so far been directed in solving
the dilemmas in the professional field and in training new generations of professionals. Existing
contributions with a focused attention to a particular metaethical question include cooperation
(Pym 1997/2012), postmodern ethical theories (Koskinen 2000), social responsibility (Drugan
and Tipton 2017) and the connection of voice and ethics in translation (Greenall et al. 2019)
and the ethics of machine translation (Moorkens et al. 2020).
The ethos of this handbook is metaethical. While we have aimed for thickly contextualized
descriptions of the various ethical dilemmas, readers hoping to find ready-made codifications of
good or right behaviour in this book will therefore mainly be disappointed. If anything, many
chapters of this volume repeat the story of the codified ethics not being enough. According
to Jacques Derrida (1997, 17 and passim), we only enter the field of ethics when we can no
longer apply set of rules and we need to find our bearing in an inherently ambivalent situation
where any course of action can be deemed ethical from one perspective but also unethical from
another. Similarly, codes of conduct depict an ideal world, but the moral dilemmas are born of
a messy and complex life. Because translatorial activities are by definition located in an intersec-
tion, in transit areas between entities, and they involve more than one language, culture, reader-
ship and interlocutor, they are ripe with bigger and smaller ethical dilemmas of this kind. Hence
the need to talk about ethics. Hence also the futility of searching for fast and solid rule-based
ethical codification to solve the ethics of translation once and for all.
4
2 Handbook: the making of

This current volume consists of chapters that aim to chart and analyze what has been said about
the ethical issues related to a particular topic, and how as well as which elements need to be
addressed in more depth in future discussions. Our ambitious aim was to provide a global view
of the entire landscape of ethics in Translation Studies. Like in any human endeavour, the reality
does not fully match the ambition, and we are aware of the many gaps in areas we could not
cover, or that we only managed to cover partially, but the rationale for each chapter and for the
entire volume is metaethical at heart.
When we were invited to edit this handbook with the title Translation and Ethics, it had already
been decided at Routledge that no separate handbook on interpreting will be commissioned and
that both written and oral modes of translation need to be included. This foundational decision
pushed the authors of the chapters and our editorial activities towards including both modes in
the same discussion whenever possible, highlighting similarities rather than specificities of each.
Moreover, the fact that we strove to include relevant aspects of the various modes of interpreting
and translating resulted in a fairly strict prototypical understanding of interlingual translation in
the handbook’s chapters. This being said, when relevant, some authors also briefly cover such
areas as subtitling and dubbing, intersemiotic, multimodal mediation, and interpreting into or
from nonverbal languages. Intralingual translation and interpreting, however, remain entirely
outside the scope of this volume.
Translation Studies as a discipline is attuned to cultural differences, and the self-understanding
of the translatorial praxis often entails an image of the cultural bridge-builder. When complet-
ing the handbook, it has therefore been somewhat unexpected to realize that the Translation
Studies history of ethical thinking may offer an argument for universalist ethics, despite the fact
that we have tried (with varied success) to enlist authors from all continents and have encour-
aged authors to expand from the Western perspectives when possible. However, surprisingly, the
final results show limited variation in terms of basic principles and viewpoints, which offers a
number of possible explanations: either translation is understood in a homogenous way in most
cultures or we failed to weave our network to areas where the thinking and categorizations are
fundamentally different from ours, or else, the Western/European TS model has spread to all
corners of the world. Nevertheless, some chapters depart from entirely Eurocentric positioning
and thus reduce the Western bias: for example, the chapters focusing on translation ethics in
socialist countries, on religious translation, on postcolonial, feminist and Chinese perspectives
offer a broader, more global view of the issues discussed.
Besides giving visibility to some non-Western perspectives, we are glad that we have managed
to include presentations of some Western ethical thoughts, like the ethical translation theory
developed by Erich Prunc that has seldom crossed the confines of German language into Eng-
lish-dominated contemporary translation-studies discourses on ethics. We have also striven to
make another language division which has marked the history of ethical thought in Translation
Studies less pronounced: a linguistic and cultural division within Translation Studies/traductolo-
gie that has persisted through the Anglophonization of academic publishing. Many core thinkers
in the realm of ethics and translation published their main contributions in French in the 1980s
and 1990s, among them Antoine Berman, Henri Meschonnic, Paul Ricœur and Anthony Pym,
and English translations have been slow to appear. We hope that chapters dedicated to these
seminal theoreticians will make their pertinent ethical considerations more visible in Translation
Studies. There remains a slight disconnection within the history of ethical TS literature in that
while interest in ethical issues has been on the rise during the first decades of the 21st century,
the more recent discussions do not always connect to the earlier contributions. One of the aims
5
of this handbook is to encourage such connections and invite researchers to boldly cross the
linguistic and theoretical boundaries.
Another aim of the handbook relates to ethics education in translator and interpreter training
institutions. This volume has been designed and edited very much with translation students in
mind. Authors have been asked to provide definitions and to avoid overly complex sentences to
keep the junior members of our scholarly community from BA level onwards engaged. We have
also decided to dedicate two chapters to issues of ethics and translator education, one of them
looking at how ethics is or should be taught, and the other at what kinds of ethical issues may
arise in the daily life of translator and interpreter trainers and institutions. Ever since Plato the
issue of whether virtues can be taught has been raised. In Translation Studies and in translator
and interpreter education the response has tended to be positive, and ethics has gradually gained
ground in curricula. It is then essential that the ethics classes are not reduced to rote learning of
the codes of conduct, “programming” the students to apply a pre-set codified system (see Koski-
nen 2000, 29). Instead, the future translatorial actors need to be given opportunities to practice
their own muscles of ethical reasoning, to learn to contemplate complex questions from many
directions, to deliberate dialogically and listen to other viewpoints in a non-judgemental man-
ner. Simultaneously, we need to cultivate a humble attitude. Abstract ethical reasoning always
poses a risk of self-righteous attitude and hubris, but no one escapes the human condition of
sometimes taking a wrong turn, and in ethics education no final answers are found. We hope
these chapters will function as an incentive for critical reflection and debate in the classroom.
3 Outline of the contents

This is the first volume in Translation Studies that covers the field of ethics exhaustively, which
means that we had no example to follow or to rebel against. We decided against some of the
typical ways of creating disciplinary subdivisions: we did not want to proceed in a domain-based
manner, providing chapters on medical translation or court interpreting, for example, or to base
the structure on translatorial genres, by focusing, for example, on subtitling or poetry transla-
tion. The outcome is a combination of different approaches and viewpoints. Eventually, in order
to cover different ethical considerations that proved most influential in Translation Studies, we
decided, first, to focus on the presentation of the most prominent authors and currents in the
development of ethical thought in Translation Studies, which is then followed by the discussion
of the ethical considerations of more specific translation and interpreting-related issues.
Part I of the handbook thus offers a selection of most acknowledged ethical theories devel-
oped and applied within Translation Studies. It can be understood as the theoretical foundations
of this area. The focus is sometimes more geographical and sometimes it centres on a specific
theoretical current or tradition. The chapters that provide an insight into the development of
ethical thought within specific national confines are the chapter by Xin Guangqin that traces
the origins of Chinese discourse on translation ethics in the long tradition of Confucian ethics,
and the chapter by Brian James Baer and Christina Schäffner that illustrates the way the ethics of
translation was conceived in “socialist” theories of translation, in particular, in those developed
in the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic. Other chapters in this section focus
more on a specific theoretical translatological, ethical or philosophical current. For example, the
chapter by Andrew Chesterman outlines the application of virtue theories of ethics in Transla-
tion Studies and proposes that a virtue-based Hieronymic Oath could be used to highlight the
importance of professional translation ethics in translator training. Gernot Hebenstreit describes
the absence and presence of ethics in the functional translation theory, in particular in the
work of Hans J. Vermeer, Justa Holz-Mänttäri, Christiane Nord and Erich Prunc. Françoise
6
Massardier-Kenney provides an insight into the prima facie duties ethics of Antoine Berman and
on the way ethics is embedded in a larger system, combining ethical issues with epistemological
and metaphysical concerns in the work of Henri Meschonnic. The ethics of linguistic hospitality
and untranslatability, developed by two other important French philosophers, Jacques Derrida
and Paul Ricœur, are outlined in the chapter by Nike K. Pokorn and Kaisa Koskinen. This is
then followed by the chapters describing ethical consideration in three postmodern currents:
first, Douglas Robinson explores the translational “ethics of difference,” honouring the differ-
ence of the source text, as an ethos of anticoloniality/decoloniality. Then Emek Ergun outlines
the historical development of the ethics of feminist translation and its potential expansions
into an intersectional, transnational, decolonial and interconnectionist feminist translation eth-
ics. And finally, Jenni Laaksonen and Kaisa Koskinen describe the development of Lawrence
Venuti’s ethics of difference. This section concludes with the chapter by Anthony Pym in which
he describes the basic tenets of “translator ethics,” which focuses on the people involved in the
production of translations rather than on translations as texts.
Chapters in Part II look at ethics from the perspective of a situated translator, charting the
ethical issues of translatorial actors in various contexts. This section thus opens with a chapter by
Joseph Lambert focusing on the various and overlapping ethical questions facing the professional
translator, such as professionalization and the dynamics between the professional and personal
ethics. In the next chapter focusing on literary translator’s ethics Cecilia Alvstad provides an
overview of the key Translation Studies texts discussing ethical issues arising from translations of
literary texts and addresses several ethical issues connected to the publishing and re-publishing
of literary translations. In Translation Studies a focus on ethical issues has been particularly
prominent in interpreting research: four chapters therefore more or less explicitly address ethi-
cal issues connected with various forms of interpreted discourse. Wen Ren and Mingyue Yin
review previous studies on interpreter ethics working in conference settings, while Sonja Pöl-
labauer and Iris Topolovec focus on ethics in public service interpreting. Since community
interpreting often involves high-stake encounters where interactants are steered by different
motives, ethics is intricately interwoven with the work of community interpreters, and there-
fore research in this field is also extremely varied and often marks the avant-garde in the field.
Interpreting is also present in the chapter by Salah Basalamah, which focuses on ethical issues
connected to volunteering and non-professional translators and interpreters, i.e. on the grow-
ing phenomenon encouraged by the increase in global migration and the rising opportunities
created by technological affordances for online self-publishing. The ethical issues connected to
volunteering are also addressed by Julie Boéri and Carmen Delgado Luchner in their chapter on
activist translators and interpreters, where they discuss ethically challenging issues of impartiality
versus engagement and expertise versus grassroots knowledge. This section on human transla-
tors and interpreters in different contexts concludes with two chapters addressing the topical
issue of the challenges of the traditional human-centeredness of the field. First, Lynne Bowker
explores a wide range of ethically challenging professional and societal issues connected to the
newest advances in translation technology. And finally, this section is rounded off by Chapter
19 “Translation and posthumanism,”, in which Michael Cronin argues that Translation Studies
should be concerned with the ethical positioning of translation in a time of ecological crisis,
and insists that translation has an important role to play in the formulation of a different kind of
ethics for a viable, future planet.
Part II acknowledges the personal, agentic elements of ethics and approaches ethical issues
from the perspective of a particular actor, with different degrees of agency, and thus honours the
tradition in Translation Studies to predominantly direct the ethical demands on the translators
and interpreters. To balance this individual perspective and to emphasize the social and collective
7
embeddedness of ethics, we devote Part III to a number of institutions and organizations involved
in translatorial practices, with a power to define and disseminate particular understandings of the
professional ethical behaviour of translators and interpreters. Part III thus opens with a chapter
by Lluís Baixauli-Olmos on different codes of ethics or conduct and standards of practice that,
on one hand, depict professional practices of interpreters and translators, and, on the other hand,
also shape the expectations that define and delimit the ethical positioning of the practitioners.
The way globalization influences ethical concerns experienced by different stakeholders in the
translation industry at various levels in translation production is presented in the chapter on eth-
ics in translation industry by Joss Moorkens and Marta Rocchi, paying particular attention to
issues such as disparities of power, ownership of resources and the challenge of crowdsourcing.
Part III also looks into the central role and ethical challenges of trainers, educators and research-
ers and introduces some self-reflection in the field by exploring not only the ways in which we
can research and teach ethics in the educational institutions educating translators and interpreters
and in academic Translation Studies research but also, importantly, how we can be ethical in the
provision of education and in conducting research on translating and interpreting. Thus, first,
Georgios Floros provides an insight into the main pedagogical aspects of teaching ethics within
the context of both academic and professional training institutions, and then Raquel Pacheco
Aguilar and Dilek Dizdar discuss the ethics of translator and interpreter education and focus on
the ways in which the pedagogical relationship between teachers and students are conceptualized
and on the power relations that have an effect on how an “ethical” translator and interpreter
education is manifested. The chapter that concludes this section explores research ethics in trans-
lation and interpreting studies. In this chapter Christopher D. Mellinger and Brian James Baer
present an overview of the current state of research ethics in translation and interpreting studies
and discuss issues, such as the prevalence of Western bias in dominant research paradigms, the
positionality of the researcher, the representation of linguistic difference in acts of translation in
research contexts, researcher bias, conducting ethical research in neighbouring disciplines and
the dissemination of research results and the sharing of research data.
Finally, in Part IV we attempted to identify ethical dilemmas specific to translation and
interpreting as mediating practices, as well as emerging challenges and trends in translator and
interpreter ethics. Some of these topics have been in the focus of translatological ethical thinking
for quite a while; others have become an object of Translation Studies research only recently.
Among emerging topics that have received increased scholarly attention recently are ethical
challenges brought about by child language brokering, i.e. by the phenomenon when children
are used to enable intercultural and interlinguistic communication in child-to-child, child-to-
adult or adult-to-adult interactions. These challenges are discussed by Claudia V. Angelelli in
the chapter that opens this final section of the handbook. In the second chapter of Part IV,
Małgorzata Tryuk explores ethical issues connected with translating and interpreting in wartime,
conflict-related settings and crisis situations associated with mass migration, humanitarian emer-
gency or gender violence. Ethical stress that results from disparities between one’s ethical values
and expected behaviours in the translation and interpreting professions, triggered by various job
stressors such as time pressures, technology and competition and impacting the productivity and
well-being of translators and interpreters is discussed by Séverine Hubscher-Davidson. Svetlana
Probirskaja outlines ethical issues related to the practice of “linguistic first aid,” i.e. help in the
form of interpreting or translation provision by a person with some proficiency in a foreign
language to another person or a group of people who are not able to communicate in a specific
language. The topics of accessibility and linguistic rights are addressed by Maija Hirvonen and
Tuija Kinnunen, who discuss the ethical imperative to enable equal participation in society to all
people with the help of various translatorial practices, with special focus on audio description.
8
The final two chapters in the handbook focus on topics that seemed to have encouraged ethical
considerations already in some of the first recorded writings on translation. Hephzibah Israel in
her chapter focusing on translations of sacred texts offers examples from different religious tradi-
tions to highlight that translation practices and strategies considered ethical in one religion may
not hold as ethical in another. And finally, ethical tensions caused by the collaboration of literary
translators with the commissioners of the translation, source text authors, translators (includ-
ing those involved in collaborative translations, retranslations and indirect translations), censors,
publishers, editors, literary agents and patrons promoting the publication of the translation are
discussed by Outi Paloposki and Nike K. Pokorn.
All in all, we are aware of the fact that we might have missed out some important viewpoints
from our handbook. In spite of its shortcomings, however, we would like to think that this cur-
rent volume will not only provide an outline of the state of the art, but also offer new insights
into the ethical considerations in Translation Studies. The handbook, for the first time in its
disciplinary history, brings together 30 topics by 38 authors focusing exclusively on translation
and interpreting-related ethical issues, and many of the themes are for the first time presented in
a comprehensive manner. A repeated observation of the authors of the chapters included in this
handbook was that information on a particular topic has been fragmentary, and that we need a
lot more ethically focused research in Translation Studies. We hope the richness of the contribu-
tions will encourage our readers to explore the ideas further and to uncover new areas of interest.
To assist them in moving forward in this quest, each chapter ends with recommended further
reading where one can begin one’s own expedition into the realm of addressing translation- and
interpreting-related ethical issues.
Note
1 The earliest surviving ethical teachings of ancient Egypt date from around 25th century BCE (cf. Lich-
theim [1973] 2019, 58) and in Babylonia from c. the 18th century BCE (cf. Larue [1991] 2000, 29–35).
The Hebrew Torah developed between the 14th and the 5th centuries BCE (Larue [1991] 2000, 35–9).
Indian ethics could be found in the Vedas, the oldest of Indian writings (c. 1500–800 BCE), in the
Upanishads (post 500 BCE) (Bilimoria [1991] 2000, 43–57) and in Buddhist teachings which developed
between the 6th and the 1st centuries BCE (de Silva [1991] 2000, 58–68). For major Abrahamic religions,
Judaism, Christianity and Islam, see e.g. Kellner ([1991] 2000, 82–90) for Jewish ethics; Preston ([1991]
2000, 91–105) for Christian ethics; Nanji ([1991] 2000, 106–18) for Islamic ethics.
References
Aristotle. [1908] 1994–2000. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W.D. Ross. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
Provided by the Internet Classics Archive. Daniel C. Stevenson, Web Atomics. http://classics.mit.edu//
Aristotle/nicomachaen.html
Baker, Mona, and Carol Maier. 2011. “Ethics and the Curriculum: Critical Perspectives.” Special issue of
The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1.
Bilimoria, Purusottama. [1991] 2000. “Indian Ethics.” In A Companion to Ethics, edited by Peter Singer,
43–57. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. Malden, Oxford, Carton: Blackwell Publishing.
Bykova, Marina F. 2016. “New Insights Into Aristotle’s Ethics.” Russian Studies in Philosophy 54, no. 6:
449–55. DOI: 10.1080/10611967.2016.1301734
Chrisman, Matthew. 2017. What Is This Thing Called Metaethics? London, New York: Routledge.
Davis, Nancy Ann. [1991] 2000. “Contemporary Deontology.” In A Companion to Ethics, edited by Peter
Singer, 205–18. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. Malden, Oxford, Carton: Blackwell Publishing.
Derrida, Jacques. [1988] 1997. Limited Inc. Translated by Samuel Weber, and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press.
De Silva, Padmasiri. [1991] 2000. “Buddhist Ethics.” In A Companion to Ethics, edited by Peter Singer,
9
Drugan, Joanna, and Rebecca Tipton, eds. 2017. “Translation, Ethics and Social Responsibility.” Special
issue of The Translator 23, no. 2.
Gert, Bernard, and Joshua Gert. 2017. “The Definition of Morality.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Phi-
losophy, Fall 2017 edition, edited by Edward N. Zalta. <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/
entries/morality-definition/>
Greenall, Annjo, Cecilia Alvstad, Hanne Jansen, and Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, eds. 2019. “Voice, Ethics
and Translation.” Special issue of Perspectives 27, no. 5.
Hansen, Chad. [1991] 2000. “Classical Chinese Ethics.” In A Companion to Ethics, edited by Peter Singer,
Inghilleri, Moira. 2012. Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics and Language. London, New York: Routledge.
Kant, Immanuel. [1785] 2002. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Edited and Translated by Allan W.
Wood. New Haven, London: Yale University Press.
Kellner, Menachem. [1991] 2000. “Jewish Ethics.” In A Companion to Ethics, edited by Peter Singer, 82–90.
Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. Malden, Oxford, Carton: Blackwell Publishing.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2000. Beyond Ambivalence: Postmodernity and the Ethics of Translation. Tampere: University
of Tampere.
Larue, Gerald A. [1991] 2000. “Ancient Ethics.” In A Companion to Ethics, edited by Peter Singer, 29–40.
Lichtheim, Miriam. [1973] 2019. Ancient Egyptian Literature. Oakland: University of California Press.
Luce, John Victor. 1992. An Introduction to Greek Philosophy. London, New York: Thames and Hudson.
Meschonnic, Henri. 2007. Éthique et politique du traduire. Lagrasse: Éditions Verdier. (2011. Ethics and Politics
of Translating. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.)
Monzó-Nebot, Esther, and Melissa Wallace, eds. 2020. “Ethics of Non-Professional Translation and Inter-
preting.” Special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies 15, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.15.1
Moorkens, Joss, Dorothy Kenny, and Félix do Carmo, eds. 2020. “Fair MT.” Special issue of Translation
Spaces 9, no. 1.
Nanji, Azim. [1991] 2000. “Islamic Ethics.” In A Companion to Ethics, edited by Peter Singer, 106–18.
Plato. 1914. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Loeb Classical
Library 36. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Preston, Ronald. [1991] 2000. “Christian Ethics.” In A Companion to Ethics, edited by Peter Singer, 91–105.
Pym, Anthony. 1997. Pour une éthique du traducteur. Arras, Ottawa: Artois Presses Université & Presses
d’Université d’Ottawa. (On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation between Cultures. Benjamins Transla-
tion Library 104. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.)
Pym, Anthony, ed. 2001. “The Return to Ethics.” Special issue of The Translator 7, no. 2.
Rowe, Christopher. [1991] 2000. “Ethics in Ancient Greece.” In A Companion to Ethics, edited by Peter
Singer, 121–32. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. Malden, Oxford, Carton: Blackwell Publishing.
Singer, Peter [1991] 2000. “Introduction.” In A Companion to Ethics, v–vi. Blackwell Companions to Phi-
losophy. Malden, Oxford, Carton: Blackwell Publishing.
10
Part I
2
Virtue ethics in translation
Andrew Chesterman
1 Introduction
“You was a good man, and did good things!” Thus, at the very end of Thomas Hardy’s novel
The Woodlanders, a country girl pays tribute at the grave of Giles Winterborne (Hardy [1887]
1998, 367). We might well understand the relation between the two clauses as causal rather than
purely additive: you did good things because you were a good man. Good people do indeed do
good things, after all. And this insight lies at the heart of virtue ethics. In other words, if we wish
to do good, we first have to decide to be good, and the rest will follow naturally.
The view of ethics based on virtues is, in the West, one of the earliest conceptual frameworks –
or “theories” – of ethics. The content of this framework has not remained unaltered over the
centuries, however: different periods and cultures have highlighted different virtues, and still do.
A brief outline of this development is given in the following section.
One of the salient characteristics of virtue ethics is that it encompasses both contractual
and utilitarian aspects. This division, often made in moral philosophy (e.g. Williams 1985),
distinguishes between, on one hand, an ethics based on what has been promised or contractu-
ally agreed or is seen as a duty, and on the other hand, an ethics based on the real or imagined
consequences of an act. This distinction is relevant to the discussion of the place of virtue ethics
vis-à-vis other approaches to translation ethics.
A recent development in debates about translation ethics has been the shift from translation
ethics to translator ethics. This move, from a focus on the product to a focus on the producer,
brings virtue ethics back into the spotlight. It also illustrates how the interest in ethics has
broadened from a micro-ethics concerned with relations between texts towards a macro-ethics
concerned with relations between people; or more broadly still, between words and the world.
2 Historical background
This section takes a brief look at some aspects of the development of virtue ethics. For a much
more detailed account, see MacIntyre ([1981] 2007), which I draw on here. MacIntyre argues
that virtue ethics offers a useful general framework for moral philosophy, because this approach
is less liable to the disputes which arise from competing rights or values, or clashing ethical
13
Andrew Chesterman
rules; he also argues that it is a better framework than one based solely on reason, or solely
on emotion. (For a short general introduction to virtue ethics, see Hursthouse and Pettigrove
2018.) The following section will then illustrate how virtue ethics can be applied to translation
ethics.
We can start with the fundamental question posed by classical Greek philosophers such as
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle: how should one live? The general context of this question is
the classical Greek notion of “paideia,” which can be translated as education but has a broader
meaning encompassing culture in a general sense. Paideia was the whole system of bringing
up children to develop into ideal citizens. Implied here is the Greek concept of a person as
having the potential of development, of not just being but becoming, and hence of becom-
ing better, closer to an ideal, to excellence. Indeed, their word for virtue – “areté” – meant
“excellence of character.” On this view the ultimate purpose of a virtuous life is to attain the
telos (“goal”) of life, understood as the ideal human nature: as MacIntyre puts it (2007, 63),
“human-nature-as-it-could-be” if only it realized its full ethical potential. This is our true
“end” as human beings.
A major source of the virtue ethics tradition has been Aristotle’s systematization of it, in his
Nicomachean Ethics. His list of virtues is more wide-ranging than the earlier Homeric ones of
courage, strength, loyalty and honour, and also more varied than Plato’s four cardinal virtues:
temperance, courage, wisdom and justice. Some of those in Aristotle’s list are intellectual rather
than moral: theoretical wisdom (sophia), practical knowledge (episteme), intuitive understand-
ing (nous), practical wisdom (phronesis), craft knowledge (techne). Others are virtues of charac-
ter, moral virtues: courage, temperance, generosity, magnanimity, self-confidence/self-respect,
proper ambition, good temper, truthfulness, wittiness, friendship (concern for others), modesty,
righteous indignation. For Aristotle, each virtue represented a “mean” between two extremes:
courage, for instance, lies between cowardice and rashness.
There is an interesting relation between Aristotle’s view of virtue and his analysis of causality
in terms of four causes: material, formal, final (purpose) and efficient (pertaining to the agent).
(For an application of these in Translation Studies, see e.g. Pym 1997, 85.) Character (whether
virtuous or not) is part of what he called the efficient cause: e.g. the way an artefact or action is
influenced by the character – and mind and body – of the person who creates or performs it.
Character is partly formed by the agent’s own previous choices, as well as upbringing and train-
ing etc. Aristotle’s final cause also has ethical implications: an agent’s intentions can be more or
less virtuous. Causation can thus be seen to have a potential ethical dimension. Curiously, the
Greek word aitia and its derivatives cover both the sense of a natural/scientific cause and a moral/
judicial fault or responsibility. (So does the Finnish word syy, “cause, fault.”)
Different sets of virtues have emerged in different cultural and historical contexts. Religious
traditions have foregrounded charity and compassion, humility and gentleness, or obedience
and submission, for instance. The Enlightenment thinkers stressed tolerance and reasonableness,
good humour and friendliness. MacIntyre (2007, 211f) compares the virtues as understood by
Homer, Aristotle, and Christianity with the views of two later writers, Benjamin Franklin and
Jane Austen. Franklin lists practical virtues such as industry, silence and cleanliness, whereas
Austen values constancy, integrity and amiability (understood as genuine affection for people).
A thoughtful and accessible collection of meditations on historical and contemporary inter-
pretations of different virtues is offered by Comte-Sponville ([1996] 2003), who covers a wide
range of virtues, including some borderline cases: politeness, fidelity, prudence, temperance,
courage, justice, generosity, compassion, mercy, gratitude, humility, simplicity, tolerance, purity,
gentleness, good faith, humour and love. And there are of course other similar lists. But what
might be the relevance of virtue ethics to translation studies?
14
3 Core issues
3.1 Fidelity and other translator virtues

In the West, a virtue traditionally required of translators has been fidelity. In an oft-cited phrase,
Horace referred in his Ars Poetica (about 19 BCE) to the “faithful interpreter.” However, inter-
pretations of precisely what Horace meant by this have varied, and there has been much debate
on the subject. The original Latin is nec verbo verbum curabis reddere fidus interpres. For some schol-
ars, this means that a faithful or true translator (fidus interpres) should take care not to translate
word for word; but for others it has been taken as a criticism of “slavish translators” who do
translate (only) word for word. (See e.g. Kelly’s magisterial history of the profession, entitled The
True Interpreter, 1979; Rener 1989, 289–290; and Garceau 2018.) So fidelity has had both a posi-
tive and a negative interpretation. Furthermore, the concept has straddled the border between
the textual and the interpersonal views of what the ethics of translation should be about. Transla-
tion ethics explores the principles governing what makes an ethically good translation, as a text,
whereas translator ethics seeks to define the characteristics of an ethically good translator. In con-
temporary Translation Studies, the publication of Anthony Pym’s Pour une éthique du traducteur
(1997) marked a distinct shift from the former to the latter, bringing to the fore issues such as
the translator’s responsibility and agency.
There are several different approaches to translation ethics (see Chesterman 2001 for a sur-
vey). To summarize: an ethics of representation foregrounds the value of being true to the
source, and hence fidelity; an ethics of service values loyalty to the client; a norm-based ethics
highlights predictability and hence trustworthiness; and an ethics of communication aims at
reaching understanding. The following paragraphs illustrate further how different virtues have
been interpreted in these different approaches.
Fidelity is a key aspect of the kind of translation ethics that is based on the idea that a translation
stands for its original, as a representation of the original text. The key value underlying this ethics
of representation seems to be truth: a translation must be true to its original, as a translator must be
true to the original author. In this respect, then, a translator must have the virtue of truthfulness.
In Newmark’s words (1991, 1), “[t]ranslation is concerned with moral and with factual truth.”
In the tradition of Bible translation this has been a key point: appearing to be unfaithful to the
original, i.e. introducing difference, or even being suspected of this, has carried heavy penalties.
If you believe that the Bible is literally the Word of God, even the slightest deviation from the
original constitutes a sin: for sacred texts, literal translation was therefore the safest solution. For
a long time, it was a crime even to translate the Bible at all into a vernacular language (Latin,
taken to be a sacred language, was an exception), and moreover a crime punishable by death:
this was the fate of the great English translator William Tyndale (1494–1536), among others.
Such translations were thought to inevitably introduce changes in the Holy Word. (Compare
the view held by many Muslims that the Koran is untranslatable in principle.) A similar risk also
accompanied the translation of some non-sacred texts: in 1546 the French humanist Étienne
Dolet was burned at the stake, together with his books, because in his translation of a work by
Plato he had added a clarifying phrase that the Inquisition interpreted as heresy, because it could
be read as denying the posthumous life of the soul.
The strategy of literal translation has also been advocated for literary translation, where fidel-
ity has been a priority value. (See e.g. Berman 1985; Meschonnic 2007.) This view in general
stresses fidelity to the form of the original, but at the cost of fidelity to the effect on the origi-
nal reader, for the stylistic effect of a literal translation is usually very different from that of the
original. Translation always involves compromise.
15
Andrew Chesterman
Textually speaking, fidelity has been taken to imply sameness between original and transla-
tion: a highly problematic interpretation. In linguistic terms, the notion that a translation can
achieve total sameness with the original is usually an illusion. It is generally recognized nowa-
days that this is rarely possible at any level higher than certain kinds of individual lexical items,
like technical terms, numbers and the like: yes, English three milligrams is exactly the same as
French trois milligrammes. But the larger the syntactic unit in question, the less likely it is that
total sameness can be achieved. So scholars working with the concept of equivalence in Trans-
lation Studies nowadays more often understand it not as a sameness but, rather more realistically,
as some kind of relevant similarity (see e.g. Pym 2014, ch. 3). Ethically, the challenge is still
there: fidelity to the original can easily be taken to mean striving to achieve the similarity that
is most relevant to the circumstances in question. So the question becomes: what exactly should
a translator be faithful to, and when? Meaning? Form? Style? Spirit? The author’s intention?
The intended effect? Something else? Lip movements (as in dubbing)? Under what conditions
should one aspect be given priority over others? Many answers have been proposed, often based
on different analyses of kinds of equivalence (for a survey, see e.g. Leal 2012). Fidelity remains
a central virtue in translation ethics, but debates continue about the various ways in which it
can be interpreted.
With reference to modern times, consider the appeal to fidelity that is made in the Transla-
tor’s Charter adopted by the International Federation of Translators (FIT) in 1963 (amended
1994, see FIT 1994). It opens with a number of clauses setting out the basic guiding principles
of the profession. Section I lists the translator’s general obligations: clause 1 says that the very
nature of translation entails that translators work under specific obligations, and clause 2 is on the
translator’s responsibility. Then come three clauses all having to do with fidelity, either explicitly
or implicitly:
3 The translator shall refuse to give to a text an interpretation of which he/she does not
approve, or which would be contrary to the obligations of his/her profession.
4 Every translation shall be faithful and render exactly the idea and form of the original, this
fidelity constituting both a moral and legal obligation for the translator.
5 A faithful translation, however, should not be confused with a literal translation, the fidelity
of a translation not excluding an adaptation to make the form, the atmosphere and deeper
meaning of the work felt in another language and country.
Clauses 3 and 5 thus frame and modify the strict obligation stated in clause 4. There are limits to
how far fdelity can stretch, how freely one can translate (3), but fdelity does not mean literal-
ness (5). These principles are highly relevant to much professional translation, but less relevant
to situations where a translator sets out to break norms, to intervene in the text, to edit or even
censor the text or radically change its meaning. Clause 3 also seems to appeal to the virtues of
good faith and honesty: one should not lie about the meaning of the original. It also implies the
importance of the virtue of loyalty to one’s profession.
Fidelity has been radically reconceptualized by some scholars (e.g. Venuti 1998) who wish
to underline the ethical justification not for preserving some kind of relevant sameness but for
allowing a translation to manifest difference, both with respect to the original and with respect
to the norms of the target language. Such an approach (usually proposed with respect to literary
translation) foregrounds the value of revealing the Other in the original, for instance by exploit-
ing deliberate interference from the source language. The culture of the Other is thus not hid-
den, not domesticated into normal target language, but openly recognized. Lewis (1985) called
this kind of translation strategy “abusive fidelity.”
16
The virtue of loyalty, too, has been given different interpretations. Most non-literary transla-
tion functions as a service: translation is a service to a client, and service ethics focuses on the
contractual loyalty involved in this service. Some scholars have taken the notion in a wider sense
to include loyalty to the original author and any other relevant agents, such as the readers. Nord
(1989, 2007) first introduced loyalty into the Skopos theory of translation as a replacement for
fidelity, which she interpreted as a textual relation rather than a social one. For her, loyalty has
to do with the responsibility translators have towards all relevant partners, including themselves;
so loyalty conflicts may arise (see e.g. Künzli 2007; see also Chapter 5 “Functional translation
theories and ethics” in this volume).
Professional codes of ethics also illustrate the relevance of other virtues. The current Code
of Professional Ethics on the website of AIIC, the International Association of Conference
Interpreters, for instance, contains a section entitled “Code of Honour” concerning professional
secrecy, not accepting assignments that one does not feel competent to do, and so on (AIIC
2018). There are also clauses concerning complaints procedures and arbitration, which implicitly
appeal to the virtue of justice. The Translator’s Charter has similar clauses. The whole issue of
translator’s copyright also has to do with justice (see e.g. Venuti 1995a).
The status of fidelity as the dominant virtue for translators has long been questioned by
scholars and practitioners in community interpreting (see also Chapter 15 “Ethics in public
service interpreting” in this volume). Here, many have commented that, in practice, interpret-
ers often feel they need to do more than “just translate,” but aim to act more as helpers, as aids
to a deeper understanding between client and for instance patient or asylum applicant. This
might involve altering the register of the language, making it simpler for a client to understand;
sensitively reformulating information in order to take account of cultural differences; or adding
information for the benefit of either party. Doubts have been raised about the validity of the
conduit metaphor for translation and interpreting, according to which the mediator is no more
than a neutral channel for the exchange of information. (See e.g. Clifford 2004, and at greater
length Inghilleri 2012.) These arguments suggest the value of other virtues such as compassion,
which could be seen as representing a more profound kind of communication ethics, beyond
merely ensuring that packets of information reach their destination. They also raise more gen-
eral questions about the difficult relation between professional ethics and personal ethics (see
further later).
In an ethics based on norms, the virtues of integrity, honesty and trustworthiness come to
the fore: clients and readers need to know that translators will endeavour to meet the norms that
they are expected to meet. Without these, a translator risks losing trust, and by extension the
public image of the whole profession may be affected. (On the importance of trust in the trans-
lation profession, see further Rizzi, Lang, and Pym 2019.) One consequence of this view is the
value of clarity, and another is the importance of transparency, which one could interpret as
honesty: if a translator decides, for some reason or other, to break the norms or expectations of
the client and/or reader, it is considered ethical to do this openly, not covertly. Clarence Jordan’s
norm-breaking “Cotton Patch Version” of parts of the Bible (1968–1973), for example, is clearly
labelled for what it is – not a close translation but an attempt to retell the stories in a way that
seems relevant to a certain group of readers, modernized and domesticated into a contemporary
Atlanta dialect. (The full text is no longer available online, but extracts can be found on various
sites: see e.g. Cotton Patch Version 1973.)
Making the aims and general strategy of a translation clear, e.g. in a translator’s preface, is an
effective way of making the translator’s role visible, so that readers are made aware that they are
indeed reading a translation. Aristotle’s virtues of self-respect and “proper ambition” are implicit
here. If translators typically exhibit a rather servile habitus, as Simeoni claimed (1998), one
17
Andrew Chesterman
could see this as an unfortunate deficiency in these two virtues, although this conclusion should
be tempered by consideration of socio-economic factors such as the power relations between
employer and employee. In this respect, it is significant that professional codes of ethics also have
sections on translators’ rights.
The virtues of self-respect and proper ambition are also implicit in arguments that translators
should be more socially active in promoting their profession (e.g. Venuti 1995b, 311). Koskinen
(2000, 99f) makes a useful distinction between three kinds of visibility. First, textual visibility
enables the translator to be visible in the text itself, for instance via the use of foreignizing strate-
gies. (A bad translation, written in faulty target language or in “translationese,” also makes the
translator visible, of course, but not usually in an ethically defensible way.) Second, paratextual
visibility is seen e.g. in translator’s prefaces or afterwords, or in translator’s footnotes. A minimum
paratextual requirement in literary and academic translation, for instance, is that the translator’s
name should be mentioned on the translation. And third, extratextual visibility refers to the
translator’s social role outside a given translation task. This might include marketing and public-
ity, responses to critical reviews, and also public appearances in general, such as in interviews,
letters to the press and public talks. All three types of visibility have ethical implications. Textual
visibility has to do with whether it is considered appropriate in a given translation context to
hide the otherness of the text. Paratextual visibility concerns the translator’s right to be seen
and acknowledged as the producer of the translation, and the need for the translator to be open
about unusual strategies or intentions, for example. And extratextual visibility is associated with
the translator’s loyalty to the profession, on the assumption that the profession will fare better
and gain trust if its representatives are seen in a positive light in the public eye. In Finland, for
instance, the literary translator Kersti Juva has become a widely recognized public ambassador
for the profession.
3.2 A Hieronymic Oath

Let us now look at one application of virtue ethics in more detail. MacIntyre offers a “first and
partial” definition of virtue as follows, relating it to the notion of a practice: “A virtue is an
acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those
goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which prevents us from achieving any such
goods” (2007, 222).
Practices include all kinds of social activities: MacIntyre’s examples include football, chess,
architecture, medicine, among others. Let us also include translation. Here is MacIntyre’s defini-
tion of a practice:
By a “practice” I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established
cooperative human activity though which goods internal to that form of activity are real-
ized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate
to, and partially defnitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to
achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systemati-
cally extended.
(2007, 218)
Roughly speaking, then, a practice is any kind of cooperative human activity in which people
try to get better at this activity: they strive for excellence. The satisfaction that this striving brings
is one of the “internal goods” which come with participation in a practice. A few pages later,
we get a clearer picture of what means to enter into a practice (see also Chapter 22 “Ethics in
18
translator and interpreter education” in this volume), and hence into the whole tradition of this
practice, especially regarding its most notable representatives:
To enter into a practice is to enter into a relationship not only with its contemporary prac-
titioners, but also with those who have preceded us in the practice, particularly those whose
achievements extended the reach of the practice to its present point. It is thus the achieve-
ment, and a fortiori the authority, of a tradition which I then confront and from which I have
to learn. And for this learning and the relationship to the past which it embodies the vir-
tues of justice, courage and truthfulness are prerequisites in precisely the same way and for
precisely the same reasons as they are for sustaining present relationships within practices.
(MacIntyre 2007, 226)
In sum, MacIntyre sees virtues as human qualities that help a person to strive for excellence in
a practice. Virtues are displayed by individuals, but their efects are social as well as personal.
Practices thrive on the virtues of their participants, including of course the relevant technical
skills (recall Aristotle’s “craft knowledge”). On this view, an ethically good translator must want
to be one, and so strives for excellence in this practice. A “virtuous” translator in this sense is one
who can be relied on to seek ethically justifable solutions. A translator, moreover, who publicly
professes to be a professional translator thus commits him/herself to this striving for excellence.
This position would thus assume that translator ethics takes priority over translation ethics.
Building on this framework, Chesterman (2001) proposed a “Hieronymic Oath” to be sworn
by translators (named after Hieronymus, i.e. St Jerome, patron saint of translators). The idea here
was to establish for translators something similar to the classical Hippocratic Oath sworn by doc-
tors, or the Archimedean Oath more recently formulated for engineers (see Archimedean Oath
1990). Here is the original proposal, which included within square brackets the value or virtue
underlying each clause. The commitment clause at the beginning was inspired by a point made
by Tymoczko (1999, 110, referring to Van den Broeck) that translation is implicitly a “commis-
sive act” implying a promise to represent a source text. It also appeals to the virtue of integrity:
a solemn promise is being made (“I swear . . . ”).
Proposal for a Hieronymic Oath (Chesterman 2001, 153)

1 I swear to keep this Oath to the best of my ability and judgement. [Commitment]
2 I swear to be a loyal member of the translators’ profession, respecting its history. I am willing
to share my expertise with colleagues and to pass it on to trainee translators. I will not work
for unreasonable fees. I will always translate to the best of my ability. [Loyalty to the profession]
3 I will use my expertise to maximize communication and minimize misunderstanding across
language barriers. [Understanding]
4 I swear that my translations will not represent their source texts in unfair ways. [Truth]
5 I will respect my readers by trying to make my translations as accessible as possible, accord-
ing to the conditions of each translation task. [Clarity]
6 I undertake to respect the professional secrets of my clients and not to exploit clients’ infor-
mation for personal gain. I promise to respect deadlines and to follow clients’ instructions.
[Trustworthiness]
7 I will be honest about my own qualifications and limitations; I will not accept work that is
outside my competence. [Truthfulness]
8 I will inform clients of unresolved problems, and agree to arbitration in cases of dispute. [Justice]
9 I will do all I can to maintain and improve my competence, including all relevant linguistic,
technical and other knowledge and skills. [Striving for excellence]
19
Andrew Chesterman
The proposal aroused some interest among scholars, professional translators and translator train-
ers. One of the frst reactions was a short discussion piece in the Bulletin of Translation and Inter-
preting (Fraser, Harris, and Wagner 2002). Some critical points were made, e.g. that too much
respect is given to the client, and a revised version was suggested. One discussant thought such
an oath could be advertised as a kind of “mission statement” and might also be useful for client
education (see also Chapter 28 “Linguistic frst aid” in this volume).
4 Emerging issues
Virtue ethics appears either explicitly or implicitly in a number of emerging issues in discussions
of translation ethics. Several of these relate to the virtue of justice – one of Plato’s four cardinal vir-
tues. “And in justice all virtue is summed up,” wrote Aristotle (1985, Book V, chapter 1, 1129b).
One example is the recent debate on broadening the concept of translation quality, so that it
does not encompass only textual matters but also takes account of the working conditions under
which a translation is done. Abdallah (2012) argues that factors such as client relations, deadlines
and resources available affect the degree of responsibility that can reasonably be attributed to
the translator. These conditions are often “not fair,” i.e. unjust. They may even be so bad as to
cause cognitive damage to translators (see e.g. Ehrensberger-Dow and O’Brien 2015; see also
Chapter 27 “Ethical stress in translation and interpreting” in this volume). At issue here are the
virtues of translation agency of managers and clients, rather than of translators themselves.
There is an extension of this debate on the justice of working conditions which concerns
the behaviour of clients towards their translators or interpreters after an assignment or period of
employment. Translators and interpreters at least have the right not to be killed for translating/
interpreting (don’t shoot the messenger . . .): a right that has not always been acknowledged,
however. In recent history, Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses,
was stabbed to death in 1991 because he had translated this novel. The fate of military interpret-
ers who have faithfully served their clients during a military campaign but are then abandoned
has been increasingly publicized in recent years. In January 2018, a news item highlighted the
shameful treatment of an Afghan interpreter who had worked long and faithfully for the British
military in Afghanistan but had been refused sanctuary in the UK (Brown and Williams 2018).
(For a survey of such cases, see https://red-t.org/. For an account of the recruitment and work-
ing conditions of wartime interpreters and “fixers,” see Footit and Kelly 2012.)
Another emerging topic is language and translation policy. Here too, the underlying virtue
is one of justice and how best to achieve it, in addition to social rights and duties. (See e.g.
González Núñez and Meylærts 2016.) Here again, it is not just the translator’s ethical position
that is at issue but also that of decision-makers, politicians etc., who may be the translator’s clients
and/or writers of source texts, plus the attitudes of the public concerned. This topic is another
indication of the way translation ethics has broadened to include other stakeholders. One par-
ticular kind of translation policy is censorship, which obviously involves other agents besides
the translator. Translators working under censorship are faced with practical challenges which
also have ethical dimensions: under such conditions, is it better not to translate at all, to translate
only for one’s desk drawer, to get one’s translations published in another country, to manage by
self-censoring parts of the works one dares to translate, or what? (See e.g. Ní Chuilleanáin, Ó
Cuilleanáin, and Parris 2009.) The virtues of courage and honesty come into play here.
A different and in the long term more disturbing issue has been raised by Vihelmaa (2009),
who is concerned about the translator’s responsibility to the environment: ecological ethics. To
what extent do translators think about the environmental consequences of their modes of work-
ing, technical decisions, use of natural resources such as electricity and paper, disposal of waste
20
products, etc.? She also comments on a fundamentally ethical question posed by Pym (1997, 11)
as the first question of all in translator ethics: should one translate at all? Like Pym, she queries
whether everything that is translated contributes to the well-being of society. On this view,
translation/translator ethics has a long reach indeed. The relevant virtue here might be humility:
man is not the measure of all things, after all. Justice is also involved, but in a wider sense: not
only between people but between humans and their environment.
These issues illustrate the way professional ethics merge with personal ethics and highlight
situations where there is a clash between the two. Inghilleri (2012) explores this clash in the
context of community interpreting, arguing that interpreters should be allowed more leeway to
act in accordance with their personal ethical principles when these are in conflict with profes-
sional codes which are felt to be inapplicable in certain circumstances and may even conflict
with good practice. Professional guidelines specify that the interpreter must be neutral and not
take sides, but not everyone agrees that this is the most ethical stance under all circumstances.
An interpreter’s fidelity to the requirement not to alter the formal legal register in a court of
law is also problematic if clients do not understand this register, owing to their poor education
level, and the interpreter wishes to help by breaking the same-register norm. (Such a situation
is analyzed in detail in Andreotti 2016.) The general fidelity requirement is particularly prob-
lematic for activist interpreters and translators, who may be more motivated by ideals such as
social equality and justice than by the neutrality or fidelity principles. (See e.g. Pérez-González
and Susam-Saraeva 2012.)
This brings us back to the classical Greeks, and the concept of the telos (“goal, end, aim”).
One’s telos is part of one’s personal ethics and thus reflects one’s values, ideology, possible reli-
gious beliefs, and general goals in life. If one takes one’s telos seriously, one seeks to develop the
relevant virtues. However, if you find yourself working as an interpreter or a translator in the
middle of an ideological or military conflict, there may well be clashes between your personal
telos and the aims of your client, for instance. Or you may be a voluntary activist translator,
working for a given cause that fits with your telos. Or you may be an engaged scholar, urging
translators to translate in a particular way in order to promote a particular view of life that you
support, in a given socio-political context (see e.g. Tymoczko 2010). Whereas, in Translation
Studies, the skopos refers to the aim of a translation (what is this translation for?), the telos could
be a useful term to refer to the more general life goals of a translator (why do you translate?).
(See further Chesterman and Baker 2008.)
5 Conclusion
Translation scholars and practitioners are still some way from a consensus on a number of matters
concerning the professional ethics of translators and interpreters. There are still open questions
that have not been resolved in a way that would be generally accepted. Virtue ethics may offer
a means of resolving some kinds of ethical conflict that are highly relevant in translation ethics.
Consider the problem of deciding relative priorities between a contractual view of ethics and
a utilitarian view (Williams 1985). Contractual ethics is based on the assumption that certain
ethical expectations derive from the status or profession of an agent, or from a previous promise
or signed contract. Ethical decisions thus depend on previous events or existing states of affairs. If
you tell people that you are a translator, or indeed a professional translator, this will arouse certain
expectations. People will expect you to have certain skills, of course, but they will also expect
you to behave in a certain way: at least, they will believe that you ought to behave in a certain
way. You have certain ethical obligations because you claim to be a translator: for instance, the
obligation to translate faithfully. Utilitarian ethics, on the other hand, takes a forward-looking
21
Andrew Chesterman
view: it focuses on the consequences of a decision. This term has historical associations with the
value of happiness: according to the classical utilitarian view associated with Jeremy Bentham
(1748–1832), the ethically best action in a given situation is the one that results in the greatest
happiness of the greatest number of people. However, in using this label for a variety of ethi-
cal theories, we do not need to assume that happiness is the only possible, or best, measure
of ethical value. If we say that good translation serves as a bridge between cultures, bringing
people together across a language boundary, promoting international communication etc., we
are thinking in utilitarian terms: these are seen as good consequences of translation.
But what happens when there is a clash between these two approaches? Might an appeal
to virtue ethics justify prioritizing one approach over the other, in certain circumstances? For
instance, if you, as a judge in court, knew from experience that a given interpreter had the
virtues of trustworthiness and honesty, would you allow the interpreter to relax the principle of
strict fidelity in order to ensure that the accused fully understood what was said? One could also
appeal here to the minimization of what could be called communicative suffering, one form of
which would be misunderstanding, or indeed not understanding at all, against the prioritization
of a strict fidelity alone.
Virtue ethics could also refer to the telos concept, and the original Aristotelian idea of virtue
as a quality promoting the better realization of the human telos. This would take priority, as a
higher value, both over status-based duty and over narrowly defined utilitarian goals. In many
cases, of course, an action justified by a person’s telos might coincide with an action that could
also be justified on a utilitarian view. (See Chesterman 2009 for discussion of an example of
such a case, where a translator’s decision to make a semantic change can be defended either on
grounds of avoiding the risk of bad consequences, or on grounds of personal integrity.)
Consider now a problem that has already been raised earlier: the conflict between personal
and professional ethics. This can be seen as a conflict between different concepts of virtue. On
one view (Aristotle’s), virtue is a quality which promotes development towards a personal telos,
a telos that might be linked to the objective of working toward the ideal of a just society in a
fairer world, for example. On another view (Homer’s), virtue is a quality related to the fulfill-
ing of the duties attached to a social role, e.g. to a person’s status as a professional. In cases of
conflict, preference should perhaps be given to the telos view, but in such a way that this is done
openly. If priority is given to the status-based view, there is the risk of the slippery slope leading
to the “I was just obeying orders” excuse for evil actions. It might also mean going against the
virtues of integrity and honesty. True, generalizing here is risky in itself, but with the aid of the
virtues of practical wisdom and prudence one might hope that ethically justifiable decisions can
be made in individual cases.
Personal ethics are also highly relevant in forms of ideologically motivated interventionist
or activist translation, where fidelity (at least in a textual sense) is not the priority (see Munday
2007). A much-studied example is feminist translation (see Flotow 2014 for a survey and Chap-
ter 9 “Feminist translation ethics” in this volume).
How could we, or should we, consider these problematic issues in the light of justice? Is it
sufficient, after all, that scholars and practitioners simply take the question seriously: what does
it mean to be an ethically good translator?
Related topics in this volume

Functional translation theories and ethics; ethics in Berman and Meschonnic; feminist transla-
tion ethics; Venuti and the ethics of difference; translator ethics; professional translator ethics;
literary translator ethics; conference interpreter ethics; ethics in public service interpreting; ethics
22
of volunteering in translation and interpreting; ethics of activist translation and interpreting;

ethics codes for interpreters and translators; ethics in the translation industry; translating and
interpreting in conflict and crisis; accessibility and linguistic rights.
References
Abdallah, Kristiina. 2012. “Translators in Production Networks. Reflections on Agency, Quality and Eth-
ics.” PhD diss., University of Eastern Finland. Accessed September 29, 2019. http://urn.fi/URN.
ISBN:978-952-61-0609-0
AIIC. 2018. “Code of Professional Ethics.” Accessed September 28, 2019. https://aiic.net/page/6724/
code-of-professional-ethics-2018-version/lang/1
Andreotti, Julia Lambertini. 2016. “Comprehension of Legal Discourse in Interpreter-Mediated Judicial
Proceedings.” PhD diss., Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Tarragona. Accessed September 28, 2019. www.
tdx.cat/handle/10803/397782#page=1
“Archimedean Oath.”1990. Accessed September 28, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedean_Oath
Aristotle. 1985. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing
Company, Inc.
Berman, Antoine. 1985. “La traduction et la lettre – ou l’auberge du lointain.” In Les Tours de Babel, edited
by Antoine Berman, 35–150. Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress.
Brown, Larisa, and David Williams. 2018. “Top Afghan Interpreter Denied UK Sanctuary.” Scottish
Daily Mail, January 18. Accessed September 30, 2019. www.pressreader.com/uk/scottish-daily-mail/
20180118/281590945976534
Chesterman, Andrew. 2001. “Proposal for a Hieronymic Oath.” The Translator 7, no. 2: 139–54.
Chesterman, Andrew. 2009. “An Ethical Decision.” In Translators and Their Readers: In Homage to Eugene
Nida, edited by Rodica Dimitriu, and Miriam Shlesinger, 347–54. Brussels: Éditions du Hazard.
Chesterman, Andrew, and Mona Baker. 2008. “Ethics of Renarration (Interview with Mona Baker).”
Cultus 1, no. 1: 10–33.
Clifford, Andrew. 2004. “Is Fidelity Ethical? The Social Role of the Healthcare Interpreter.” TTR: Traduc-
tion, Terminologie, Rédaction 17, no. 2: 89–114.
Comte-Sponville, André. [1996] 2003. A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues. London: Vintage.
“Cotton Patch Version.” 1973. Accessed September 28, 2019. http://kenanderson.net/bible/html/mat-
thew.html
Ehrensberger-Dow, Maureen, and Sharon O’Brien. 2015. “Ergonomics of the Translation Workplace:
Potential for Cognitive Friction.” Translation Spaces 4, no. 1: 98–118.
FIT. 1994. “Translator’s Charter.” Accessed September 28, 2019. www.fit-ift.org/translators-charter/
Flotow, Luise von. [1997] 2014. Translation and Gender: Translating in the “Era of Feminism”. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Footit, Hilary, and Michael Kelly, eds. 2012. Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in
Conflict. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fraser, Jane, David Harris, and Emma Wagner. 2002. “Do We Need a Professional Oath?” Bulletin of the
Institute of Translation and Interpreting, July–August: 13–15.
Garceau, Ben. 2018. “The Fidus Interpres and the Fact of Slavery: Rethinking Classical and Patristic Mod-
els of Translation.” Translation Studies 11, no. 3: 349–64.
González Núñez, Gabriel, and Reine Meylærts, eds. 2016. Translation and Public Policy. New York:
Routledge.
Hardy, Thomas. [1887] 1998. The Woodlanders. London: Penguin.
Hursthouse, Rosalind, and Glen Pettigrove. 2018. “Virtue Ethics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Winter 2018 edition, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed September 28, 2019. https://plato.stanford.
edu/archives/win2018/entries/ethics-virtue/
Inghilleri, Moira. 2012. Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics and Language. London: Routledge.
Kelly, Louis G. 1979. The True Interpreter. Oxford: Blackwell.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2000. Beyond Ambivalence. Postmodernity and the Ethics of Translation. Tampere: University
of Tampere.
Künzli, Alexander. 2007. “The Ethical Dimension of Translation Revision: An Empirical Study.” JoSTrans
8: 42–56. Accessed September 30, 2019. www.jostrans.org/issue08/art_kunzli.php
Leal, Alice. 2012. “Equivalence.” In Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 3, edited by Yves Gambier, and
Luc van Doorslaer, 39–46. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
23
Andrew Chesterman
Lewis, Philip E. 1985. “The Measure of Translation Effects.” In Difference in Translation, edited by Joseph F.
Graham, 31–62. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. [1981] 2007. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd edition. Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press.
Meschonnic, Henri. 2007. Ethique et politique du traduire. Paris: Verdier.
Munday, Jeremy, ed. 2007. Translation as Intervention. London: Continuum.
Newmark, Peter. 1991. About Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, and David Parris, eds. 2009. Translation and Censorship:
Patterns of Communication and Interference. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
Nord, Christiane. 1989. “Loyalität statt Treue. Vorschläge für eine funktionale Ubersetzungstypologie.”
Lebende Sprachen 34, no. 3: 100–5.
Nord, Christiane. 2007. “Function Plus Loyalty: Ethics in Professional Translation.” Génesis. Revista
Científica do ISAG 2007, no. 6: 7–17.
Pérez-González, Luis, and Şebnem Susam-Saraeva, eds. 2012. “Non-Professionals Translating and Inter-
preting: Participatory and Engaged Perspectives.” Special issue of The Translator 18, no. 2.
Pym, Anthony. 1997. Pour une éthique du traducteur. Arras Presses Université. (English edition 2012. On
Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation between Cultures. Amsterdam: Benjamins.)
Pym, Anthony. [2010] 2014. Exploring Translation Theories, 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
Rener, Frederick M. 1989. Interpretatio: Language and Translation from Cicero to Tytler. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Rizzi, Andrea, Birgit Lang, and Anthony Pym. 2019. What Is Translation History? A Trust-Based Approach.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Simeoni, Daniel. 1998. “The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus.” Target 10, no. 1: 1–39.
Tymoczko, Maria. 1999. Translation in a Postcolonial Context. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Tymoczko, Maria, ed. 2010. Translation, Resistance, Activism. Amherst: Massachusetts Press.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1995a. “Translation, Authorship, Copyright.” The Translator 1, no. 1: 1–24.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1995b. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge.
Vihelmaa, Ella. 2009. “L’éthique du traducteur a l’épreuve de l’écologie.” Méta 54, no. 4: 857–70.
Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana Press.
Further reading
The Translator 2001, 7 (2), Special issue on The Return to Ethics, edited by Anthony Pym.
A variety of contributions illustrating a range of perspectives on the ethical problems raised by transla-
tion. The issue includes the Proposal for a Hieronymic Oath.
The Translator 2010, 16 (2), Special issue on Translation and Violent Conflict, edited by Moira Inghilleri, and
Sue-Ann Harding.
A collection of papers exploring various aspects of the work on translators and interpreters in the con-
text of violence, such as mediation, agency and ethics: much food for thought.
Chesterman, Andrew. 2009. “An Ethical Decision.” In Translators and Their Readers: In Homage to Eugene
Nida, edited by Rodica Dimitriu, and Miriam Shlesinger, 347–54. Brussels: Éditions du Hazard.
A simple example of how different values and virtues can clash, and how an ethical translator can dem-
onstrate real responsibility.
An accessible interview-based study illustrating the practical problems posed by cases where fidelity does
not seem to be the best option, and outlining some solutions.
Künzli, A. 2007. “The Ethical Dimension of Translation Revision: An Empirical Study.” JoSTrans 8: 42–56.
Accessed September, 2019. www.jostrans.org/issue08/art_kunzli.php
A thought-provoking empirical study of how translators react to loyalty conflicts in a typical revision
job.
24
3
Translation ethics in
the Chinese tradition
Xin Guangqin
1 Introduction
Ethics is always complex, in practice or theory. The more complex, the more necessary to delib-
erate on it. According to Chen Jiaying (2015), a contemporary Chinese philosopher, “studies
on ethics are always interwoven with studies on the discourse of ethics” (6).1 Translation ethics
are no exception; careful analysis of their discourse is indispensable.
This chapter explores Chinese discourse on translation ethics and aims to elucidate the Chi-
nese tradition. Liang Shuming (1893–1988) ([1949] 2011, 78), a philosopher who has been
described as the last Confucian, has argued that as a country with a long history, China is a soci-
ety “centred on ethics,” in the sense that ethics permeate almost every aspect of Chinese history,
including politics, culture and the military (Cai [1910] 2009, 8). Zhu Guangqian (1897–1986),
a prestigious contemporary aesthetician, in his masterpiece Tragic Psychology, observes that the
Chinese people rarely engage with abstract thinking, nor do they strive to address questions
that have little to do with reality. For them, philosophy is ethics, and merely ethics (1985, 215).
For Liang and Zhu, “ethics” refers to Confucian ethics, which have been practised in China by
both individuals and institutions for the past two millennia and have developed into something
like a collective unconsciousness. Translation scholar Zhang Boran makes a similar observation:
the national psychological structure of the Chinese people has been consistent for much of its
history (see Zhang and Xin 2016, 48). Chinese tradition is thus deeply affected by Confucian
ethics (Gan 2019, 1).
Unlike virtue or Aristotelian ethics (Yu 2007; see also Chapter 2 “Virtue ethics in translation”
in this volume), Confucian ethics is neither normative nor virtue-based but a combination of
both (Liu Yuli 2011, 7). It is comprehensive because it contains the key parameters of ethics:
principles, values and virtues, and can function as both virtue ethics and deontological ethics
in Western ethical terms (Tao 1998). The key principles and values include xin [faithfulness],
zhong [loyalty] or shuzhong [reciprocity and faithfulness], cheng [sincerity] and ren [benevolence].2
There are also virtues based on the concept of junzi [exemplary and righteous person] (cf.
Cheung 2006, 34–35); the ideal personality in Confucian ethics, junzi buqi [not to be a mere
utensil], means an exemplary person should not just be a specialist, but xiu qi zhi ping, which
means, starting from one’s family, one should develop into a junzi, to harmonise a family, govern
25
Xin Guangqin
a state, bring peace to the world and play positive roles in different capacities.3 The concept of
wulun [five relationships], the essence of which is mutual respect, has also played an important
role in the long tradition of Confucian ethics.
As Zhang and Xin (2016, 48) observe, the functions and values of Chinese translation theo-
ries are generally born of Confucianism, as seen in key terms like xin, zhong and cheng, which are
still used to discuss translation ethics, in addition to more modern concepts like respect, respon-
sibility and trustworthiness. Two other striking features in the Chinese tradition – the emphasis
on morality and responsibility on the part of translators and interpreters, and the convergence of
ethics and politics in translators’ practice – also have origins in Confucianism.
Confucian ethics was undermined dramatically around the May Fourth Movement in 1919,
when China began to transform from a feudal empire into a modern country, and from 1949
to the late 1970s, when China started to reform and open up. Since 1919, many Chinese
have attributed the country’s backwardness and weakness to Confucianism and considered it
a major hindrance to progress. This change of perspective also affected translation ethics, and
its foundational principles shifted from Confucian ethics to socialist and Marxist ideas. Today’s
China is witnessing a revival of Confucianism, even though Chinese socialism and Marxism
remain predominant ideologies (see also Chapter 4 “Ethics in socialist translation theories” in
this volume).
Translation ethics in the Chinese tradition are thus closely related to Confucianism. But rapid
development in Chinese TS in the past two decades have made emergent ideas in translation
ethics equally important.
2 History
Translation has been practiced in China for about 3,000 years. Roughly, there have been four
waves of translation, following Wang Kefei and Fan Shouyi’s analysis (1999), and their respective
ethics have not always been the same.
First is the wave of Buddhist sutra translation from what is largely India today, which spanned
a period of almost ten centuries, from the East Han (25–220 CE) to the Song (960–1279) dynas-
ties. In this period, translation ethics were dominated by the value of faithfulness as represented
by xin. In spite of some Taoist influences, the dominant frame of reference was nevertheless
Confucianism (Nakamura 1957, quoted in Chang 1998).
The second wave is the translation of science from Europe during the period of the late Ming
(1368–1644) and early Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, around the seventeenth century, when Jesuit
missionaries from Europe came to China to spread Catholicism. They also translated between
Chinese and Latin and other European vernaculars with the help of Chinese scholars like Xu
Guangqi (1562–1633), who were then government officials and had the opportunity to become
translators (cf. Tang 2007b, 361). These official-cum-translators were well versed in Confucian
classics and steeped in Confucianism. During this period ethics and politics converged because
“the writings on translation reflected political and ideological agendas rather than linguistic or
methodological concerns” (Tang 2007b, 360–361). Xu Guangqi’s statement has become well
known: “If we wish to surpass other countries, we must learn from others and become learned;
to learn from others and become learned, we must translate” ([1631] 2009, 154).
The third wave lasted from around the turn of the twentieth century until the 1930s, when
China was engaged in a war against Japanese aggression. In this period there emerged great
thinker-cum-translators such as Yan Fu (1854–1921), Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and Lu Xun
(1881–1936), whose works helped change the way China developed (Wang and Fan 1999). Such
figures have all had a strong sense of cultural ego (Zhang and Xin 2016, 77). Yan Fu’s thought on
26
Translation ethics in Chinese tradition
translation in particular made an important contribution to translation ethics, especially through

the Confucian concept of xin [faithfulness] (discussed later).
After this third wave, China witnessed an ebb in translation from 1949 to 1966, during
which the incoming translation was chiefly from the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, efforts were
also made to translate Chinese literature into foreign languages to promote the newly founded
People’s Republic of China (Ni 2011). The ensuing decade was the so-called Cultural Revo-
lution (1966–1976), in which not much translation was done, and what was done featured
extreme control of political ideology (Li Jing 2008).
The fourth wave started in the 1980s, when China began to reform and open up. This wave
carries on into this century. In this period a wide range of books from a variety of languages
have been translated into Chinese, and at the same time more and more Chinese books have
been translated into other languages.
Since the end of the last century, with the rapid development of TS as a discipline, the issue
of ethics has drawn increased attention from translation scholars, starting with the work of Xu
(1998) and Lü (2001). In one of the first systematic analyses in the past two decades, Xu (1998)
discusses three levels of translation activity, in which a translator must mull over the purpose
of the translation, her own competence and the morality of the translating act. The study is
acclaimed as an in-depth theoretical exploration of translation ethics (Lan 2018, 87). Lü (2001)
is the first scholar in China to propose establishing “translative ethics” for better and more regu-
lated communication between cultures. In this wave, modern concepts like respect, difference
and responsibility were introduced and emphasised.
In the twenty-first century, a wide variety of explorations of translation ethics burgeoned
in the form of journal essays, MA theses, PhD dissertations and book publications. Within a
body of research consisting of 18 PhDs and monographs, Wang Dazhi plays a special role as the
first in China to do a PhD in translation ethics. Her understanding of translation ethics (2005,
2009, 2012) has drawn followers in the field, such as Tu (2013) and Liu Yunhong (2014). After
an examination of two translation waves in the Chinese history of translation, Wang proposes
a relativist view of translation ethics. She firmly believes that translation ethics must be relative
rather than universal because, according to her, no such ethics could solve all ethical problems
in translation (2012, 161–166; cf. Koskinen 2000; van Wyke 2013, 551). Wang Dazhi (2005, 47)
also stresses that the concept of ethics features nationality and temporality, similarly to Zhang
J. (2009), as noted later. Tracing her ethical ideas to the source leads us to Wang Haiming, a
Peking University-based scholar of moral philosophy. Wang H. (2004, 4) defines ethics as “the
law of ‘the is’ and the norms of ‘the ought to,’” because in his eyes ethics unite law and norm.
Many TS scholars in China have been influenced by this conception of ethics, including Wang
D., Tu and Liu Yunhong.
Following Wang D.’s definition of translation ethics, Tu sums up three models of translation
ethics during the late Qing and early Republic period: masterly, servantly and masterly plus ser-
vantly. These models are represented by Lin Shu (1852–1924), Yan Fu and Lu Xun respectively.
Lin tries to make almost all values comply with Chinese ones, Yan tries to serve the upper class
by delicately bringing advanced ideas from the West and Lu has a strong sense of ego in his
early practice but later evolves to respect the original (Tu 2013, 123–174). But it may be more
accurate to see Tu’s (2013) work as a descriptive sociological study, in Pym’s terms (2012, 2).
Peng Ping (2008), Wang D. and Tu in fact try to deduce the ethics of the “ought to” from
the “is,” i.e. the real practice of translation, a contentious issue in ethics since David Hume, also
discussed by Chesterman (1993).
Xu (1998), Tang (2007a), Peng P. (2012), Zhang D. (2015) and Ren (2016) explore trans-
lation ethics comprehensively. Tang (2007a) approaches translation ethics by distinguishing
27
Xin Guangqin
between professional and personal ethics, but her distinction is regarded as problematic by some
scholars (e.g. Shen 2018, 28). Such scholars may fail to consider that at times the personal ethics
of translators and interpreters may contradict their professional ethics (cf. Camayd-Freixas 2013).
Zhang D. (2015) in her meta-study approaches translation ethics from the perspective of “ought
to.” Ren (2016) points out that ethical issues arise not just during the process of translating but
before and after, and in the profession as well, implicitly denying and defying Wang Dazhi’s
(2012) definition of translation ethics, discussed earlier. Ren also argues that translation and
interpreting cannot be divided due to advances in technology and translation services in China.
In fact, Ren is also the first scholar in China to discuss interpreting ethics (Ren 2010; see also
Chapter 14 “Conference interpreter ethics” in this volume).
Some studies are influenced by Western ideas, as seen in Lü (2001), Liu W. (2011) and
Luo X. (2012), among others. Lü (2001) draws on Habermas’s communicative action theory.
Liu’s reconstruction of ethics is also Habermasian. Luo’s model of translation ethics targets the
problematic ethical situation in China’s translation world, but there is an apparent discrepancy
between the model’s postmodern background and the Chinese reality.
3 Core issues and topics

Despite the absence of explicit discourses in China’s long tradition of translation, four issues are
prominent throughout this history: faithfulness, responsibility, the convergence of ethics and
politics, and the ethics of difference. Along with these core topics, new issues have also emerged,
such as the professionalisation of translation vis-à-vis the challenges posed by machine translation
(MT) and AI, the ethics of reciprocity in the globalisation of Chinese culture and literature, and
the ethics of translation variation.
3.1 Faithfulness
The very first principle for all translators in history, xin [faithfulness], zhong [fidelity] or zhongshi
[equivalence] has long been central to both Chinese and Western translation theory (Tan 1999,
27; Zhang 2004, 108). This notion echoes other Chinese characters or words like cheng [sincer-
ity], which is regarded as a key ethical concept in translation (Wu and Wang 2008) and what
makes a translator a translator (Zhang and Li 2008). For Wu and Wang, only with sincerity is
the translator able to address the contradictions and relationships between the major subjects like
the author, the reader and the patronage. According to Zhang and Li, a sincere translator will
try her utmost to be faithful to the original.
In fact, xin was used from the time of Zhi Qian, a translator of Buddhist sutra during the
Three Kingdoms (220–280 CE) until Yan Fu and the 1920–1930s, when the term was replaced
by zhongshi, to convey the requirement of linguistic equivalence between the source and target
texts or faithfulness to the ST (Wang Dongfeng 2004, 3–5). Lin Yutang ([1933] 2009, 493)
(1895–1976), a renowned Chinese writer and translator, argues, “faithfulness is the very first
responsibility on the part of translator.” Xin and zhong both refer to accuracy in translation,
but zhong is broader and richer ethically (Wang Dongfeng 2004, 5). Xin was also replaced by
zhong/zhongshi because the latter is easier to understand for its colloquial nature (Zhang 2004,
109).
As a longstanding issue in translation practice, often in different guises, the demand of lin-
guistic equivalence in fact constitutes the ethics of “fidelity” or “faithfulness,” somewhat like the
“ethics of sameness” in the West (van Wyke 2010) or Chesterman’s “ethics of representation”
(2001, 139). The “ethics of representation” virtually dominates in China, according to Chu
28
Chi Yu (2009, 9). Chu advances such ethical concepts as trust/trustworthiness, respect and
equality in his discussion of prescriptive, descriptive and ethical translation studies (2009, 11). On
another occasion he argues that zhongshi [faithfulness], regarded as a criterion in the Chinese
translation tradition, can help interpret the major Chinese translation discourses: the emphasis
on zhi [following the sense in plain words without refining] in the translation of Buddhist sutras
is faithfulness in form; Yan Fu’s tripartite dictum “xin, da, ya,” discussed later, is faithfulness in
meaning or content; shensi [similarity in spirit], as advanced by Fu Lei (1908–1966), a famous
modern translator of French literature, and huajing [transformation of realms], described
by Qian Zhongshu (1910–1998), a renowned erudite, are faithfulness in literary art (Chu
2007, viii).
Yan Fu’s concepts of xin, da, ya, noted earlier, warrant much attention. The “three principles”
were in fact “three hurdles” (Zhu 2018, 11) in Yan’s preface to his translation of Thomas H.
Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics ([1898] 2009): “Translation involves three difficulties: xin, da, ya.”
Yan failed to denote explicitly what he meant by xin, the first concept in the trinity, but it has
often been read in his wake to mean “fidelity to the original” (e.g. Chan 2004, 5; Wong 2007,
88, 90, 96). A frequent translation of the trinity is “faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance”
(see Zhu 2018, 11). In Zhu’s (2018) new interpretation of the tripartite model, xin, da, ya are
construed as “truthfulness, accessibility and appropriateness,” with xin [truthfulness] meaning
“the translator being truthful to what she sees as true in the ST” (2018, 12–13).
In a seminal but disputed essay, which prefaces a prestigious anthology of Chinese transla-
tion discourse he compiled, Luo Xinzhang delineates the features of the Chinese TS tradition
([1984] 2009). In this essay, Yan Fu’s xin found its way into Luo’s concept of qiuxin [“ST-oriented
fidelity-seeking,” in Zhu’s translation (2018, 6)]. In his delineation, Luo argues that such notions
as anben, qiuxin, shensi and huajing4 illustrate that there has been a “self-contained” system of
translation theory in China (Luo 2009, 1–20). Of the four concepts, the latter two were men-
tioned by Chu, and qiuxin is a summary of what Yan Fu proposed. The first, anben [“ST-oriented
textualisation,” in Zhu’s translation (2018, 6)], dates back to Buddhist sutra translators Zhi Qian
and Shi Dao’an (314–385) and in essence emphasises faithfulness to the original (Luo 2009, 3).
The idea of faithfulness, first in terms of xin and later in zhongshi, continues to draw the atten-
tion of contemporary translation scholars. For example, Peng contends that “zhongshi [faithful-
ness] in translating means speaking the truth of the source text to the reader of the target text,”
and he firmly believes such faithfulness is “the translator’s moral and legal obligation” (Peng
2007, 65). Zeng (2008) addresses the poly-positioning of translation ethics by analysing chrono-
logical changes in the concept of fidelity. A recent PhD thesis on zhongshi [fidelity] (Fang 2012)
argues that with the prevalence of ethics of “difference” and postmodernism, the ethics of fidel-
ity has reached a dead end; instead, the “moral values” of translation should be explored and
employed as an alternative to “ethical norms” in translation ethics.
Despite Fang’s argument, the importance of faithfulness lingers on. As Lan Hongjun, a young
theoretician, sees it, zhongshi [faithfulness] is a generally acknowledged principle, synonymous
with cheng and xin (2017, 21). For Lan, zhongshi, as an ethical principle, requires the translator
to transfer the meaning of the source text truly and completely to the reader of the target text
(24). Xie Tianzhen (2018), a leading theorist in TS, holds that as Chinese culture and literature
go global, Chinese stories should be told in a language and manner popular in the receiving
context, i.e. it is acceptable for some translations to be rewritten or altered for better reception
and communication (8). But opposing voices are quite loud: Liu, for example, illustrates her
objection to Xie’s argument with the case of French translator Noёl Dutrait, who, as she sees it,
exemplifies faithfulness as a fundamental principle in his translation of contemporary Chinese
novels (Liu Yunhong 2019, 108).
29
Xin Guangqin
Recently, the author of a critical overview of faithfulness in translation argued that the con-
cept of faithfulness holds sway among translators, despite the fact that academics still question
its exact meaning (Feng 2019, 110). There have been attempts to deconstruct the notion of
zhongshi [faithfulness] (e.g. Wang Dongfeng 2004), yet, according to Feng, as an ethical principle
as opposed to a reality in translation, faithfulness is everlasting, and aiming for faithful translation
has become part of a collective unconsciousness among translators and translation scholars in
China (Feng 2019, 117).
Wang X. (2016) observes that the many diverse, contemporary Western ideas of translation
ethics, which sometimes contradict each other, share a common difficulty: translator subjec-
tivity. As a way out, she suggests resorting to the Chinese standard and character xin, which is
made up of “man” and “say” (the radical and component of the Chinese word). The concept
represents a relationship, the key word to define the Chinese reality, as she sees it, and she calls
for an ethical agent of relationship.
According to Chang, “In brief, traditional translation studies in China is applied TS aimed at
zhongshi [faithfulness]” (2004, 24). Even as MT and AI herald a future of authorless texts, voices
arguing that the notion of zhongshi [faithfulness] should be a prerequisite for translation, and
translators still hold sway (e.g. Ren 2019, 50).
3.2 Responsibility and morality

In the Chinese tradition, translation involves far more than fidelity (Xu 1997); in addition, a long
line of thinking centres on translators’ responsibility and morality. Wang Hongyin, a renowned
scholar of the Chinese tradition of translation, sums up five features of traditional Chinese trans-
lation theories. The first is that morality is essential, and translators’ morality and responsibility
are paramount (2018, 119). As a matter of fact, stress on translators’ morality and responsibility
dates back to the Buddhist sutra monk translators, epitomised by Shi Yancong5 (557–610 CE)
during the Sui Dynasty (598–617). As a perennial issue, it has drawn the attention of today’s
Chinese TS scholars as well, as seen in works by Sun (2007), Chu (2009), Zhu (2010), Chen
and Lü (2011) and Chen and Yi (2011).
Shi Yancong, who served as the emperor’s religious consultant, wrote about the “ba bei”
[eight prerequisites] for translators in his seminal essay “Bianzheng lun” [“On the Right Way”].
It has been regarded as the first systematic disquisition of the translator’s professional quali-
fications and ethical demeanour in the Chinese tradition (see Luo and Chen 2009, 60–63).
Translated by Diana Yue and Martha Cheung, the eight prerequisites are as follows (see
Cheung 2006, 142):
First, a translator must love the truth sincerely and be devoted to spreading the Buddhist
faith and wisdom to others. Second, to prepare himself for enlightenment, he should hold
fast to the rules of abstinence and not arouse scorn or laughter in others. Third, he must be
well read in the Buddhist canon and must understand both Mahayana and Hinayana Bud-
dhism, and he should not be deterred by the difficulties he encounters. Fourth, he must
also study the Chinese classics and Chinese history and make himself well-versed in letters
so that his translations will not be clumsy and awkward. Fifth, he must be compassionate,
open-minded and keen to learn, and must not be biased or stubborn. Sixth, he must devote
himself to practising the truth; he must think lightly of fame and riches and harbour no
desire to show off. Seventh, he must study the Fàn language [Sanskrit] until he knows it
thoroughly, and must learn the correct methods of translating so that he will not lose the
meaning of the doctrines. Eighth, he must also acquaint himself with the lexicons in ancient
30
Chinese writings and with the development of the Chinese script so that he will not misuse
words in his translations.
For Yancong, these eight prerequisites make for an eligible translator (Cheung 2006, 142). Half
of the eight prerequisites are about character or morality, and the rest are, in today’s academic
parlance, about the translator’s competence in the languages and subjects involved.
In the twenty-first century, the translator’s responsibility and morality have received increased
attention among translation scholars. Chu (2009, 10), as noted, holds that translation ethics are
in a nutshell the translator’s responsibility to the parties involved in a translation project. Sun
Zhili (2007), Zhu Chaowei (2010) and Chen and Yi (2011) also discuss the issue. Sun (2007)
relies on Chesterman’s five models – ethics of representation, of service, of communication,
ethics based on norm and ethics of commitment (Chesterman 2001) – to identify five transla-
tor responsibilities: representing the original, fulfilling client requirements, conforming to the
sociocultural norms of the receiving country, satisfying the demands of the Target Language
(TL) reader and abiding by professional ethics (see also Chapter 2 “Virtue ethics in translation”
in this volume). Chen and Lü (2011) argue that Chesterman’s (2001) transference of ethical
responsibilities to translators fails to free them from moral dilemmas. They provide translators
and interpreters with four principles for prioritising virtual responsibilities within the limits of
social contexts and the interests of the subjects: due consideration to the interests of all stake-
holders, benefits maximised and harm minimised, priority to the interests of the weak party and
prioritising the most pressing responsibility.
This emphasis on the requirements and responsibilities of translators and interpreters con-
tinues today in various professional codes of ethics. The latest development is the release of the
Code of Professional Ethics for Translators and Interpreters in China by the Translators Asso-
ciation of China (TAC) on November 9, 2019, at the 2019 TAC Conference in Beijing (TAC
2019). The code explicitly specifies what is expected of professional translators and interpreters
in terms of attitude, competence, fidelity and accuracy, impartiality, confidentiality, contract
awareness, cooperation, technology literacy and self-improvement. It is also intended to serve as
a guide for professional trainers and users or consumers of translation services in China (see also
Chapter 20 “Ethics codes for interpreters and translators” in this volume).
3.3 Convergence of ethics and politics

The convergence of ethics and politics has manifested in various forms throughout the history
of Chinese translation ethics. The convergence is based on three axioms: first, translation is for
cultural enhancement. Second, translation is for national survival. And third, translation is for
national image promotion.
For a long time, translation was seen as a way to strengthen the central status of the Han
culture, and translators before the Song Dynasty did not enjoy high status (Xia 2017, 89). Trans-
lation gained more visibility through the translation between Han or Confucian classics and
minor ethnicities in China (89). During the second wave of translation, besides the translation
of science from Europe, translation within the country played a role in the integration of a mul-
ticultural country (89). In this period, ethics and politics converged in the sense that translation
contributed to cultural enhancement.
Ethics and politics also converge in the use of translation as a cultural weapon for national
survival, as identified by many Chinese translation scholars, including Liu Miqing (2005) and
Gu Zhengkun (2008). In arguing that translation should function as a cultural strategy, Liu
built on a long tradition of translators, such as Xu Guangqi, Ma Jianzhong (1844–1900), Yan
31
Xin Guangqin
Fu, Liang Qichao and Lin Shu, who all saw translation as a cultural strategy for the nation to
survive various crises (Liu 2005, i). For Liu, this was the most essential “Chinese characteristic”
of translation. Liu also appealed to contemporary translators in China to play a larger role in the
rejuvenation of Chinese culture and the nation (Liu 2005, i–xxxii). Liu’s point was reaffirmed by
Gu in his study of cultural translation in the late Qing and early Republic (1840–1919) (2008,
7–17) eras and by other translation scholars, such as Zhang and Xin (2016, 76–77). Translation
ethics and politics are also linked in the Chinese context because China has a long history of
hiring translators as government officials (Hung and Pollard 2009, 372; Tang 2007b, 361). China
has often had a strong central government, run by a well-structured hierarchy of scholar-officials,
despite political disorder from time to time.
Nevertheless, the use of translation as a cultural weapon has been held responsible for the
under-exploration of translation ethics in China (Chu 2009). Chu argues that in twentieth-cen-
tury China, translation was employed to realise various cultural purposes and primarily served
the “self,” without a focus on “humanities,” which refers to how to treat the foreign, including
strangers and enemies, properly (2009, 7).
Ethics and politics also converged in institutionalised translators after the founding of the
People’s Republic of China and throughout the Cultural Revolution period (1966–1976). In
this “national translation programme,” as termed by Ren and Zhang (2016), the ethical agents
are characterised in three levels: the nation as nominal agent, state-level translation organisa-
tions as institutional agents and translator groups as actual agents. In such programmes, Ren
and Zhang argue, ethics of patriotism prevail: national interests dominate translation decisions.
3.4 Ethics of difference

Influenced by Western ideas, like those of French philosopher Levinas and TS scholars Berman
and Venuti, the so-called ethics of difference and its critiques have recently become influential
in Chinese TS (see also Chapter 6 “Ethics in Berman and Meschonnic” and Chapter 10 “Venuti
and the ethics of difference” in this volume). Xu H. (2012), Liu and Xu (2016) and Shen (2008)
are firm believers in “ethics of difference,” while Liu Yameng (2005) and Zhang J. (2009) criti-
cise the paradigm. Zhang in particular has developed new thinking about translation ethics.
Xu H. (2012), informed by the ideas of Berman, Venuti and Levinas, valorised difference in
translation by studying how an ethics of difference was applied to render literature into Chinese.
Liu and Xu (2016), following Berman’s earlier view rather than his later notion of translation
ethics, also stress the importance of ethics of difference, particularly in the translating of Chinese
literature and culture into other foreign languages. Of those Chinese scholars espousing “differ-
ence,” proponent Shen Lianyuan is particularly determined and consistent in his argument. In
several essays (2008, 2010, 2014, 2016) and his monograph (2018), Shen argues that translation
ethics boil down to the respect of “difference, nothing but difference.” He contends that only
by respecting “difference” can translation be ethical and a world steeped in capitalist notions
and ideologies be saved from selfishness, self-importance and other contemporary human mal-
aises. In his most recent work (Shen 2018), he goes to great lengths to stress the philosophy of
“other-regarding.”
Views on “difference” also appear in past Chinese discourses. For example, the great transla-
tor and thinker Lu Xun was a staunch supporter of respecting difference, linguistic in particular.
His call to respect difference stems from his discontent with the Chinese nationalism of his time
and his hope to revolutionise the Chinese way of thinking via reform of the Chinese language.
Ethics of difference has also been criticised. Liu Yameng (2005) put forth the first system-
atic criticism of Venuti’s “ethics of difference” (see Venuti 1998), followed by Jiang (2008) and
32
Zhang J. (2009). Zhang J. (2009, 198–200) links this discussion to the convergence of ethics
and politics noted earlier and sees translation ethics as often subject to the needs of politics. In
his investigation of Venuti’s translation ethics, Zhang champions the idea that translation ethics
feature national, political and epochal characteristics, thereby constituting a kind of “cultural
soft power” (2009, iii). For Zhang, translation ethics is not only the translator’s pursuit of certain
values but also part of the social institutions and social control systems of the country concerned
(2009, 196). In his view, translation ethics as a cultural soft power is chiefly embodied in the
ethical “collective unconsciousness,” or the collective cultural interests and standpoints, of a
nation (2009, 196).
Xin Guangqin (2017, 76–78) also takes issue with “difference” as the foundation for ethics
when he discusses Yang Zhenyuan’s (2013) model of shoujing-daquan. Yang (2013) borrows two
important notions long practised in Chinese ethical tradition, shoujing and daquan (acting flexibly
in concrete quan [tactics] while sticking to jing [principles] as strategies), to build a model. Yang’s
model is significant, but his jing [principle] is pinpointed at “difference.” For Xin, difference is
relative and cannot be granted an absolute value and thereby doesn’t constitute a value for ethi-
cal formulation (see also Weller 2006). Xin (2017) argues, “[a]lso related to difference regarding
translation ethics is the issue of asymmetrical relations of power between different languages and
cultures,” for which the identity of a minor language might be harmed (77).
Despite criticisms, difference is espoused by some scholars (e.g. Liu and Xu 2016) for a major
reason: the “going global” initiative of Chinese literature and culture. As the flow of translation
between Chinese and Western languages, English in particular, remains lopsided, many in China
hope the country’s culture and literature will be translated with due respect for its “difference”
instead of being misrepresented, misunderstood or improperly appropriated.
4 New debates and emerging issues

The heated discussion of translation ethics reflects the topic’s importance to translation scholars,
but it also demonstrates that it is not easy for the field to come to consensus on complex ethical
issues. With the rapid change of society and swift development of technology, new issues and
topics in translation in the Chinese context have emerged. Three new issues in the Chinese
context warrant particular attention.
4.1 Professionalisation of translation and challenges posed by MT and AI

Due to changes in such factors as source-text types, translating modes and translating tools and
means, some scholars conclude that translation in China is entering an era of professionalisation
(Xie 2014). More practical texts than literary works are being translated both into and out of
Chinese, and translation is listed in the national document of professions and occupations (Mu
2018, 11). Meanwhile, a large number of universities offer master of translation and interpret-
ing (MTI) programmes,6 and training issues and questions concerning the professionalism of
future translators and interpreters will give rise to new issues in translation ethics. For example,
where will the boundary of responsibility be drawn when many more participants are involved
and more texts are produced collaboratively rather than individually? Clear copyright may give
way to collective copyright (see also Chapter 21 “Ethics in the translation industry” in this
volume).
Moreover, in this new context of professionalisation and digitisation, translation is part of the
language service industry, which exists in the ecosystem of the cultural industry (Miao and Ning
2016). New problems such as underdeveloped policies and regulations for personnel, chaotic
33
Xin Guangqin
market management and non-standardised quality control have been identified (Wang Huashu
2017, 87). Meanwhile, the use of open-access machine translation tools will further complicate
ethical issues, including emerging needs for criteria and legislation (87).
Ethical issues related to translation in the digital age are nothing new (see Cronin 2013),
but debates emerge all the time. For example, translation technology leads to conflicts between
human and machine: what is the purpose of machine translation? Whom does it serve? Does it
serve the interests of a small number or promote the harmony and development of humanity as
a whole? Recently, such questions have been taken seriously, and an intersubjective understand-
ing of the agents involved in and brought about by MT is suggested (Lan 2019, 13; see also
Chapter 19 “Translation and posthumanism” in this volume).
On the one hand, translation seems to be professionalising swiftly. On the other hand, crowd-
sourced translation, cloud translating and MT point to the development of collaborative trans-
lation and collective wisdom, which have resulted in the scaling up and deprofessionalisation
of translation (cf. McDonough Dolmaya 2011; see also Chapter 16 “Ethics of volunteering in
translation and interpreting” in this volume). The resulting ethical issues are therefore more
pressing and complex, as discussed by Hao (2016) and Wang, Li, and Li (2018, 81–82). In fact,
the fast development of MT has given rise to a plethora of changes in translation types, text
types, translation subjects and translatorial roles; in turn, these changes challenge basic ethical
principles like faithfulness, responsibility, loyalty, impartiality and harmony, according to Ren
Wen (2019, 48–50). While technology offers benefits such as speed and efficiency, the challenges
and risks must not be neglected, Ren (2019) argues, and the aforementioned principles must be
strengthened to meet the challenges.
The ethical issues arising from translation technology have much to do with translation
knowledge protection and technology democracy, human alienation and linguistic ecology;
translators and interpreters, translation users and the community at large may all be damaged
in one way or another by technology, as illustrated by some translation scholars (e.g. Hao and
Mo 2019). For example, Lan (2019) revealed and criticised a corporation specialising in AI and
voice recognition for taking advantage of interpreters’ work in the advertising of their products.
In sum, technological progress has not been matched by corresponding ethics and law, which
lag far behind in present-day China.
4.2 Ethics of reciprocity and outgoing translation

According to statistics from the Translators Association of China, the translation volume from
Chinese to other languages accounted for 54% of the total in 2011, outpacing the volume of
incoming translation for the first time, and 60% of the total in 2014 (Huang 2018, 6). This
changed translation flow has led to a reconsideration of the ethics of difference. Liu and Xu
(2016), as noted earlier, stress the importance of “ethics of difference” and take issue with some
foreign or Chinese translators’ practice of manipulating or rewriting contemporary Chinese lit-
erary works. They stress difference for another reason: in China quite a few TS scholars (e.g. Xie
2015, Hu 2018) are somewhat supportive of the “manipulation” or “rewriting” as epitomised
by Howard Goldblatt, a noted American translator of contemporary Chinese literature. Xie is
typical of those siding with Goldblatt. He (2018) contends that there is a gap in culture and time
between the Chinese adoption of Western culture and the Western adoption of Chinese culture.
For the imbalanced exchange and communication between the West and the East, China should
exercise patience and acknowledge the reality that China is still weak in terms of cultural power,
although it has been the second largest economic power in the world. In other words, Xie argues
that respecting the “foreign” as “foreign” takes time.
34
The kind of ethics that works best for the outgoing translation of Chinese culture and litera-
ture is still under dispute. Li (2016) draws on ethics in general to define the translation ethics for
today’s English translation of Chinese classics.
Xin (2017) supplies an ethics of reciprocity. Translation ethics involves issues of texts, lan-
guages and cultures as well as individuals, collectives and larger communities like nations, to
which good and evil can be done by translation and translators, and Xin strives to formulate a
more comprehensive, dynamic, integrated and multi-layered model, called the “ethics of reci-
procity in translation,” by drawing on Ricœurian and Confucian concepts of reciprocity (see also
Chapter 7 “The ethics of linguistic hospitality and untranslatability in Derrida and Ricœur” in
this volume). The Ricœurian model stresses reciprocity between equal parties, while the Confu-
cian model emphasises reciprocity between unequal parties, and translation tends to involve both
equal and unequal participants. Reciprocity presupposes pairs of entities and parties, and any
translation project involves such pairs. The ethics of reciprocity in translation was thus developed
by combining virtue ethics and principle ethics to cover a wide scope of whether to, what to
and how to translate. The paradigm centres on translation projects, whereby active parties, such
as individual persons, collectives and nations, and passive entities, including texts, languages and
cultures, ought not to be harmed but should rather mutually benefit. To achieve such reciprocity,
translators and other agents are faced with three general alternatives: no translation, “equivalent”
translation and manipulated translation, depending on the text type and quality, as well as the
value the translation project aims to establish. This model supersedes the ethics of difference and
sameness at once and promotes linguistic, cultural and national harmony.
4.3 Ethics of translation variation

Translation variation is a concept put forward by Chinese translation scholar Huang Zhonglian
in 1998 (see Zhou 2012). As developed by Huang, the theory discusses the adding, altering,
cutting, adapting and rewriting in translation practice, in contrast to the notion of linguistic
equivalence in most codes and the idea of “faithfulness” in many traditional conceptions of
translation. Two recent publications have given rise to the latest discussion of translation varia-
tion: an essay entitled “The Ethics of Translation Variation: A Tentative Examination” (Fang
2019) and a dissertation entitled “Towards the System of Trans-variation Ethics” defended at
the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in November 2019. In the dissertation, researcher
Yang Rongguang develops a system of ethics concerning translation variation. The theory of
translation variation has been around for two decades, but its ethics will undoubtedly continue
to trigger heated discussions.
5 Conclusion
To conclude, the emphasis on xin [faithfulness], translator responsibility and the convergence
of ethics and politics will continue to occupy centre stage in the discussion of translation ethics
among translators and TS scholars in China. The dispute over whether to respect difference
will not be settled anytime soon, as the Chinese people hold enormous hope that their culture
and literature can be received by others just as in China. For translators, translation scholars and
all other parties concerned, there are also other imposing issues in translation ethics: how to
effectively engage with the ethical notions from the West, including those embodied in the func-
tional, feminist, postcolonial and postmodern discourses; how to tap into and develop the rich
and profound ethical tradition of China; and how to meet the challenges posed by the advance-
ment in AI and MT.
35
Xin Guangqin
Chu (2009) argues that translation ethics in China is underdeveloped largely because of the
persistent influence of Confucian ethics. But other scholars think otherwise, such as Wu (2008,
2011), Zhang J. (2009), Yang (2013), Wang X. (2016) and Xin (2017), who resort to Confucian
ethics or call on its long tradition to address translation ethics. As scholars continue to reconceptu-
alise translation and notions of ethics, and as globalisation, glocalisation and technology continue
to change the landscape of translation, developments in translation ethics will emerge. Reciprocal
engagement between the rich legacy of Chinese tradition and the profound insights of the West,
from ancient Greece to today, will help speed up the emergence of new ethical paradigms.
About ten years ago, Moira Inghilleri in her entry for the second edition of Routledge Encyclope-
dia of Translation Studies stated, “we have not yet by any means reached a clear understanding of or
agreement about what an ‘ethical’ approach actually means in the context of translation theory or
practice, or the construction of the field itself ” (2009, 100). This situation will change. Chinese TS
scholars are ready to critically and reciprocally engage with productive explorations in translation
ethics to develop insights for better communication and exchanges between cultures and peoples.
The result will be a shared human community, or telos (cf. Chesterman and Baker 2008), not just
for translators and interpreters but also for anyone involved in cross-cultural communication.

Virtue ethics; Venuti and ethics of difference; translator ethics; translation industry and ethics;
codes of ethics.
Notes
1 All quotations from Chinese authors in this chapter are my translations unless otherwise noted. All Chi-
nese names are romanised in Pinyin according to the practice in China – with the surname first, followed
by the given name.
2 The English translations of these Chinese concepts are the most relevant but cannot in most cases convey
the rich and profound meaning of the concept in question. For example, ren, an all-encompassing ethical
concept in Confucianism, conveys not just “reason” or “sense” but something of both (Yu Yingshi 2004,
402). For more, see Xin (2017, 107, note 107).
3 These ideas are conveyed in the Confucian classics The Daxue [The Great Learning] and have been pro-
moted by Confucius’s followers and practised by ordinary Chinese people for over 2,000 years. Maria
Tymoczko, an American translation scholar, seems to have been influenced by these ideas when she says,
“Thinking about responsibilities to self, family, community, nation, and the world open up wider and wider
ethical issues for translators” (2007, 318, my emphasis).
4 Zhun Chunshen called these the “four pronouncements on translation.” Luo linked them to chart a
conceptual evolution of Chinese TS tradition and Zhu translated them respectively as “ST-centred textu-
alisation,” “ST-oriented fidelity-seeking,” “TT-oriented resemblance in spirit” and “TT-centred transfor-
mation” (Zhu 2018, 6).
5 Buddhist monks in ancient China usually give up their real name and adopt a two-character religious
name like Yancong, Dao’an or Xuanzang. Shi is their uniform surname, after Sakyamuni, the founder of
Buddhism, whose name is transliterated into Chinese as Shijiamouni. See also Tang Jun’s note 3 in her
Target essay (2007b, 372).
6 253 in total in April 2019 (Mu 2020, 96).
References
Cai, Yuanpei. [1910] 2009. A History of Chinese Ethics. Beijing: Peking University Press. (蔡元培. 《中
国伦理学史》)
Camayd-Freixas, Erik. 2013. “Court Interpreter Ethics and the Role of Professional Organizations.” In
Interpreting in a Changing Landscape: Proceedings of the 6th International Critical Link Conference, edited by
36
Christina Schäffner, Krzysztof Kredens, and Yvonne Fowler, 15–30. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Chan, Leo Tak-hung 陈德鸿. 2004. Twentieth-Century Chinese Translation Theory: Modes, Issues and Debates.
Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Chang, Nam Feng. 1998. “Faithfulness, Manipulation, and Ideology: A Descriptive Study of Chinese
Translation Tradition.” Perspectives 6, no. 2: 235–58.
Chang, Nam Feng. 2004. Criticism of Translation Studies in the West and China. Beijing: Tsinghua University
Press. (张南峰.《中西译学批评》)
Chen, Jiaying. 2015. What Is Good Life? Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe. (陈嘉映.《何谓良好生
活》)
Chen, Zhijie, and Lü Jun. 2011. “Translators’ Responsibility Choice: Reflections on Chesterman’s Transla-
tion Ethics.” Foreign Languages and Their Teaching, no. 1: 62–65. (陈志杰,吕俊.译者的责任选择 – 对切
斯特曼翻译伦理思想的反思.《外语与外语教学》)
Chen, Zhijie, and Yi Songming. 2011. “Realizing a Translator’s Responsibilities.” Journal of PLA University
of Foreign Languages 34, no. 5: 75–9, 91. (陈志杰,易松明.译者责任的实现.《解放军外国语学院学
报》)
Chesterman, Andrew. 1993. “From ‘Is’ to ‘Ought’: Laws, Norms, and Strategies in Translation Studies.”
Target 5, no. 1: 1–20.
Chesterman, Andrew, and Mona Baker. 2008. “Ethics of Renarration.” Cultus 1, no. 1: 10–33.
Cheung, Martha 张佩瑶, ed. 2006. An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation, Volume 1: From Earliest
Times to the Buddhist Project. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Chu, Chi Yu. 2007. “Introduction.” In Translation and Norms, edited by Christina Schäffner, vii–xiii. Bei-
jing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. (朱志瑜.导读:求同与存异.《翻译与规范》)
Chu, Chi Yu. 2009. “Translation Studies: Prescription, Description, and Ethics.” Chinese Translators Journal
30, no. 3: 5–12. (朱志瑜.翻译研究:规定,描写与伦理.《中国翻译》)
Cronin, Michael. 2013. Translation in the Digital Age. London, New York: Routledge.
Fang, Wei 方薇. 2012. “After Fidelity: Exploring Translation Ethics.” PhD diss., Shanghai International
Studies University.
Fang, Wei 方薇. 2019. “The Ethics of Translation Variation: A Tentative Examination.” Foreign Language
Research, no. 5: 95–101. (方薇.变译之伦理辨.《外语学刊》)
Feng, Quangong. 2019. “Disputes over Faithfulness in Translation and Further Reflections.” Journal of PLA
University of Foreign Languages 42, no. 3: 109–19. (冯全功.翻译忠实观:争议与反思.《解放军外国语
学院学报》)
Gan, Chunsong. 2019. A Short History of Confucianism. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe. (干春松.《儒
学小史》)
Gu, Zhengkun. 2008. “The Cultural Turn of TS and the Rise of the Chinese Cultural School.” Foreword
to A Study of Traditional Chinese Translation Activities from the Perspective of Ethics, by Peng Ping, 1–17.
Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. (辜正坤.翻译研究的文化转向与中国文化
学派的兴起 – 序彭萍博士论著《伦理视角下的中国传统翻译活动研究》)
Hao, Junjie. 2016. “An Ethical Exploration of Crowdsourcing Translation.” Shanghai Journal of Translators,
no. 4: 43–9. (郝俊杰.众包翻译的伦理探索.《上海翻译》)
Hao, Junjie, and Mo Aiping. 2019. “An Ethical Exploration of Translation Technology.” Shanghai Journal of
Translators, no. 5: 58–63. (郝俊杰,莫爱屏.翻译技术的伦理探索.《上海翻译》)
Hu, Anjiang. 2018. “Achievements and Reflections of Chinese Literature’s Going Global in the 40 Years
of Reform and Opening-Up.” Chinese Translators Journal, no. 6: 18–20. (胡安江.改革开放四十年中国
文学“走出去”的成就与反思.《中国翻译》)
Huang, Youyi. 2018. “Serving the Reform and Opening-Up for 40 Years, Translation Practice and Trans-
lation Education Embrace a New Era.” Chinese Translators Journal, no. 3: 5–8. (黄友义.服务改革开
放40年,翻译实践与翻译教育迎来转型发展的新时代. 《中国翻译》)
Hung, Eva, and David Pollard. 2009. “Chinese Tradition.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies,
2nd edition, edited by Mona Baker, and Gabriela Saldanha, 369–78. Abingdon, New York: Routledge.
Inghilleri, Moira, and Carol Maier. 2009. “Ethics.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 2nd edi-
tion, edited by Mona Baker, and Gabriela Saldanha, 100–4. Abingdon, New York: Routledge.
Jiang, Tong. 2008. “From the Establishment of Foreignizing Translation to the Deconstruction of the Ethics
of Difference: A Study of Lawrence Venuti’s Translation Theory.” PhD diss., Shoudu Normal University.
(蒋童.从异化翻译的确立到存异伦理的解构:劳伦斯韦努蒂翻译理论研究.首都师范大学)
37
Xin Guangqin
of Tampere Press.
Lan, Hongjun. 2017. “Lying and Cheating: The Other Side of Translation.” Translation Quarterly, no. 4:
21–41. (蓝红军.谎言与欺骗:翻译的另一面.《翻译季刊》)
Lan, Hongjun. 2018. “Theoretical Construction of Translation Studies.” In Translation Studies in China since
the Reform and Opening-Up (1978–2018), edited by Xu Jun, 52–95. Wuhan: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe.
(蓝红军.翻译学理论建设.载许钧主编.《改革开放以来中国翻译研究概论（1978–2018）》)
Lan, Hongjun. 2019. “On the Ethicality of Translation Technology.” Shanghai Journal of Translators, no. 4:
8–13. (蓝红军.关于翻译技术伦理性的思考.《上海翻译》)
Li, Jing. 2008. A Study of Translation in Contemporary China (1966–1976). Tianjin: Nankai University Press.
(李晶.《当代中国翻译考察（1966–1976）》)
Li, Zheng. 2016. “A Study of the Ethics of Translation from the Perspective of Ethics: With the English
Translation of Chinese Classics as an Example.” PhD diss., East China Normal University. (李征.伦理
学关照下的翻译伦理研究 – 以中国典籍英译为例.华东师范大学)
Liang, Shuming. [1949] 2011. The Essentials of Chinese Culture. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe. (梁
漱溟.《中国文化要义》)
Lin, Yutang. [1933] 2009. “On Translation.” In An Anthology of Discourses on Translation, revised edition,
edited by Luo Xinzhang, and Chen Yingnian, 491–507. Beijing: The Commercial Press. (林语堂.论
翻译.载罗新璋,陈应年编.《翻译论集》)
Liu, Miqing. 2005. A Comparative Study of Translation Thought in China and the West. Beijing: Zhongguo
duiwai fanyi chuban gongsi. (刘宓庆.《中西翻译思想比较研究》)
Liu, Weidong. 2011. “A Way to the Reconstruction of Translation Ethics.” PhD diss., Shanghai Interna-
tional Studies University. (刘卫东.翻译伦理重构之路.上海外国语大学)
Liu, Yameng. 2005. “Venuti’s Perspective on Translation Ethics and Its Self-Deconstruction.” Chinese Trans-
lators Journal, no. 5: 40–5. (刘亚猛.韦努蒂的“翻译伦理”及其自我解构.《中国翻译》)
Liu, Yuli. 2011. Confucian Ethics: Unity of Rules and Virtues. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe.
(刘余莉.《儒家伦理学:规则与美德的统一》)
Liu, Yunhong. 2014. “Identity, Choice, and Responsibility: An Interpretation of Anthony Pym’s On Trans-
lator Ethics.” Chinese Translators Journal 35, no. 5: 18–23. (刘云虹.译者伦理:身份,选择,责任-皮姆《论
译者的伦理》解读.《中国翻译》)
Liu, Yunhong. 2019. “A Translator’s Choices and Insistency: Dutrait’s Translation of Contemporary Chi-
nese Literature.” Chinese Translators Journal 40, no. 4: 104–10. (刘云虹.翻译家的选择与坚守 – 杜特
莱译介中国当代文学之路.《中国翻译》)
Liu, Yunhong, and Xu Jun. 2016. “The Experience of the Foreign: An Interview on Translation Ethics.”
Journal of Foreign Languages 39, no. 2: 70–7. (刘云虹,许钧.异的考验 – 关于翻译伦理的对谈.《外
国语》)
Lü, Jun. 2001. Crossing the Cultural Barriers: Reconstruction of Babel. Nanjing: Southeast University Press. (吕
俊.《跨越文化障碍:巴别塔的重建》)
Luo, Xianfeng. 2012. “A Study of Translator Ethics in an Age of Postmodernism.” PhD diss., Hunan Nor-
mal University. (骆贤凤.后现代语境下的译者伦理研究.湖南师范大学)
Luo, Xinzhang, and Chen Yingnian, eds. [1984] 2009. An Anthology of Discourses on Translation, revised
edition. Beijing: The Commercial Press. (罗新璋,陈应年编.《翻译论集（修订本）》)
McDonough Dolmaya, Julie. 2011. “The Ethics of Crowdsourcing.” In Translation as a Social Activity, edited
by Minako O’Hagan, 97–110. Antwerp: Artesis University College Antwerp, Department of Transla-
tors & Interpreters.
Miao, Ju, and Ning Hailin. 2016. “On the Construction of Ethics System for Translation Services.” The
World of Translation, no. 1: 61–73. (苗菊,宁海霖.试论构建翻译行业伦理理论体系.《翻译界》)
Mu, Lei. 2018. “Explorations in the Development of Translations Studies as a Discipline.” Chinese Translators
Journal, no. 6: 9–11. (穆雷.翻译学学科建设的探索.《中国翻译》)
Mu, Lei. 2020. “The Status Quo and Problems in the Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) Pro-
grammes in China.” Chinese Translators Journal, no. 1: 87–96. (穆雷.我国翻译硕士专业学位现状与问
题 – 基于《翻译硕士专业学位发展报告》的分析研究.《中国翻译》)
Ni, Xiuhua倪秀华. 2011. “Nation-Building, Ideology and Translation: A Study of English Translations
of Chinese Literature in the First Seventeen Years of the PRC (1949–1966).” PhD diss., Hong Kong
Baptist University, Hong Kong.
Peng, Changjiang. 2007. “Faithfulness in Translating: Its Meaning, Presuppositions and Essence.” Journal
of PLA University of Foreign Languages 30, no. 6: 65–9. (彭长江.翻译的忠实:含义,预设与实质.《解
放军外国语学院学报》)
38
Peng, Ping. 2008. A Study of Traditional Chinese Translation Activities from the Perspective of Ethics. Beijing:
Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. (彭萍.《伦理视角下的中国传统翻译活动研究》)
Peng, Ping. 2012. Translational Ethics. Beijing: Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe. (彭萍.《翻译伦理学》)
Pym, Anthony. 2012. On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation between Cultures, a version of Pour Une
Ethique du Traduteur. Translated by Heike Walker, and revised and updated by the author. Amsterdam,
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ren, Dongsheng, and Zhang Yuling. 2016. “A Probe into Ethics in National Translation Programs.” Journal
of Chinese Ocean University, no. 1: 105–10. (任东升,张玉凌.国家翻译实践伦理探究.《中国海洋大
学学报（社会科学版）》)
Ren, Wen. 2010. The Liaison Interpreter’s Subjectivity Consciousness. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and
Research Press. (任文.《联络口译过程中译员的主体性意识研究》)
Ren, Wen. 2016. “On the Translation Ethics in a New Historical Context.” A Seminar at Sun Yat-Sen
University [Zhongshan University, Guangzhou], 4.11.2016. (任文.论新历史语境下的翻译伦理.中
山大学)
Ren, Wen. 2019. “Ethical Challenges Posed by and Ethical Principles Proposed for Machine Translation.”
Shanghai Journal of Translators, no. 5: 46–52. (任文.机器翻译伦理的挑战与导向.《上海翻译》)
Shen, Lianyun. 2008. “Respect for Difference: The Ethical Principle of Contemporary Translation Stud-
ies.” Chinese Translators Journal, no. 2: 16–9. (申连云.尊重差异 – 当代翻译研究的伦理观.《中国
翻译》)
Shen, Lianyun. 2010. “How to Translate: From ‘Manipulation’ to ‘Surrender’.” Journal of Foreign Languages
33, no. 2: 44–52. (申连云.怎么译 – 从“操控”到“投降”.《外国语》)
Shen, Lianyun. 2014. “From ‘Manipulation’ to ‘Surrender’: The Construction of Models of Transla-
tion Ethics in the Context of Globalization.” PhD diss., Nanjing Normal University. (申连云.从“操
控”到“投降” – 全球化背景下的翻译伦理模式构想.南京师范大学)
Shen, Lianyun. 2016. “Manipulationism and Capitulationism in Ethical Proposals for Translation Models.”
Journal of Foreign Languages 39, no. 2: 78–88. (申连云.翻译伦理模式研究中的操控论与投降论.《外
国语》)
Shen, Lianyun. 2018. A Study of Translation Ethics Model in the Context of Globalization. Hangzhou: Zhejiang
University Press. (申连云.《全球化背景下翻译伦理模式研究》)
Sun, Zhili. 2007. “The Translator’s Responsibilities.” Chinese Translators Journal, no. 4: 14–18. (孙致礼.译
者的职责.《中国翻译》)
Tan, Zaixi. 1999. “The Similarities between Chinese and Western Translation Theory.” Chinese Translators
Journal, no. 6: 25–8. (谭载喜.中西译论的相似性.《中国翻译》)
Tang, Jun. 2007a. “Ethics of Translation: Theoretical Considerations.” Journal of Foreign Languages 30, no.
4: 14–8. (汤君.翻译伦理的理论审视.《外国语》)
Tang, Jun. 2007b. “The Metalanguage of Translation: A Chinese Perspective.” Target 19, no. 2: 359–74.
Tao, Julia. 1998. “Confucianism.” In Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, edited by Ruth Chadwick, 597–608.
San Diego: Academic Press.
Translators Association of China [TAC]. 2019. “Code of Professional Ethics for Translators and Interpret-
ers.” November 9, Beijing. (中国翻译协会.译员职业道德准则与行为规范)
Tu, Binglan. 2013. A Study of the Translators’ Translation Ethics in Late Qing China (1898–1911). Changsha:
Hunan renmin chubanshe. (涂兵兰.《清末译者的翻译伦理研究（1898–1911）》)
van Wyke, Ben. 2010. “Ethics and Translation.” In Handbook of Translation Studies Volume 1, edited by Yves
Gambier, and Luc van Doorslaer, 111–5. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
van Wyke, Ben. 2013. “Translation and Ethics.” In Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Car-
men Millán, and Francesca Bartrina, 548–60. Abingdon: Routledge.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London, New York:
Routledge.
Wang, Dazhi. 2005. “Towards the Study of Translation Ethics.” Foreign Languages and Their Teaching, no. 12:
44–7. (王大智.关于展开翻译伦理研究的思考.《外语与外语教学》)
Wang, Dazhi. 2009. “Concept Analysis of ‘Ethics of Translating’.” Foreign Languages and Their Teaching, no.
12: 61–3. (王大智.“翻译伦理”概念试析.《外语与外语教学》)
Wang, Dazhi. 2012. La traduction et l’éthiqu du taduirer/Translation and Translating Ethics. Beijing: Peking
University Press. (王大智.《翻译与翻译伦理》)
Wang, Dongfeng. 2004. “The Deconstruction of ‘Fidelity’ and the Demythologization of Translation.”
Chinese Translators Journal, no. 6: 3–9. (王东风.解构“忠实” – 翻译神话的终结.《中国翻译》)
Wang, Haiming. 2004. Approaches to Ethics. Beijing: The Commercial Press. (王海明.《伦理学方法》)
39
Xin Guangqin
Wang, Hongyin. 2018. “Explication and Study of Traditional Chinese Translation Theories.” In Transla-
tion Studies in China since the Reform and Opening-Up (1978–2018), edited by Xu Jun, 96–131. Wuhan:
Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe. (王宏印.中国传统译论的阐发与研究.载许钧主编.《改革开放以来中国
翻译研究概论（1978–2018）》)
Wang, Huashu. 2017. “Coordinated Innovation and Regulated Development in Language Service.” Chi-
nese Translators Journal, no. 1: 85–8. (王华树.语言服务的协同创新与规范发展.《中国翻译》)
Wang, Jiayi, Li Defeng, and Li Liqing. 2018. “The Internet Translation in the Context of Big Data.” Chi-
nese Translators Journal, no. 2: 78–82. (王家义,李德凤,李丽青.大数据背景下的互联网翻译.《中国
翻译》)
Wang, Kefei, and Fan Shouyi王克非,范守义. 1999. “Translation in China: A Motivating Force.” Meta 44,
no. 1: 7–26.
Wang, Xiulu. 2016. “Translation Ethics again.” Shanghai Journal of Translators, no. 5: 13–7. (王岫庐.再谈
翻译伦理.《上海翻译》)
Wong, Lawrence Wang-chi. 2007. Xin, Da, Ya Reinterpreted: Translation Studies in Twentieth-Century China.
Beijing: Tsinghua University Press. (王宏志.《重释“信,达,雅” – 20世纪中国翻译研究》)
Weller, Shane. 2006. Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wu, Zhijie. 2008. “On the Ethical Properties of Translation.” In Inheritance and Innovation of Chinese Tra-
ditional Translation Theory, edited by Zhang Boran, Liu Huawen, and Zhang Sijie, 75–88. Shanghai:
Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. (吴志杰.试论翻译的伦理性.载张柏然,刘华文,张思洁
编.《中国译学:传承与创新》)
Wu, Zhijie. 2011. “Toward a Harmony-Promoting Theory of Translation.” Chinese Translators Journal 32,
no. 4: 5–13. (吴志杰.和合翻译研究刍议.《中国翻译》)
Wu, Zhijie, and Wang Yuping. 2008. “Translating with Cheng: On the Ethical Turn of Translation.” Nan-
jing Social Sciences, no. 8: 136–42. (吴志杰,王育平.以诚立译 – 论翻译的伦理学转向.《南京社会
科学》)
Xia, Dengshan. 2017. “A Reconsideration on the Views of Ancient Chinese Translation Movements.”
Foreign Languages in China, no. 5: 87–92. (夏登山.对中国古代翻译大潮的重新认识.《中国外语》)
Xie, Tianzhen. 2014. “On the Professionalisation Era of Translation.” East Journal of Translation, no. 2: 4–9.
(谢天振.论翻译的职业化时代.《东方翻译》)
Xie, Tianzhen. 2015. “Re-siting and Redefining Translation in a Changing Landscape: Notes on the
Theme of the International Translation Day 2015.” East Journal of Translation, no. 6: 4–8. (谢天振.翻译
巨变与翻译的重新定位与定义-从2015年国际翻译日主题谈起.《东方翻译》)
Xie, Tianzhen. 2018. “Sichuan Version of Teahouse: ‘Insights into the Introduction of Chinese Culture to
Foreign Readers’ through Translation.” East Journal of Translation, no. 1: 4–8. (谢天振.川味《茶馆》与
文化外译.《东方翻译》)
Xin, Guangqin辛广勤. 2017. “The Ethics of Reciprocity in Translation: The Development of a Cross-
Cultural Approach.” PhD diss., Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong.
Xu, Guangqi. [1631] 2009. “Lishu zongmu biao” [A Complete Rundown of Calendric Systems]. In An
Anthology of Discourses on Translation, revised edition, edited by Luo Xinzhang, and Chen Yingnian, 154.
Beijing: The Commercial Press. (徐光启.历书总目表.载罗新璋,陈应年编.《翻译论集》)
Xu, Hong. 2012. A Study of Translation Ethics of Difference: Under the Context of Literary Translation in China.
Shanghai: Shanghai yiwen chubanshe. (许宏.《翻译存异伦理研究 – 以中国的文学翻译为背景》)
Xu, Jun. 1997. “Far More Than a Word of ‘Fidelity’.” Translations, no. 1: 213–15. (许钧.怎一个“信”字
了得.《译林》)
Xu, Jun. 1998. “On the Three Levels of Translation Activity.” Foreign Language Teaching and Research, no. 3:
49–54. (许钧.论翻译活动的三个层面.《外语教学与研究》)
Yan, Fu. [1898] 2009. “Tianyanlun·Yiliyan” [Preface to Evolution and Ethics]. In An Anthology of Discourses
on Translation, revised edition, edited by Luo Xinzhang, and Chen Yingnian, 202–4. Beijing: The Com-
mercial Press. (严复.《天演论》译例言. 载罗新璋,陈应年编.《翻译论集》)
Yang, Zhenyuan. 2013. A Study on Translation Ethics. Shanghai: Shanghai yiwen chubanshe. (杨镇源.《翻
译伦理研究》)
Yu, Jiyuan 余纪元. 2007. The Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle. New York, London: Routledge.
Zeng, Ji. 2008. “The Changes of ‘Fidelity’: Poly-Positioning of Translation Ethics.” Foreign Languages
Research, no. 6: 79–83. (曾记. “忠实”的嬗变 – 翻译伦理的多元定位.《外语研究》)
Zhang, Boran, and Xin Hongjuan. 2016. Q and A on Translation Studies: New Observations and Thoughts.
Nanjing: Nanjing University Press. (张柏然,辛红娟.《译学研究叩问录 – 对当下译论研究的新观
察与新思考》)
40
Zhang, Dongmei. 2015. A Meta-Theoretical Study of the “Ought” of Translation. Changsha: Hunan renmin
chubanshe. (张冬梅.《翻译之“应该”的元理论研究》)
Zhang, Jinghua. 2009. Translation Ethics: An Investigation into Venuti’s Translation Theory. Shanghai: Shanghai
Jiaotong University Press. (张景华.《翻译伦理:韦努蒂翻译思想研究》)
Zhang, Sijie, and Li Guirong. 2008. “Reflections on the Translator’s Sincerity and the Way to Be Sincere.”
Journal of Foreign Languages 31, no. 2: 62–7. (张思洁,李贵荣.论译者之诚及致诚之道.《外国语》)
Zhang, Yan. 2004. “More Reflections on ‘Faithfulness’.” Tongji University Journal Social Science Section, no.
3: 108–12. (章艳. “忠”, “信”的旧论和新说.《同济大学学报（社会科学版）》)
Zhou, Lingshun. 2012. “The Name and Nature of Translation Variation: Some Queries to Theoretical
Studies on Translation Variations.” Foreign Languages Research, no. 1: 74–80. (周领顺. “变译”之名
与实.《外语研究》)
Zhu, Chaowei. 2010. “The Translator’s Duties: A Reading from the Ethics of Translation.” Foreign Language
and Literature, no. 6: 77–82. (祝朝伟.译者职责的翻译伦理解读. 《外国语文》)
Zhu, Chunshen朱纯深. 2018. “The Chinese Tradition of Translation Studies: Review, Reconstruction
and Modernisation.” In Routledge Handbook of Chinese Translation, edited by Chris Shei, and Zhao-Ming
Gao, 3–18. Abingdon, New York: Routledge.
Zhu, Guangqian. 1985. Tragic Psychology. Beijing: People’s Literature Press. (朱光潜.《悲剧心理学》)
Further reading
Confucius/Kongzi. 2008. The Analects/Lunyu. Translated by Yang Bojun (modern Chinese), D.C. Lau
(English). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. (孔子.《论语》.杨伯峻今译,刘殿爵英译)
A short and indispensable guide to Confucianism/Ruism.
Cheung, Martha, ed. 2006. An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome
Publishing.
An anthology of ancient Chinese discourse on translation, which connects the past to the present in
the Chinese context.
Xin, Guangqin. 2017. “The Ethics of Reciprocity in Translation: The Development of a Cross-Cultural
Approach.” PhD diss., Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong.
Unlike any other model of translation ethics, this volume attempts to develop a more sophisticated
paradigm based on Chinese and Western ethical insights and the latest understandings of translation.
Zhu, Chunshen. 2018. “The Chinese Tradition of Translation Studies: Review, Reconstruction and Mod-
ernisation.” In Routledge Handbook of Chinese Translation, edited by Chris Shei, and Zhao-Ming Gao,
3–18. Abingdon, New York: Routledge.
A lucid and sophisticated introduction to the Chinese tradition of translation studies.
41
4
Ethics in socialist
translation theories
Brian James Baer and Christina Schäffner
1 Introduction
Translation and interpreting have been objects of research for a very long time. Over that time,
Translation Studies has developed into a discipline investigating translation as a situated practice
(e.g. Risku 2010), as a cultural-political practice (e.g. Venuti 1995), or as a socially regulated
activity (e.g. Wolf and Fukari 2007). Earlier theories developed in the 1960s/1970s which
defined translation as an “interlinguistic transfer procedure” (Delisle, Lee-Jahnke, and Cormier
1999, 188) hardly reflected on the role of the translator beyond that of an invisible transcoder of
meanings. More recent theories focus on translators as visible and engaged interventionists and as
responsible social agents in the translational field, respectively. Perceptions of the role of transla-
tors are therefore different depending on the theoretical approach and the conceptualization of
translation informing them. Role perceptions are closely linked to aspects of professionalism and
to ethics. In this chapter, we will illustrate how the ethics of the translator’s role was conceived
in socialist or socialist-informed theories of translation, focusing mainly on scholarly publica-
tions from Eastern Europe from the founding of the Soviet state in 1917 to the end of the Cold
War around 1990, in particular, from the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic.
After contextualizing socialist translation theories in their historical and political contexts, we
will provide a brief overview of the emergence of a socialist translation ethics. The next sec-
tion will discuss some core issues and topics, in particular, Marxism/Leninism as the basis of
translation theory, the ethical profile of a socialist translator/interpreter, and the consequences
of this particular view of translation ethics for translator training and translation practice. It will
conclude with a reflection on some new, emerging issues and their implications for the discipline
of Translation Studies.
2 Researching socialist translation ethics

In order to fully understand what role ethics played in socialist translation theories, these
theories need to be contextualized in their historical and political environment. In the Soviet
Union, translation assumed a very visible place in cultural politics shortly after the Octo-
ber Revolution, with the first theoretical writings on translation appearing already in 1919
42
Ethics in socialist translation theories
(Chukovskii and Gumilev 1919) and continuing throughout the Soviet period. Those theories
were shaped by a political system that was increasingly centralized and top-down and that saw
translation as an important component of the regime’s domestic and foreign policy. That cen-
tralization is evident in the promotion of Socialist Realism as the dominant approach in all fields
of Soviet culture and in the establishment in 1934 of the Soviet Union of Writers, in which
translators were full members from the very beginning.
In Soviet culture, translation was seen as a symbol of communist internationalism and as a
vehicle of soft diplomacy. It also had a role to play internally, fostering cultural understanding
among the various Soviet peoples and supporting state-sponsored efforts to promote literacy.
The importance of translation was reflected in an enormous investment of capital and labour,
beginning in 1918 with the founding of the publishing house World Literature, dedicated to
producing high-quality translations of the great works of world literature for Soviet readers.
The ambitious publishing goals set by World Literature, however, faced an immediate problem:
where to find a sufficient number of translators to achieve their goals and how to turn people
with the necessary language proficiency into professional translators. And so, the founder of
World Literature, the writer Maxim Gorky, instructed the translator Kornei Chukovsky “to
provide professional development to these ‘gray masses,’ to raise their literary and intellectual
level and to instil in them a heightened sense of responsibility” (Chukovskii 1967, 137).1 This
led to the creation of what is perhaps the first modern work of translation theory, Принципы
художественного перевода [Principles of Literary Translation] (1919), co-authored by Chu-
kovsky and the poet Lev Gumilev. (An expanded edition appeared in 1920, with a third co-
author, Fiodor Batiushkov, who wrote about the translation of drama and introduced the term
адекватность, or “complete correspondence.”) Therefore, before any explicit discussion of eth-
ics, let alone the formulation of a code of ethics, there were attempts to “professionalize” the
work of translators and articulate a notion of the translator’s rights and responsibilities. In Prin-
ciples, Chukovsky argues that translators should only accept to translate the work of authors
with whom they are stylistically compatible. At the same time, Chukovsky describes the task
of the translator as highly creative, and places the translator on an equal footing with the source
text author, presenting the translator as the “co-creator of the artistic work of the author he is
translating” (Chukovskii 1919, 7).2
Granting such creative freedom to the translator would become increasingly suspect as Stalin
consolidated power toward the end of the 1920s and attempted to control artistic production
through the doctrine of Socialist Realism. And so, in his 1930 Искусство перевода [The Art
of Translation], co-authored with Andrei Fedorov, Chukovsky, who was under increasing sus-
picion from the regime, would rein in his notion of the translator’s creative freedom, making
the translator clearly subordinate to the source text author. The translator, Chukovsky writes,
must work toward “the diminishing [umalenie] of his talent, the reduction of his lichnost’ [creative
personality or identity]” in order to do justice to the source text (Chukovskii 1930, 24). Failure
to do so, Chukovsky argues, results in grotesque and politically suspect distortions, which he
describes in a chapter provocatively titled “The Translator as Enemy.”
Chukovsky’s single-authored Искусство перевода [The Art of Translation] of 1936 reflected
the new orientation in Soviet culture toward domestic policy as consolidated in the notion of
“friendship of peoples.” Chukovsky acknowledged this reorientation by focusing more attention
on translations of the literatures of the various Soviet peoples and by insisting on the enormous
importance of translation in Soviet society: “The question of literary translation in our country,
the USSR – is an affair of great state importance in which millions of people have a deep inter-
est” (Chukovskii 1936, 6). Hence, the heavy responsibility that lay on the shoulders of the Soviet
translator. Incidentally, the word ethics was not used in Soviet writings on translation; ethical
43
concerns were typically discussed in relation to the responsibilities of Soviet translators, which
were elaborated in terms of guiding principles rather than codes.
Another theoretical school developed in the Stalinist period led by Ivan Kashkin, the popu-
lar translator of American literature – the works of Hemingway, in particular. Known as “real-
ist” translation, this theory construed translators’ ethics as fidelity to the underlying reality being
portrayed (Kashkin 1954). By placing content firmly above form, this approach avoided the
charge of literary formalism, or excessive attention to form and formal experimentation, which
was viciously condemned by the regime as a sign of bourgeois individualism. It also tacitly con-
doned translatorial interventions in order to align a given text with a socialist understanding of
reality. At about the same time, Andrei Fedorov (1953) was formulating his ideas regarding the
responsibilities of Soviet translators, which he elaborated in a set of four guiding principles:
(1) the translator must possess partiinost’, meaning “party spirit” or “partisanship”; (2) the trans-
lator must not make any arbitrary additions or omissions; (3) the translation must be truthful;
and (4) the poet-translator must pay close attention to the linguistic and stylistic qualities of the
original (90). On a more general level, Fedorov characterized the ethical stance of the Soviet
translator as one of optimism over the possibility of providing a fully adequate translation of
both the form and content of the original, which he contrasted to the pessimism of Western
translation theory, with its obsession over untranslatability (24–27).
After the Second World War, two opposing camps developed among scholars theorizing
about translation, an opposition that was based largely on whether a scholar’s background was in
literature or linguistics. Scholars working in literature emphasized the radical subjectivity of the
translator’s task, especially with regard to poetic translation, with Efim Etkind describing transla-
tions as “an act of love” and with Samuil Marshak describing every successful verse translation
as “a miracle” (see Baer 2016). Scholars in this camp, such as Ilya Sermon, Efim Etkind, and
Iurii Levin, were also deeply interested in translation history and highlighted shifting translation
paradigms and the contribution of individual translators. Scholars working in linguistics, on the
other hand, sought “objective” criteria on which to base the translator’s decision-making, such
as regularly occurring stylistic patterns (e.g. Retsker 1963). This linguistics-based approach is
described today as the Linguistic Theory of Translation, which remains the dominant theoretical
approach in Russia (see Dmitrienko 2015).
Later work by scholars in the linguistics camp, such as Fedorov, Barchudarov, Komissarov,
Kolshansky, Sveitser, and others, may also be linked to the effect of Stalin’s 1950 rejection of the
linguistic theories of Nikolai Marr, which the leader had previously championed. Marr believed
that standard languages were bourgeois and that the languages of the Soviet peoples, through
the cooperation and friendship engendered by socialism, would eventually merge and a general
Soviet culture would form. The rejection of Marr’s theories marked the theoretical (and politi-
cal) acceptance that linguistic and cultural differences among nations were likely to endure, as
would translation, inaugurating new interest in comparative linguistics and comparative gram-
mar. (See Fedorov’s 1953 Введение в теорию перевода [Introduction to Translation Theory]).
The theories that were developed by Soviet scholars after World War II also had an impact on
the development of translation theories and concepts of translation in other socialist countries.
In the post-war period until the fall of the Soviet Union, Eastern European countries formed a
bloc under the Warsaw Pact that was led by the Soviet Union; this bloc was united by a planned
economic system, and Marxism/Leninism was the dominant ideology in all spheres of life. It
was argued that this was the epoch of the transition from capitalism to socialism/communism,
which was characterized by a class struggle between socialism and imperialism. For translation
practice, this meant that the choice of texts and languages was also conditioned by the political
situation. The literature of other communist states, along with the classic works of Marx, Engels,
44
and Lenin, as well as the documents of the various congresses of the communist parties were
translated into all the languages of the bloc countries. Publishing houses were nationalized and
financed by the state, and censorship was instituted, although it was not officially referred to as
such. Translation theory was perceived as embedded in and determined by the communist ideol-
ogy of Marxism/Leninism in general and by official views on linguistics in particular. Moreover,
in the Warsaw Pact countries, Soviet scholarship was influential in guiding the research of schol-
ars, and it was often a requirement to include reviews of literature by Soviet scholars in publica-
tions. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), theoretical reflections on translation, which
were deeply informed by Soviet translation scholars such as Fedorov, began to be published in
the 1960s by scholars such as Otto Kade, Gert Jäger, and Albrecht Neubert. Since they were all
working at the University of Leipzig, their theoretical reflections have often been referred to
collectively as the “Leipzig School” of Translation Studies, although this was never a uniform
approach to translation (see e.g. Schäffner 2003; Wotjak 2000, 2007; Fleischmann 2007).
Although there are similarities in the translation theories developed in Eastern European
countries, there are also differences, due to their individual traditions and historical develop-
ments (see the entries for Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, and Slovak
traditions in the second edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (Baker and
Saldanha 2009) and the contributions to Translation Theories in the Slavic Countries (Ceccherelli,
Costantino, and Diddi 2015). We are not, therefore, treating the East European countries as a
monolithic bloc. Moreover, there were significant differences within the confines of the indi-
vidual states. In respect to the history of Slavic translation research, Costantino (2015) describes
it as “includ[ing] a multiplicity of approaches, local developments and directions in research,
some of which developed in isolation, others as a result of joint efforts” (19). The same can
be said about Eastern European countries in general. This also means that the label “socialist”
theories may not be the most appropriate one. Differences are not only linked to the different
approaches to socialism in these countries but also to different developments in the cultural and
academic spheres. For example, while literary formalism deeply influenced translation theory
in the Soviet Union, Czech and Slovak structuralism, dating back to the first half of the 20th
century, informed the development of translation theory in Czechoslovakia, specifically in the
work of Jiří Levý in the 1950s/1960s and of Anton Popovic in the 1960s/1970s (see Jettmarová
2015). In Bulgaria, the work of Aleksandǎr Ljudskanov, who developed a comprehensive semi-
otic theory of translation and also focused on machine translation, was highly influential. That
being said, there were also differences within countries. In Yugoslavia, for example, the Serbs
and Croats produced some theoretical reflections on translation (e.g. Sibinović 1979; Bugarski
1981; Ivir 1978) while Slovene reflection on translation was characterized by “the absence of a
fully-fledged theory” (Ožbot 2015, 205). Nevertheless, one can trace commonalities across the
Eastern European countries in that translation was approached from both a linguistic and a liter-
ary perspective. There was also a common interest in a scientific orientation, which led to the
adoption of linguistics as the primary framework for translation theory in the 1960s, explicitly
reflected, for example, in the label “Translationslinguistik” (literally: translational linguistics)
introduced by Jäger (1975).
Until the 1980s, linguistics-oriented translation theories were very much linked to the con-
cept of equivalence. Scholars in several countries agreed that a major task of translation theory
was to determine relationships of equivalence between languages and to establish objective
criteria as the basis for the translator’s decision-making, which informed both translator train-
ing and translational practice. International conferences were organized in Eastern Europe to
provide a platform for scholarly exchange, e.g. the conferences “Grundlagen der Ubersetzungs-
wissenschaft” (Foundations of Translation Theory), which were held every five years at the
45
University of Leipzig. Until the 1980s, the majority of participants at these conferences came
from Eastern European countries. The focus on equivalence is evident in the theme of the
international conference held in Leipzig in 1970: “Invariance and Transferability, Modelling the
Translation Process.” A volume of selected papers included contributions by Kolshansky from
the Soviet Union, Ljudskanov from Bulgaria, and Filipec and Sgall from Czechoslovakia, all
addressing issues of equivalence and seeking to establish systematic relations between languages
(Neubert and Kade 1973). Another publication of 1983 (Jäger and Neubert 1983) included
selected papers from the international conference “Meaning, Text, and Translation,” which was
held in Leipzig in 1981. The proceedings included contributions by Sgall on semantics and
pragmatics as two distinct aspects of meaning, and by Ivir from Croatia on the causes of seman-
tic shifts in translation. A joint publication by scholars from Leipzig and Moscow (Jäger and
Neubert 1982) was intended to document their fruitful cooperation. The title of this volume
was Equivalence in Translation, and it contained contributions from the Soviet scholars Kolshan-
sky, Shveitser, Barchudarov, and Komissarov. The scholarly exchange among the Eastern bloc
countries was also reflected in the translation of some key publications. For example, Levý’s
1963 Uměni překladu [The Art of Translation] was translated into German Die literarische Überset-
zung. Theorie einer Kunstgattung (Levý 1969) into Russian as Искусство перевода (Levyi 1974),
and into Serbo-Croatian as Umjetnost prevođenja (Levi 1982). Popovic’s 1975 monograph Teória
umeleckého prekladu [Theory of Literary Translation] was translated into Hungarian, Russian, and
Serbo-Croatian, and Barkhudarov’s Iazyk i perevod (1975) and Ljudskanov’s Preveždat čovekǎt i
mašinata (1968) were translated into German as Sprache und Übersetzung (1979) and Mensch und
Maschine als Übersetzer (1972), respectively.
Although equivalence was a key notion during these decades, the development of translation
theories was not narrowly based on structural linguistics but included aspects of communication
studies (already in Kade 1968), pragmatics, text-linguistics, and semiotics as well. Moreover,
some key concepts were defined differently. As Jettmarová (2015, 94) argues, because the Czech
tradition was based on the semiotic theory of function, its understanding of translation equiva-
lence was quite different from that outlined in some linguistics-based translation theories in the
Soviet Union and the GDR. In equivalence-based theories, a translation had to reflect fidelity
to the underlying reality being portrayed, as proposed by Kashkin in 1954 (see earlier). The
translator as an actor or an active agent, however, was not yet explicitly addressed or empirically
researched in socialist regimes. The translator was seen as subordinate to the source text author.
What was expected of a translator, then, was to reproduce the content (message) of the source
text faithfully, although in line with the principle of socialist partisanship (discussed later).
Moreover, aspects of translators’ ethics were not explicitly addressed as ethics in the publica-
tions of “socialist” scholars produced between 1918 and 1990. Rather, they were implied in
reflections on translators’ responsibilities and professional profiles. Some of the core issues and
topics which thus relate to ethics will be addressed in the next section.

While there was much discussion of translators’ “responsibility” in the Soviet Union, no explicit
codes of ethics were produced during the Soviet period. Since 1920, all professional organiza-
tions in the field of “artistic production” were under the control of the People’s Commissariat
for Education, or Narkompros. As for translation, the only regulating body was the Writers’
Union, which had a special section for translators. As full members of the Writers’ Union, Soviet
translators were expected to comply with its charter, which basically required that all members
advance Socialist Realism, defined as demanding “a true, historically-specific representation
46
of reality and of it revolutionary development” (Iudin 1934, 26). As Katerina Clark (1981) has
noted, the doctrine of Socialist Realism was implemented through exemplars or models rather
than through a detailed elaboration of its precepts and characteristics, hence the absence of an
explicit code of ethics, along with the assumption that Soviet norms would naturally be ethical.
In addition to the common focus on linguistic and communicative aspects of translation in the
1960s through the early 1980s, Translation Studies scholars in Eastern Europe regularly referred to
Marxism/Leninism as the basis for translation theory, although to a different degree in the respec-
tive countries. This element was especially strong in publications of the GDR, and the following
arguments will therefore focus on the writings of GDR scholars. Their theoretical reflections often
dealt with both translation and interpreting as two modes that in German publications were com-
bined under the cover term “Sprachmittlung,” literally, language mediation (e.g. Kade 1980). It was
argued that since language mediation fulfils a function in social communication, it is itself a social
phenomenon. As a social activity, language mediation is determined by the social forces whose
interests it serves. As a consequence, language mediation has a class-based nature; it is a class-bound
and ideology-dependent phenomenon of social communication (e.g. Kade 1973, 1977, 1980).
This view of translation was then systematically related to the principle of party spirit or par-
tisanship (Parteilichkeit in German publications). It is this concept of partisanship that most closely
relates to ethics, more specifically to the profile of the “socialist language mediator.” The con-
cept of Parteilichkeit denotes a specific political and ideological commitment, attitude, or stance
(e.g. Kade 1966; also Fleischmann 2007; Schäffner 2017). For language mediators in socialist
countries, this includes an affirmation of the social system. A socialist translator thus serves the
interests of his/her people and should rely on a genuinely scientific worldview founded on the
precepts of Marxism/Leninism to ensure a proper and successful translation (an argument also
put forward by Fedorov 1953, 21). Or in the words of Kade (1980):
Er muß in der Lage sein, die objektiven Bewertungsmaßstäbe, die zum Wesen der marxistisch-
leninistischen Parteilichkeit gehören, subjektiv richtig anzuwenden, und dies setzt einen marxistisch-
leninistischen Klassenstandpunkt als persönliche Überzeugung, aber auch marxistisch-leninistische
Bildung voraus.
(38)
[The language mediator must be able to apply in a subjectively correct way the objective
criteria of evaluation which belong to the nature of Marxist-Leninist Parteilichkeit, and this
presupposes both a Marxist-Leninist class position as personal conviction and Marxist-
Leninist education.]
That is, objectivity can only be ensured if a translator assesses the communicative context from
the position of the working class, which, according to Marxism/Leninism, was the “correct” one.
Since the theoretical description of language mediation included the view that language
mediation reflects class interests, the profession of the language mediator was subsequently seen
as a political task (e.g. Jäger 1977, 14). The characteristics of the profile of the socialist language
mediator listed later (see Schäffner 2017, 417) have been collated mainly from editorials in
academic and professional journals, textbooks (e.g. Jäger and Dalitz 1984; Salvesky 1979), and
official documents from the GDR. The socialist language mediator:
• represents his/her socialist country and thus socialism;

• is trained and educated on the basis of the ideals and the policy of socialist society (i.e. on
the basis of Marxism-Leninism as the ideology of the working class);
47
• has high qualifications, extensive knowledge, and well-developed skills (further specified as
knowledge of languages and of the relationships of equivalence between them; knowledge
of the scientific basis of translation; knowledge of the two cultures; subject-specific knowl-
edge; technical skills);
• has an excellent professional ethos, i.e. a sense of responsibility, a zeal for work, reliability,
honesty, conscientiousness, discretion, modesty, and tactfulness;
• can translate objectively and in line with the historical truth (parteilich) and act in confor-
mity with the ideology of the Communist Party.
Such views and expectations regarding professional ethics had consequences for translator
training in the socialist countries. Translator training as a political task required planning, and
like all other activities in the socialist countries, it was subject to fve-year economic plans.
This planning included where students would be trained, how many to admit, in which
languages, the number of teachers needed, and the content of the programmes. In view of
the political nature of the task, a very signifcant admission criterion in the GDR was the
social background and the ideological positioning of the students. The same argument was
true in the Soviet Union, where “access to the profession required both high professional
competence and ideological reliability” (Salmon 2015, 50). In the GDR, applicants from a
working-class background had a much higher chance of being accepted than children of the
intelligentsia. Close family contacts with the “West” normally made acceptance impossible,
and applicants were often asked during aptitude tests whether they would be willing to forgo
such contacts in order to demonstrate their political loyalty to the communist system and
the state.
Regarding the notion of Parteilichkeit, students often found it difficult to understand what
exactly this meant for their actual work. Lecturers too often struggled to explain this concept
and its implications for the students. Such conflicts were particularly obvious in respect of
ideologically sensitive topics (e.g. the division of Germany, freedom of speech), proper names
(e.g. in the official discourse of the GDR, East Berlin was called “Berlin, capital of the GDR”),
and labels for specific phenomena (e.g. the Berlin wall was officially called the “state border”).
Debates were normally initiated by the students who would ask, for example, “What shall I
do in an interpreting situation if a speaker says Soviet Zone instead of GDR; or Berlin wall?”
These questions reflected insecurity and fear on the students’ part. In answering, lecturers
would normally resort to a simple “translate/interpret in accordance with the source message/
source text.” That is, if a speaker says “Berlin wall,” it should be rendered literally so that the
other communicative partner can see the ideological position of his/her counterpart and react
accordingly, e.g. by pointing out that “wall” is not an appropriate label. Such strategies would
be easier to handle in an interpreting context since here the interpreter is a direct communica-
tive participant and so is – along with the source utterance – more visible and active (in contrast
to a translator); therefore, they can influence the communicative exchange and the wording
(e.g. in negotiations).
Another problematic issue was the requirement that translators and interpreters represent
their country and thus socialism. In addition to dealing with ideologically sensitive topics and/
or labels, interpreters in particular were openly encouraged to act as political agitators, especially
when they were employed as escorts for a visitor or a delegation, where they would have con-
tacts beyond their formal interpreting tasks. It was argued that since foreigners often get their
first personal impression of the socialist country through an interpreter, a poorly performing
interpreter could cause political and economic damage. It was thus required for an interpreter
to demonstrate in any personal communication with foreign visitors that they were a worthy
48
representative of the socialist state, aligning themselves with (the policy and ideology of) the
state and thus using every opportunity to present a realistic image of the respective socialist
country. Training manuals also pointed out that if the original message or its intended effect was
not compatible with the political-ideological position of the translator/interpreter, they could
distance themselves in a suitable way, e.g. with a personal comment, or, as a last resort, by refus-
ing the job (Salevsky 1979, 11). Interestingly, incompatibility of political-ideological positions
was assumed only if the speaker was not from a socialist country. Such discussions about the
ideological stance and responsibility of translators and interpreters, however, were not normally
related directly to the notion of ethics.
Ethical aspects of translation and interpreting were also relevant to professional associations
in socialist countries. In the GDR, for example, the Vereinigung der Sprachmittler (VdS), literally
Association of Language Mediators, was established as an independent association in 1971, but
was still affiliated with the Association of Journalists (Vereinigung der Journalisten, VdJ); it had been
the Interpreters and Translators section within the VdJ from 1962 till 1971. Such professional
associations would organize regular meetings of their members, normally on a regional basis.
These meetings served the purpose of providing professional development (e.g. information on
terminology, new research) as well as ideological education (e.g. discussions of targets to support
the advancement of socialist society). Although the development of a socialist professional ethos
(sozialistisches Berufsethos, e.g. Misslitz and Noffke 1979, 5) was included in the tasks of the VdS,
ethics was not explicitly addressed; it was rather implied in the notion of the socialist profile of
the translator/interpreter. The political role of the VdS was explicitly expressed in the formula-
tion of its aims and tasks in its 1986 bylaws:
Ihre Hauptaufgabe besteht in der politisch-ideologischen und fachlichen Weiterbildung ihrer Mitglieder.
Sie organisiert den politischen und fachlichen Erfahrungsaustausch und fördert nach Kräften das enge
Zusammenwirken von Theorie und Praxis der Sprachmittlung. Sie hilft den Sprachmittlern, die aktu-
ellen Probleme bei der weiteren Gestaltung der entwickelten sozialistischen Gesellschaft in der DDR
zu erkennen und an ihrer Lösung mitzuwirken.
(VdS 1986, 2)
[Its main task is the political-ideological and subject-specific further education of its
members. It organises the political and subject-specific exchange of experience and
vigorously promotes close interaction between the theory and practice of language
mediation. It helps language mediators to recognize the current problems in the fur-
ther shaping of the advanced socialist society in the GDR and to contribute to their
resolution.]
Other examples of declarations of an explicit political nature can be found in the editorials of
the journal Fremdsprachen, the journal for translators and interpreters. These editorials stressed
the political role of translators in the GDR and expressed their full support for the Communist
Party. One example of such an editorial, written before the XIth Congress of the Communist
Party of East Germany (the SED, Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, Socialist Unity Party
of Germany), should sufce:
Die Sprachmittler unseres Landes stehen auf der Seite von Frieden und Fortschritt. Sie werden durch
gute Arbeitstaten unsere Republik weiter stärken und damit einen ehrenvollen Beitrag zur Vorberei-
tung des XI. Parteitages der SED im April 1986 leisten.
(Fremdsprachen 2/1985, 76)
49
[The language mediators of our country support peace and progress. Through good work
they will strengthen our republic further and thus make an honourable contribution to the
preparations for the XIth party congress of the SED to be held in April 1986.]
The professional organizations of the socialist countries had close contacts and organized joint
training sessions and workshops (see e.g. Salevsky and Schmitz 1986). For example, the Bulgar-
ian Translators’ Union organized annual meetings of Bulgarian and Soviet translators. The VdS
became a full member of the Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT) in 1981, and had
a representative elected to the FIT Council in 1984. In reports on the FIT world congresses in
the GDR’s professional journals, it was pointed out that all recommendations put forward by
FIT had already become a reality in the GDR (e.g. Schubert 1984). Professional associations
of other socialist countries were also members of FIT before the political changes that took
place around 1990. For example, the Yugoslav Society of Translators’ Associations had become
a member of FIT in 1961. Some of these national associations had also started as sections of
their respective Writers’ Union (e.g. in Poland, Romania, Hungary). Representatives of socialist
countries played a signifcant role in FIT. For example, the Bulgarian translation scholar Anna
Lilova was elected FIT president in 1979 (and served in this role until 1990), and FIT’s journal
Babel was published in Budapest (Hungary) from 1977 to 1988 with György Radó serving as
editor in chief for 14 years in the 1970s/1980s. To what extent translation associations from
socialist countries infuenced the themes and the programme of FIT’s World Congresses (e.g.
the theme “Translators and Their Position in Society” of the 10th Congress held in Vienna in
1984), and to what extent their membership in FIT infuenced debates on professional ethics in
the socialist countries themselves, remains to be investigated. An interesting case study would
be Bulgaria. The Bulgarian Translators’ Union (BTU) was founded in 1974 and had translated
FIT’s Translator’s Charter into Bulgarian already in 1976. Anna Lilova, in her role as FIT presi-
dent, was a great asset to BTU. She was also the wife of the second highest-ranking ofcial in
the Bulgarian Communist Party, which gave her access to resources (material and personnel) that
were not readily available to individual translators. The political changes of the late 1980s led to
the establishment in January of 1990 of BTU’s Club for Democracy as a generator of ideas and
initiatives to accelerate democratic change in the association. In April of 1990, the BTU General
Assembly endorsed and introduced amendments to BTU’s statutes in line with the changes tak-
ing place in the country. However, in 2003, the BTU discontinued its membership in FIT due
to a lack of fnancial resources, although its full membership was restored in 2009.

Explicit discussion of ethics began only after the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of
its regulatory bodies, resulting in the relative autonomy of various professional fields, translation
and interpreting among them. We will address the first initiatives to develop codes of ethics,
with a particular focus on Russia, and then some theoretical and evaluative reflections on ethics
in socialist translation theories.
With the fall of the Soviet system of centralized planning, most translators were no longer
state employees; they were now independent professionals who had to find their way in a newly
unregulated market economy. This resulted in a shift in translation and interpreting discourse
from translation to translators. This shift is evident when one compares two influential Russian
translation manuals: one by Komissarov (1990) and the other by Alekseeva (2004). While the
former discusses only norms of translation, the latter includes a chapter on translator ethics and
the norms of professional conduct (2004, 39). Moreover, translator ethics appears to be a topic
50
of increasing interest among students, translation scholars, as well as for other players in the field
(see Khamatova 2011; Parshina 2017; Elin and Kostina 2013).
Unlike the Soviet Union, contemporary Russia does not ban professional associations, and
the associations that have emerged appear to follow the example of Western associations and
have sought to integrate themselves into the global translation community. The Union of Rus-
sian Translators was founded in 1991 and became a full member of FIT in 1993 (Alekseeva
2004, 41). The Union of Russian Translators does not, however, have a monopoly on translator
ethics. A collaborative project launched by various translation agencies and freelance translators
in Russia and Kazakhstan resulted in The Ethical Code of Translators (http://translation-ethics.ru/
code/), The purpose of which is
to define the norms and rules of behaviour for members of the translation community (or,
more broadly, participants in the translation market) while performing professional activi-
ties, founded on moral-ethical values and professional standards. Failure to observe these
ethical principles can serve as the basis for the moral censure of violators.
The professional principles elaborated in the code are similar to those in other professional
organizations:
work within the limits of your competence; do not accept conditions that do not allow
you to complete the commission in the necessary way; objectivity and independence;
conscientiousness; respect copyright; avoid conflicts of interest; international practice and
legislation of the Russian Federation; the right of refusal; professional development; and
confidentiality.
Finally, different translation agencies or local associations of translators have developed their own
codes of ethics and professional conduct.
As with the former Soviet Republics, the former socialist bloc countries adapted their profes-
sional associations and codes to the new political and economic circumstances and/or established
new associations, e.g. in Romania, the Professional Union of Interpreters and Translators was
founded in 1990. For the GDR, German unification meant that the VdS initially continued
under the new name Verband der Dolmetscher und Übersetzer e.V. (Association of Interpreters and
Translators) which, however, was dissolved in 2017. Its members were offered easier access to
the Bundesverband der Dolmetscher und Übersetzer (BDU), the professional association of West
Germany, which had been in existence since 1955. Some of the former GDR translators and
interpreters made use of this offer or joined other professional associations in Germany. For those
who did join the BDU, its Code of Professional Conduct became their point of reference. The
code (Berufs- und Ehrenordnung) focuses on quality and interpersonal relations but is free from any
overt ideological requirements such as acting on the basis of a specific ideology.
Regarding theoretical reflections and critical evaluation of the notion of ethics in socialist
translation theories, however, there is a marked dearth of publications. It may be that, especially
in the 1990s, scholars in Eastern Europe were busy catching up with the latest research now that
the fall of the Iron Curtain had given them access to both the literature produced in “the West”
and to the international academic community. It could also be that they wanted to distance
themselves from “old” ideology-laden theories. Whatever the reasons may be, a critical engage-
ment with theoretical reflections, specific (definitions of) concepts, or avoidance of concepts
in socialist countries would contribute to our understanding of the development of Translation
Studies worldwide. One example of such critical reflection is Fleischmann’s engagement with
51
the notion of Parteilichkeit in the “Leipzig School.” As Fleischmann argues, making partisan-
ship a constitutive feature of GDR translation studies and an object of research illustrates how
closely a wider scholarly perspective was linked to a doctrinaire way of thinking (Fleischmann
2007, 101). More research into translation policies in the former socialist countries (also going
beyond Europe to include, for example, Cuba and China) could also enhance our understanding
of socialist ethics. One example is Thomson-Wohlgemuth (2009) who, from a wider socio-
political perspective, illustrates the effects of ideology on the translation of children’s literature
in the GDR.
In addition to retrospective conceptual or theoretical research, more concrete empirical
research is needed to provide a clearer understanding of the actual working conditions of
all translators and interpreters and their status (for some initial work on the GDR, see Berg
2012, and specifically for literary translators in the GDR, see Kerstner and Risku 2014; on
literary translators in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia, see Sherry 2015 and Kamovnikova
2019). It would be interesting to find out more about their cooperation with editors and
literary agents, or, in the case of non-literary translators, about their interaction with other
translators, revisers, and clients in their respective contexts (e.g. in the state-owned transla-
tion companies or translation departments of companies). How did they reflect on their role
and their professional ethics? Did the requirement for an ideological commitment indeed
impact the actual practice? Did translators behave in line with the imposed ideology? With
respect to the Soviet Union, Salmon (2015, 33) argues, “all translators considered their job
to be a ‘national contribution,’ a matter of social involvement.” But is this really true? Was
Marxism/Leninism really their own personal conviction? Or did they submit more or less
voluntarily to the imposed ideology? More research is therefore required to determine the
actual motivations for the shifts identified in translations that aligned them with the dominant
ideology. Were they the result of a translator’s commitment to the communist ideology, or
rather an act of self-censorship or censorship by editors or other authorities (these options
are also addressed in Pokorn 2012 in respect to the translation of children’s literature in the
countries of the former Yugoslavia)?
Additional questions for future research might include: was there scope for resistance and
for subversive or dissident translation and/or interpreting? Did this happen? Did dissident or
oppositional groups of translators exist and what did they think of their professional ethics?
Was subversive and non-normative behaviour a form of empowerment? Other interesting
material for a translation history focusing on ethics could be gathered by researching the
changes in the translation policies and practices and in the status of translators after the end
of the Cold War (see e.g. Pokorn 2012 for post-communist Slovenia). This could be done
by conducting archival research and by carrying out interviews with professional transla-
tors and interpreters and with trainers and scholars who have first-hand experience of these
periods. Kamovnikova (2019) is a good example of such scholarship; her monograph, based
on numerous interviews with Soviet translators and editors, sheds important light on how
individual translators under communism negotiated their professional ethics, often on a case-
by-case basis.
There is also work to be done in documenting the ethical positioning of translators and inter-
preters in socialist states by analyzing the many autobiographies of translators and interpreters
from the Soviet and Soviet bloc countries that were published after the fall of the Soviet Union,
as well as the documentary films that have emerged more recently, such as Vadim Jendreyko’s
film Die Frau mit den 5 Elefanten [The Woman with Five Elephants] (2009) about the German
translator Svetlana Geier and Oleg Dorman’s Postrochnik [The Interlinear Trot] (2009) about the
Soviet translator Lilianna Lungina (see Baer 2018).
52
5 Conclusion
In this chapter, we have illustrated how the development of translation theories is shaped by
political and ideological factors. This had consequences for the understanding of professional
ethics as the role of socialist translators was presented as a political task that was expected to serve
the interests of the working class and the socialist state. We also illustrated how such perceptions
influenced translator training and the work of professional associations. We noted, however, that
reflections on ethics (as part of socialist translation theories, or in publications of professional
associations, or in statements by individual translators) are more complex and more diverse than
one might expect. In both the theoretical literature and professional practice in the GDR, for
example, the focus on the translator’s ideological commitment seems to have been much stronger
than in other socialist countries. Other countries (notably Yugoslavia but also Hungary and Bul-
garia) had a much more open attitude toward the Western world. A major reason for the higher
degree of ideologization in the GDR may be seen in the history of the country (i.e. the division
of Germany after the Second World War) and its geographic location, sharing a border with
West Germany. It may well be that these political factors were more important for incorporating
the issue of partisanship as an element of a socialist translation theory than Marxist epistemology.
In the last three decades, more attention has been given to the translator as an active agent.
Translators are now conceived not only as experts in text design for transcultural interaction
(Holz-Mänttäri 1984) but also as engaged interventionists (e.g. Venuti 1995) who make that
intervention visible (see also Chapter 17 “Ethics of activist translation and interpreting” in this
volume). Such interventions have been illustrated in respect to feminist translation or post-
colonial translation (e.g. Simon 1996; von Flotow 1997; Tymoczko 1999; see also Chapter 8
“The ethics of postcolonial translation” and Chapter 9 “Feminist translation ethics” in this
volume). Through such work, the notion of the activist translator has been put forward (e.g.
Baker 2006; Boéri and Maier 2010; Inghilleri and Harding 2010). Activist translators too act
in the interest of a specific agenda, which may be a political or ideological conviction, and the
translator’s intervention in such cases is usually seen in a positive light. For example, Ghessimi
(2019) reports on an Islamic Marxist translator in the socio-political context of Iran in the
1960s and 1970s who “wielded his own politics in translation to illuminate Iranians’ thought
against the imperial regime to stimulate them to subvert the Pahlavi dynasty” (Ghessimi 2019,
51). Socialist translators were not expected to make changes to the text; in other words, social-
ist partisanship did not entail turning the target text into one that was in line with communist
ideology, although in reality this did occur through censorship and self-censorship. This raises
the questions: to what extent can a translator working under socialism be compared to an activist
translator? Would such a comparison be fruitful? Would it be fair to do so? Would a distinction
between a socialist translator and a translator working under socialism be a more appropriate
line of investigation? But how can such a distinction be empirically documented? Retrospective
interviews with translators who worked at the time of socialism could reveal the same shortcom-
ings as do interviews in general: can such statements really be taken as true? It would be useful
to investigate archives of publishing houses or the secret service to see whether they contain
documents revealing surveillance or prosecutions of translators for their non-socialist activities
or professional ethics.
Since translatorial decisions (e.g. regarding the choice of words, the choice of text, or the
acceptance or rejection of a commission) can have wider cultural and ideological implications,
questions arise as to where the limits of the translator’s responsibilities lie and whether a com-
mitment to a political cause is part of a translator’s ethics. Chesterman (2001, 147) sees an eth-
ics of commitment, despite its moral value, as outside the professional realm and argues that
53
“[p]rofessional ethics . . . govern a translator’s activities qua translator, not qua political activist
or life-saver.” This would mean that the requirement of socialist translators (in particular inter-
preters) to act as political agitators when accompanying foreign visitors would not be part of a
professional ethics, although it was seen as an essential part of the profile of the socialist language
mediator. Such retrospective research into socialist translation theories and practices could there-
fore inform our current debates.
* We are grateful to Nedyalka Chakalova, Manfred Schmitz, and Gleb Dmitrienko for provid-
ing information on the Bulgarian Translators’ Union, the GDR’s Vereinigung der Sprachmittler
(VdS), and post-Soviet Russian organizations, respectively.
Related topics
Virtue ethics in translation; translator ethics; professional translator ethics; ethics of activist trans-
lation and interpreting; ethics in translator and interpreter education.
Notes
1 Russian names in the body of the text are given in their established English spelling, such as Chukovsky.
When referencing Russian sources, however, the names are transliterated according to the Library of
Congress transliteration system, hence: Chukovskii.
2 All translations from the Russian and German are by the authors.
References
Alekseeva, Irina S. 2004. Введение в перевод [Vvedenie v perevod]. St. Petersburg: Filologicheskii fakul’tet
SPbGU, Moscow: Akademiia.
Baer, Brian James. 2016. “From International to Foreign: The Packaging of Translated Literature in Soviet
Russia.” Slavic and East European Journal 60, no. 1: 49–67.
Baer, Brian James. 2018. “The Translator’s Biography and the Politics of Representation: The Case of
Soviet Russia.” In The Fictions of Translation, edited by J. Woodworth, 49–66. Amsterdam, Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Baker, Mona. 2006. Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London, New York: Routledge.
Baker, Mona, and Gabriella Saldanha, eds. 2009. Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London, New
York: Routledge.
Barchudarov, Leonid S. 1979. Sprache und Übersetzung. Leipzig: Enzyklopädie.
Barkhudarov, Leonid S. 1975. Iazyk i perevod. Moskva: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia.
Berg, Vivien. 2012. Die Übersetzertätigkeit in der DDR. Der Einfluss des Staates. Maîtrise: Univ. Genève.
Accessed October 15, 2019. http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:29167
Boéri, Julie, and Carol Maier, eds. 2010. Compromiso Social y Traducción/Interpretación–Translation/Interpreting
and Social Activism. Granada: Ecos.
Bugarski, R. 1981. “Teorija prevođenja kao naucna disciplina.” In Teorija i poetika prevođenja, edited by L.
Rajić, 7–26. Beograd: Prosveta.
Ceccherelli, Andrea, Lorenzo Costantino, and Cristiano Diddi, eds. 2015. Translation Theories in the Slavic
Countries. Europa Orientalis. Studi e ricerche sui paesi dell’Est europeo, vol. 25. Salerno: Universita
di Salerno.
Chukovskii, Kornei. 1936. Искусство перевода [Iskusstvo perevoda]. Moscow, Leningrad: Academia.
Chukovskii, Kornei. 1967. Современники: Портреты и этюды [Sovremenniki: Portrety i etiudy]. Mos-
cow: Molodaia Gvardiia.
Chukovskii, Kornei, and Andrei Fedorov. 1930. Искусство перевода [Iskusstvo perevoda]. Moscow,
Leningrad: Academia.
Chukovskii, Kornei, and Nikolai Gumilev. 1919. Принципы художественного перевода [Printsipy khu-
dozhestvennogo perevoda]. Petrograd: Vsemirnaia Literatura.
54
Chukovskii, Kornei, Nikolai Gumilev, and Fiodor Batiushkov. 1920. Принципы художественного
перевода [Printsipy khudozhestvennogo perevoda]. Petrograd: Vsemirnaia Literatura.
Clark, Katerina. 1981. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Costantino, Lorenzo. 2015. “Translation Theories in the Slavic Countries: Introductory Remarks.” In
Translation Theories in the Slavic Countries. Europa Orientalis. Studi e ricerche sui paesi dell’Est europeo,
vol. 25, edited by Andrea Ceccherelli, Lorenzo Costantino, and Cristiano Diddi, 11–23. Salerno:
Universita di Salerno.
Delisle, Jean, Hannelore Lee-Jahnke, and Monique C. Cormier, eds. 1999. Terminologie de la Traduction:
Translation Terminology. Terminología de la Traducción. Terminologie der Übersetzung. FIT Monograph Series/
Collection, Book 1. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Dmitrienko, Gleb. 2015. “Vers une science de la traduction? Contextes idéologiques, politiques et insti-
tutionelles du développement de la Théorie Linguistique de la Traduction en Russie sovietique
(1922–1991).” Unpublished MA thesis, University of Montreal, Montreal.
Dorman, Oleg, dir. 2009. Postrochnik. Russian Federation: “Dom” Studio.
Elin, Aleksandr L., and Ol’ga A. Kostina. 2013. “Профессиональная этика перевода: Основные
принципы и проблемы” [Professional’naia etika perevodchika: Osnovnye printsipy i problem]. Nauch-
naia periodika: problemy i resheniia 1, no. 13: 14–8.
Fedorov, Andrei V. 1953. Введение в теорию перевода [Vvedenie k teoriiu perevoda]. Moscow: Liter-
atury na inostrannykh iazykakh.
Fleischmann, Eberhard. 2007. “Ein Rückblick: Durch Parteilichkeit zu den Höhen der Ubersetzungs-
kunst.” Lebende Sprachen 52, no. 3: 98–101.
Fremdsprachen Editorial Board. 1985. “40 Jahre Frieden.” Fremdsprachen 29, no. 2: 75–6.
Ghessimi, Hamed. 2019. “Translation and Political Engagement: The Role of Ali Shariati’s Translations
in Islamic Marxists Movements in Iran in the 1970s.” Babel 65, no. 1: 51–60. https://doi.org/10.1075/
babel.00073.ghe
Holz-Mänttäri, Justa. 1984. Translatorisches Handeln: Theorie und Methode. Helsinki: Suomalainen
Tiedeakatemia.
Inghilleri, Moira, and Sue-Ann Harding, eds. 2010. “Translation and Violent Conflict.” Special issue of
The Translator 16, no. 2.
Iudin, Pavel F. 1934. Об уставе Союзе советских писателей [Ob ustave Soiuze sovetskikh pisatelei].
Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura.
Ivir, Vladimir. 1978. Teorija i tehnika prevođenja. Novi Sad: Centar “Karlovacka gimnazija” Sremski Karlovci.
Zavod zaizdavanje udžbenika u Novom Sadu.
Jäger, Gert. 1975. Translation und Translationslinguistik. Halle: Bibliographisches Institut.
Jäger, Gert. 1977. “Zu Gegenstand und Zielen der Ubersetzungswissenschaft.” In Vermittelte Kommunika-
tion, Sprachmittlung, Translation, edited by Otto Kade, 14–26. Leipzig: Enzyklopädie.
Jäger, Gert, and Günter Dalitz. 1984. Die Sprachmittlung und ihre Hauptarten. Leipzig: Karl-Marx-Universität.
Jäger, Gert, and Albrecht Neubert, eds. 1982. Äquivalenz bei der Translation. Ubersetzungswissenschaftliche
Beiträge 5. Leipzig: Enzyklopädie.
Jäger, Gert, and Albrecht Neubert, eds. 1983. Semantik und Übersetzungswissenschaft. Ubersetzungswissen-
schaftliche Beiträge 6. Leipzig: Enzyklopädie.
Jendreyko, Vadim, dir. 2009. Die Frau mit den 5 Elefanten. Germany: Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der
Filmwirtschaft.
Jettmarová, Zuzana. 2015. “20th Century Czech & Slovak Theories and Western Turns.” In Translation Theo-
ries in the Slavic Countries. Europa Orientalis. Studi e ricerche sui paesi dell’Est europeo, vol. 25, edited
by Andrea Ceccherelli, Lorenzo Costantino, and Cristiano Diddi, 83–98. Salerno: Universita di Salerno.
Kade, Otto. 1966. “Die Parteilichkeit von Dolmetschern und Ubersetzern.” Fremdsprachen 10, no. 3:
159–72.
Kade, Otto. 1968. Zufall und Gesetzmäßigkeit in der Übersetzung. Beiheft zur Zeitschrift Fremdsprachen I.
Leipzig: Enzyklopädie.
Kade, Otto. 1973. “Zu einigen marxistisch-leninistischen Grundpositionen der Ubersetzungswissenschaft
der UdSSR und der DDR.” Fremdsprachen 17, no. 2: 81–94.
Kade, Otto. 1977. “Zu einigen Grundpositionen bei der theoretischen Erklärung der Sprachmittlung als
menschlicher Tätigkeit.” In Vermittelte Kommunikation, Sprachmittlung, Translation, edited by Otto Kade,
27–43. Leipzig: Enzyklopädie.
Kade, Otto. 1980. Die Sprachmittlung als gesellschaftliche Erscheinung und Gegenstand wissenschaftlicher Untersu-
chung. Leipzig: Enzyklopädie.
55
Kamovnikova, Natalia. 2019. Made under Pressure: Literary Translation in the Soviet Union, 1963–1991.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Kashkin, Ivan A. 1954. “О методе и школе советского перевода” [O metode i shkole sovetskogo khu-
dozhestvennogo perevoda]. Znamya 10: 141–53.
Kerstner, Judith, and Hanna Risku. 2014. “Die Situation der LiteraturübersetzerInnen in der DDR und
im heutigen Deutschland. Eine Untersuchung zu Translation und Kooperation.” trans-kom 7, no. 1:
166–83.
Khamatova, Anna A. 2011. “О курсе ‘Профессиональная этика переводчика’” [O kurse ‘Professional’naia
etika perevodchika’]. Izvestiia vostochnogo instituta 1: 53–64.
Komissarov, Vilen. 1990. Теория перевода [Teoriia perevoda]. Moskva: Vyschaia Shkola.
Levi, Jirži. 1982. Umjetnost prevođenja. Sarajevo: Svjetlost.
Levý, Jiří. 1963. Uměni překladu. Praha: Čs. spisovatel.
Levý, Jiří. 1969. Die literarische Übersetzung. Theorie einer Kunstgattung. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum.
Levyi, Irzhi. 1974. Искусство перевода [Iskusstvo perevoda]. Moskva: Progress.
Ljudskanov, Aleksandǎr. 1968. Preveždat čovekǎt i mašinata. Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo.
Ljudskanov, Aleksandǎr. 1972. Mensch und Maschine als Übersetzer. Halle: VEB M. Niemeyer Verlag.
Misslitz, Werner, and Ernst E. Noffke. 1979. “Neue Honorarordnung ab 1980.” Nachrichten für Sprachmitt-
ler 4: 4–6.
Neubert, Albrecht, and Otto Kade, eds. 1973. Neue Beiträge zu Grundfragen der Übersetzungswissenschaft.
Beihefte zur Zeitschrift Fremdsprachen V/VI. Leipzig: Enzyklopädie.
Ožbot, Martina. 2015. “Translation Studies in Slovenia: The Profile of a Translation-Oriented Culture.” In
Parshina, Tat’iana V. 2017. “Об этике переводчика” [Ob etike perevodchika]. In Filologiia i lingvistika v
sovremennom mire: Materialy Mezhdunar. nauch. konf. (Moscow, June 2017), edited by E.G. Akhmetov,
67–76. Moscow: Buki-Vedi.
Pokorn, Nike K. 2012. Post-Socialist Translation Practices: Ideological Struggle in Children’s Literature. Amster-
dam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Popovic, Anton. 1975. Teória umeleckého prekladu. Bratislava: Tatran.
Retsker, Iakov I. 1963. “Плагиат или самостоятельный перевод?” перевода [Plagiat ili samostoiatel’nyi
perevod?]. Tetradi perevodchika 1: 42–63.
Risku, Hanna. 2010. “A Cognitive Scientific View on Technical Communication and Translation: Do
Embodiment and Situatedness Really Make a Difference?” Target 22, no. 1: 94–111.
Salevsky, Heidemarie. 1979. Einführung ins Dolmetschen. Berlin: Humboldt-Universität.
Salevsky, Heidemarie, and Manfred Schmitz. 1986. “Zur Sprachmittlerausbildung in der Deutschen
Demokratischen Republik.” Babel 32, no. 2: 118–24.
Salmon, Laura. 2015. “Translation Theory in the Soviet Union: Between Tradition and Innovation.” In
Schäffner, Christina. 2003. “In Search of Regularities: Review of Otto Kade’s Zufall und Gesetzmäßigkeit
in der Übersetzung.” The Translator 9, no. 1: 125–31.
Schäffner, Christina. 2017. “Socialist Translation Studies: Theoretical Justification and Implications for
Training.” In Going East: Discovering New and Alternative Traditions in Translation Studies. Transkulturalität
– Translation – Transfer, Bd. 28, edited by Larissa Schippel, and Cornelia Zwischenberger, 405–26.
Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Schubert, Manfred. 1984. “Die VdS – ein geschätzter Partner der internationalen Berufsorganisation.”
Fremdsprachen 28, no. 4: 219–20.
Sherry, Samantha. 2015. Discourses of Regulation and Resistance: Censoring Translation in the Stalin and Khrush-
chev-era Soviet Union. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sibinović, Miodrag. 1979. Original i prevod. Beograd: Privredna štampa.
Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London:
Routledge.
Thomson-Wohlgemuth, Gaby. 2009. Translation under State Control: Books for Young People in the German
Democratic Republic. New York, London: Routledge.
56
Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. London: Routledge.

Vereinigung der Sprachmittler der DDR. 1986. Satzung der Vereinigung der Sprachmittler der DDR beim VDJ
(VdS). Berlin: Vereinigung der Sprachmittler.
von Flotow, Luise. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the “Era of Feminism”. Manchester: St. Jerome
Publishing.
Wolf, Michaela, and Alexandra Fukari, eds. 2007. Constructing a Sociology of Translation. Amsterdam, Phila-
delphia: John Benjamins.
Wotjak, Gerd. 2000. “War das die Leipziger Ubersetzungswissenschaftliche Schule?” In Paradigmenwechsel in
der Translation. Festschrift für Albrecht Neubert zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by Peter A. Schmitt, 279–304.
Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Wotjak, Gerd, ed. 2007. Quo vadis Translatologie? Ein halbes Jahrhundert universitäre Ausbildung von Dol-
metschern und Übersetzern in Leipzig. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Further reading
Ceccherelli, Andrea, Lorenzo Costantino, and Cristiano Diddi, eds. 2015. Translation Theories in the Slavic
Countries. Europa Orientalis. Studi e ricerche sui paesi dell’Est europeo, vol. 25. Salerno: Universita
di Salerno.
The chapters in this volume provide information on translation research traditions in several Slavic
countries. It introduces the readers to main theories, concepts, and translation scholars.
Kade, Otto. 1980. Die Sprachmittlung als gesellschaftliche Erscheinung und Gegenstand wissenschaftlicher Untersu-
chung. Leipzig: Enzyklopädie.
This book presents an understanding of translation as a social phenomenon and a theory based on Marx-
ism/Leninism. It also illustrates the principle of the translator’s socialist commitment.
This monograph explores how a communist and socialist ideology and censorship influenced the
translation of children’s literature and juvenile fiction published in the Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia (SFRY). It is based on archival research and interviews with translators and editors.
Democratic Republic. New York, London: Routledge.
This monograph explores the effects of a socialist ideology on the translation of children’s literature in
East Germany. It illustrates the censorship machinery with refer
57
5
Functional translation
theories and ethics
Gernot Hebenstreit
1 Introduction
According to functionalist approaches, the translator makes decisions about the communica-
tive goals of a given translation and about which methods to apply in order to achieve these
goals. These decisions can be based solely neither on elements found in the source text nor on
knowledge pertaining to the source and target languages and cultures. Rather, they need to take
into consideration the interests and needs of the translator’s “partners” in the communicative
act. Such decisions are likely to have an impact on others and thus raise ethical issues. The aim
of this chapter is to discuss the ways in which these issues have been discussed by functional-
ist translation scholars and to illustrate the development from the formal rejection of ethics in
the 1980s to an active advocacy of functionalist translation ethics in the new millennium. The
chapter will first provide a short overview of the central ideas and concepts of Hans J. Vermeer’s
skopos theory and Justa Holz-Mänttäri’s theory of translational action and then trace ethical issues in
the two authors’ works. This will be followed by an overview of the discussion on the necessity
of ethical boundaries in relation to the eligibility of translation skopoi and an analysis of the
concept of loyalty as introduced and elaborated by Christiane Nord. The chapter will close with
an account of Erich Prunc’s attempt to conceptualize translation ethics within the functionalist
paradigm in the context of translation cultures.
For this chapter, “translation” means “translation and interpreting.” and “TS” is short for
“translation and interpreting studies.” This clarification seems necessary insofar as the central
works of functionalist translation theory have been published in German, where “Translation”
denotes a concept generic to “translating” and “interpreting,” and the theories discussed here
claim to be of a general nature, i.e. comprising all kinds of translational action.
2 Historical trajectory
Within TS, the terms “functional theories” or “functional approaches” refer to a school of
thought that draws on general theories of human action to explain translation as a purposeful
activity; as a product serving a specific purpose; and as interaction between a group of actors
cooperating to the ends of that purpose. Thus, a translation is produced to serve a purpose, or to
58
Functional translation theories and ethics
fulfil a specific function. It is that very function that forms the core of “functionalist” approaches
to translation. “Functionalists” distinguish themselves clearly from “linguistic” approaches that
try to explain translations as the result of operations that take place on various linguistic levels
(sign, sentence, text), which are intended to lead to “equivalence” between a “source text” and
a “target text.” Such positions can be found in the works of Otto Kade, Albrecht Neubert, Wer-
ner Koller, Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Dalbernet, John Catford, Juliane House, Peter Newmark,
and to some extent in the work of Eugene Nida and Katharina Reiß. According to linguistic
approaches, the source text is considered the determining factor in translation, and all answers
on how to translate should be found in the source text and in knowledge pertaining to languages
and textual conventions. “Functionalists,” on the other side, maintain that the main determining
factor of a translation is its purpose, or the function it is intended to fulfil in a target culture.
Such a perspective implies that the translator is no longer seen as a mere “de- and re-coder of
words between languages, but has wider responsibilities” (Kalina 2012, 97). The two function-
alist theories with the greatest impact on the development of TS are Vermeer’s skopos theory
and Holz-Mänttäri’s theory of translational action. The two theories were developed almost
simultaneously in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the former in Germany, the latter in Finland.
In 1984 the two scholars published comprehensive monographs presenting their theories (Reiß
and Vermeer 1984; Holz-Mänttäri 1984).
For functionalists, translation is a kind of human action. Action is distinguished from other
forms of human activity or behaviour by its intentionality: actions are performed in order to
attain a specific goal. The term “skopos” (a Greek word for “aim,” “target,” “goal,” “purpose”
cf. Vermeer 1996, 4) refers to the purpose of the translational action that is initiated by someone
in need of a translation (commissioner, initiator, or client). Vermeer postulates that, as in any other
action, the steps you take, the way you act, the means you employ etc. are determined by the
intended goal, i.e. by the skopos of the translational action (Reiß and Vermeer 1984, 95). With
regard to the way of acting (such as translation strategies, or decisions about how to handle the
source text in its content and linguistic form), adequacy is key: the translator strives to produce
a translation that is “adequate,” i.e. fit to serve the intended skopos (139). This skopos does not
necessarily comply with the original skopos of the source text (103). In fact, Vermeer and Holz-
Mänttäri both agree that, when comparing the purposes of source texts and their translations,
a difference in purpose tends to be the norm rather than an exception from the rule (Vermeer
1990, 115; Holz-Mänttäri 1990). One reason for this can be found in the differences between
the source culture, from which the text originates, and the target culture, where the transla-
tion is received. In order to produce an adequate translation, these differences need to be taken
into account. In skopos theory, the source text is seen as an “offer of information,” which the
translator uses to produce the translation as an “offer of information” in a target language, to a
target culture (Reiß and Vermeer 1984, 76). Vermeer describes the relationship between source
and target texts as intertextual coherence. The nature of this coherence, i.e. the degree of similar-
ity in form and content is, just like every other aspect, determined by the translation’s skopos
(114). Consequently, a translation’s equivalence to its source text, which was the central demand
according to linguistic approaches, is now regarded as one of many possible skopoi in skopos
theory. This reduction of the status of the source text is often referred to as “dethronement of
the original.”
In her theory of translational action, Holz-Mänttäri (1993) takes this dethronement one step
further. Here, translational action is understood as transcultural text design, where the “Design-Text,”
i.e. a text that is tailor-made for a specific purpose in a specific situation or context, can differ
greatly from the source text (Holz-Mänttäri 1984, 120–121) and does not necessarily need to
be linked to a source text at all, if the translator, as the expert in transcultural communication,
59
Gernot Hebenstreit
decides so. It is important to note that translational action can go beyond the translation itself:
translation is a kind of translational action involving a source text (Vermeer 1990, 71). Thus
Vermeer’s skopos theory can be seen as a special type of theory of translational action, whereas
Holz-Mänttäri’s theory is more general. Holz-Mänttäri (1984) stresses the translator’s role as an
expert collaborating with other experts in order to achieve a common actional goal (120–121).
Translational action is seen as part of a superordinate complex of actions (“Handlungsgefüge”) and
in service of the overall goals of this complex (43–44). It is worth noting that, in this complex
of actions, the translator does not only collaborate with a commissioner. Rather, Holz-Mänttäri
presents an elaborate model of roles in translational action. She distinguishes the initiator or client
who needs the “Design-Text,” the commissioner who orders it, the author of the source text,
the translator, the person “applying” the text in the target situation and culture (“Zieltextapplika-
tor”), and the recipient (109). As an expert for transcultural text design, the translator analyzes
the communicative conditions in the target situation, consults the action partners with regard to
the specifications of the text design, and produces it according to these specifications.
3.1 Tracing ethical issues in Vermeer’s work

It might seem paradoxical to look for an ethical stance within the context of skopos theory,
given the criticism it had to face for ignoring ethical issues, or for being unethical altogether
(Kopp 2012, 145), and given Vermeer’s own explicit statements concerning the inclusion of
ethics in his theory (see later). Nevertheless, in her analysis of Vermeer’s understanding of
responsibility, Kopp (2012) concludes “that skopos theory has an ethical foundation and that it
is only apparently in conflict with ethics” (161–162). While I do not fully concur with Kopp,
I would like to demonstrate in the following section that Vermeer was not totally blind to the
question of ethics.
Vermeer (1996) repeatedly argued against the inclusion of ethics in general theories of trans-
lation: “ethics must not be mixed up with general theoretical considerations about other sub-
jects. The same applies to value discussions. Science should be value-free (wertfrei).” He continues
that, if ethics were included, it would be unclear “how to formulate a general ethical theory of
translating which would not be prescriptive” (107–108). So part of Vermeer’s rejection of ethics
is based on his requirement that a theory must not be prescriptive. This might be surprising,
considering that skopos theory has often been seen as a prescriptive theory (cf. e.g. Kohlmayer
1988, 148). There is no denying the prescriptive undertone in many of Vermeer’s publications,
especially in relation to the examples he provides, and most certainly in the context of translator
training, where skopos theory was applied as a set of rules to be followed in order to produce
adequate translations, with Vermeer leading a fierce battle against established paradigms (cf.
Nord 2010). However, despite the terminology used (“skopos rule”), the core of skopos theory
can indeed be interpreted as a set of descriptive postulates.
Vermeer seems to map ethics to the individual rather than to a group or society: “Moral-
ity and/or ethics (whichever terminology one prefers) are phenomena concerning personal
behaviour” (Vermeer 1996, 83, and in a similar vein Vermeer 2009, 5), and he also speaks
of “(interindividual) morality and (personal) ethics” (1996, 22). Modelling such individual,
context-specific aspects might appear problematic in the framework of a general theory. More
important, though, seems Vermeer’s (2009) observation that ethics is culture-specific (6). If
ethics were to be included in a theory of translation, such a theory could never act as a general
theory of translation, which ought inherently to be independent of specific cultural contexts.
60
Vermeer does not refer to any specific literature on ethics, but it seems clear that here he is talk-
ing about normative ethics.
Setting aside these theoretical considerations, one cannot avoid the impression that Vermeer
had strong reservations about, and possibly even mistrust in, the field of ethics. At one point, for
example, he expresses his concern about the “deceptive powers” of individuals acting as ethical
role models and warns that people might all too readily avoid taking difficult decisions them-
selves and blame ethics instead (Vermeer 2006, 68–69). He also used the provocative rhetorical
question, “Ethik, gibt’s das denn?” (“Ethics, does that actually exist?”) as the title of a presenta-
tion in which he spoke of an “egological” ethics and argues that all of us follow our own ethics
(2009). Yet Vermeer’s writing is nonetheless not completely free of ethical dimensions.
Ethics is implicitly present in the concepts of freedom and responsibility, which Vermeer uses
quite often. Vermeer (1990, 89) sees freedom of choice as an essential characteristic of the
concept of action. He also claims that the integration of responsibility is a major conceptual
innovation that skopos theory brought into the realm of TS: acknowledging the role of the
skopos goes hand in hand with acknowledging the translator’s responsibility for the production
of a functional translation. Vermeer sees the translator’s responsibility as the very core of skopos
theory and explicitly relates it to the translator’s ethos (Vermeer 1990, 130–131). In Vermeer’s
thinking, freedom and responsibility are closely interrelated. The translator has the same free-
dom in wording the translation as the author has in wording the source text (Vermeer 1996,
77–78). The limits of the responsible use of that freedom are set by the skopos of the translation
(Vermeer [2001] 2007, 188). In this context, Vermeer highlights the importance of an “ethi-
cally honest” mindset. It is also interesting that the level of visibility of the translator (i.e. the
translator’s authorship) can be seen as an indication of the level of appreciation for the translator’s
responsibility (Vermeer 2006, 254–255).
In her analysis of Vermeer’s understanding of responsibility, Kopp (2012) shows that this con-
cept has a double orientation: one that is retrospective (accountability for the product and its func-
tionality) and one that is prospective, pointing towards possible consequences that extend beyond
the mere act of translating (157). Vermeer exemplifies such consequences in his discussion of the
potential implications of texts pertaining to rearmament or ecological problems and explains,
“Although I am not supposed to give you moral advice, I still want to draw your attention to
the cultural implications of the translator’s and interpreter’s work” (Vermeer 1994, 10). Such
cultural implications are also evident in what Vermeer calls the social task of the translator, which
has several dimensions: first, the responsibility to “[collaborate] in the communicative act in such
a way as to promote the achievement of the skopos” (11); second, the “cultural responsibility to
introduce into a society and its literary tradition new aspects either of form or of content or of
meaning and thereby new aspects of the ‘world’, thus enriching (‘erweitern’) the target culture”
(13). The translator’s social task also comprises a responsibility for the ethics of the profession:
this concerns the translator’s choice for or against accepting a given commission, the definition
working conditions, pecuniary compensation, and – on a truly social level – the translators’
reputation and social position in society (Vermeer [1990] 2007b, 17). For Vermeer, one central
aspect of ethics in relation to the profession is that the translators should identify themselves with
the profession to the greatest possible extent, i.e. taking on the specific role that translation
involves and requires (2006, 353).
Vermeer’s concept of culture is interesting from an ethical point of view, as he conceptualizes
it as a system of norms:
Culture is whatever one has to know, master or feel in order to judge whether or not a
particular form of behaviour shown by members of a community in their various roles
61
Gernot Hebenstreit
conforms to general expectations, and in order to behave in this community in accordance

with general expectations unless one is prepared to bear the consequences of unaccepted
behaviour.
(translation by Nord 2018, 32)
In Vermeer’s own summary, “Culture may be understood as the whole of norms and conven-
tions governing social behaviour and its results” (Vermeer [1990] 2007a, 20); culture is thus “the
repertoire of rules regulating behaviour, including linguistic behaviour … or … the repertoire
for good interpersonal behaviour [Gutverhalten]” (Vermeer 2009, 2–3, my translation). Thus
ethics is conceived of as sub-inventory of rules for good individual behaviour. Being a subsystem
of culture, ethics must therefore be culture-specific. Vermeer understands culture as a relative
concept (cf. e.g. Vermeer 1996, 3): culture can relate to individuals (“idio-cultures”), groups
(“dia-cultures”), and societies (“para-cultures”). According to Vermeer (2009), there are infi-
nitely many cultures and ethics and “ethics and cultural behaviour belong together, however not
in a 1:1-relation” (5, my translation). Thus, according to Vermeer, a specific culture does not
predetermine a specific kind of ethics.
3.2 Tracing ethical issues in Holz-Mänttäri’s work

Holz-Mänttäri hardly makes any direct reference to ethics. I only came across the word “eth-
isch” once in the context of professionality. Unlike Vermeer, Holz-Mänttäri does not oppose
the inclusion of ethics in a theory. The most striking characteristic of her model is an underlying
egalitarian worldview, ascribing total equality to all the roles involved in the translation process.
Hönig (1992) points out that Holz-Mänttäri’s focus on cooperation is based on her assump-
tion of a horizontally structured society that is constructed according to the division of labour.
He raises doubts about the empirical realism of such an assumption: “In my own observations,
all I can see is a vertically structured, hierarchized society. And this brings us to the question
of power” (3, my translation), and, one might be inclined to add, “to the question of ethics.”
Holz-Mänttäri (1993) rejects the criticism with an argument that is comparable to Vermeer’s
position: her model, she states, does not try to depict reality but to model “variables and their
relationships as a system that is compatible with the organic and mental human conditions [mit
den organischen und mentalen Gegebenheiten des Menschen kompatibel]” (304, my transla-
tion). However, she points out that a theory should, amongst other requirements, provide a basis
for discourse pertaining to the responsibility and/or accountability (“Verantwortlichkeit”) of the
translator (Holz-Mänttäri 1994, 348).
When it comes to the translator’s responsibility, Holz-Mänttäri (1984) sometimes uses the
word “Verantwortlichkeit,” which morphemically translates as “responsibleness.” Depending on
the linguistic context, the word “Verantwortlichkeit” can be used as a synonym for (the much
more frequent) “Verantwortung” (responsibility). However, a closer look at specific contexts
in the work of Holz-Mänttäri reveals two more “technical” meanings of Verantwortlichkeit
that seem to predominate: on the one hand responsibility in relation to the division of labour,
in the sense of “whose job it is,” and on the other, responsibility in the sense of answerability,
accountability, or justifiability. There are several instances where Holz-Mänttäri maintains that
the translational action needs to be “verantwortbar” (94, 98); here it is clear that the meaning
is without doubt “justifiable.” In a similar context, the notion of “verantwortliches Handeln”
(“responsible action”) is disambiguated in the same way as “justifiable action” (97). The noun
“Verantwortlichkeit,” however, tends to be used in contexts that identify responsibilities in the
sense of “who is responsible for what part of the job?” in a shared working environment with
62
several cooperating partners. This is most evident in cases where the plural form (“Verant-
wortlichkeiten”) is used: “Each role requires abilities and each role is linked to rights and duties,
and thus responsibilities” (40–41, my translation). With these observations in mind, it seems
likely that, when she talks about what is to be expected from a theory, Holz-Mänttäri’s use of
responsibility is intended in this narrower sense.
According to Holz-Mänttäri (1984) the translator has to analyze the “functional field” of the
target text, i.e. the context for which it is intended, evaluate the findings, draw the necessary
conclusions, and make decisions or prepare decisions that need to be made by a partner fulfilling
another role (109). Like Vermeer, Holz-Mänttäri maintains that the translator’s role is that of an
expert or a professional. For Holz-Mänttäri, professionality is characterized by the social authoriza-
tion to take on particular responsibilities (Holz-Mänttäri 1988, 47) and by the ability to work
responsibly, i.e. to ensure that decisions are justifiable in relation to their intended function.
The ability to work responsibly in such a way distinguishes professionals from non-professionals
(Holz-Mänttäri 1994, 352). According to Holz-Mänttäri (1984), the key to justifiable action
and justifiable products is diligent, systematic work throughout the whole process, where each
step is based on sound decisions (98). This is necessary because translators do not communicate
on their own behalf, but on behalf of other people who play other communicative roles in a
given actional cooperation (Holz-Mänttäri 1988, 46). Here, implicitly, yet clearly, the translator’s
responsibility is understood in a wider, non-technical, sense.
A further key concept implicitly linked to ethics in Holz-Mänttäri’s model of translational
action is cooperation. She argues that all the partners need to cooperate in order to achieve an
actional goal. A central responsibility of the translator in this cooperation is to inform and
consult the cooperating partners with regard to the translational action (Holz-Mänttäri 1984,
118), to negotiate an unambiguous description of the product, and to ensure adequate working
conditions (114–115), whereby this last condition is the shared responsibility of all participants
in the action.
3.3 Skopos unlimited? The issue of loyalty

Kopp (2012) points out that skopos theory has often been characterized as an “anything-goes-
theory of translation,” and its assertion that, in translation, the end justifies the means was
deemed “unethical sui generis as it accords a disputable power to the translator” (Kopp, 145).
For some critics, even seeking a skopos would equate “to a disputable arbitrariness of transla-
tion that would allow the translator to do anything he wants” (154). An inherent danger of the
functionalist approach is visible in the inherent potential for “misuse” (Kadric and Kaindl 1997,
144–145), such as the possibility to promote an ideology in the target text that was clearly not
intended by the author of the source text. Within functionalism in TS, this line of critique has
led to the development of the concept of the translator’s loyalty, as introduced by Nord (1989).
Loyalty is an ethical category, introduced explicitly as a “corrective measure vis-a-vis a reck-
less functionalism” (Nord 2004, 236, my translation). Unlike the old concept of fidelity, which
refers to an intertextual relationship, loyalty refers to an interpersonal relationship (Nord 2003,
94). It is “a moral principle indispensable in the relationships between human beings who are
partners in a communication process” (Nord 1991, 94).
Who, then, are the translator’s partners in a given action? According to Nord (1989, 102),
there is a commissioner, a target text recipient, and a source text author. Being loyal means respect-
ing the partners’ interests. The commissioner’s interest is to obtain a translation that serves the
intended purpose (skopos), the source text author’s interest is not to be interpreted in contradic-
tion to his/her own intentions, and the recipients’ interest is to receive a translation that fits their
63
Gernot Hebenstreit
expectations, or – as Nord also calls them in one of her publications – their “subjective theories”
(Nord 2001, 195) about translation.
Such expectations always pertain to the relationship between the source text and translation.
In her critique of skopos theory, Nord (1989) proceeds from the observation that the nature of
this relationship, which she refers to as a “link” (“Anbindung”), is dependent on the intended
skopos (102). As such, it will vary according to the different skopoi. This means that, with
regard to specific elements in the source text, the translator will confront different options and
requirements to retain or change certain elements in the process of producing the target text. As
for the possible nature of the skopos, it is evident that it needs to be “justifiable,” to “make sense” –
in German: “begründbar (‘sinnvoll’)” (Reiß and Vermeer 1984, 101). Other than that, Nord
(1989) sees no restrictions in skopos theory concerning the range of possible purposes. If, Nord
argues, with a given skopos, no link can be established between the source text and the transla-
tion, either because that would be impossible or not permissible, then the translation cannot take
place. Nord concludes that in order to be legitimate, the skopos must be “compatible” with the
source text. Compatibility rules, she adds, are culture-specific, and, in “our” (probably German
or “Western”) culture, this would entail that a translation must not contradict the intentions of
the author of the source text (102).
Expectations pertaining to translation are based on culture-specific translational conventions.
Nord (1991) understands conventions as a type of social regularity. Conventions differ in terms
of their normative force and the possible consequences of non-compliance with rules (at the
top of the hierarchic structure) and norms (located in the space between rules and conventions).
Conventions draw their normative force from the fact that they have proven themselves as a
successful means of problem-solving. Consequently, conventional behaviour is behaviour that
everybody (in a given group) follows, everybody expects of everybody else, and everybody pre-
fers adhering to (95–97). Translational conventions lead to specific expectations concerning the
relationship between the translation and the original (e.g. “fidelity), or the relationship between
the translation and its purpose (e.g. “functionality”), or the reception of the translated text (e.g.
the impression of “foreignness”). Translational conventions are not universal, but valid only for
an individual culture at a given time (92). Thus, the “decision on what may or may not be a ‘pos-
sible’ or a ‘legitimate’ translation skopos for a particular source text is based on the conventional
concept of translation regarded as valid in the cultures involved” (94). A practical problem arises
from the fact that translational conventions are usually tacit, often vague, and sometimes even
contradictory (100, 107). Therefore, Nord calls for more research in this field.
The translator has to take these translational conventions into consideration. This does not
mean that the translator must always do what everybody expects: “Loyalty may require precisely
non-observance of certain conventions. But in any case, the translator should at least inform
the other participants of what has been done, and why” (Nord 1991, 95). Nord sees loyalty as a
responsibility that puts a limit on the “range of the translation purposes allowed for in relation
to one particular source text”: if a commission entails the risk of disloyalty to the other partners,
the translator should address the problem, negotiate with the client, or “perhaps even refuse to
produce the translation on ethical grounds” (Nord 2001, 200).
Based on what has been said so far, it is hardly surprising that Vermeer (1996) rejected the
proposal of including the concept of loyalty in his theoretical framework: the general theory
“cannot contain restrictions to the possible variety of skopoi.” However, he does concede, “each
culture will have its own restrictions” (87). Such restrictions, he says, are part of the prevailing
circumstances surrounding the production of translation. Vermeer views conditions like “loy-
alty” or the “source text author’s intention” as “obstacles” which can prevent the production
of a fully optimal result (with regard to the intended skopos as defined by the commissioner):
64
“‘Loyalty’ is then a term for such an ‘obstacle’, but no concept ‘in its own right’. And from
a point of view of general theory it seems to acquire a preponderantly negative connotation”
(100). In a later publication, Vermeer (2006) points out that the translator’s position in relation
to his action partners is not a given, and that the translator does not necessarily always side with
the commissioner. Still, Vermeer maintains that the skopos of the interaction will provide the
necessary guidance to find concrete solutions (352). There is one kind of loyalty that Vermeer
mentions in a positive way, which is the translator’s loyalty to the profession: “[I] think, the
translator should be loyal to his own professional role demands only (and as a person to his ethical
convictions)” (Vermeer 1996, 86, cf. Vermeer 2006, 353).
While Vermeer (1996, 81–100) questions the validity of Nord’s conceptualization of the
source text author’s intention, he does not argue against the idea of translational conventions,
which are actually very much in line with his own conceptualization of culture. Again, he
argues that a general theory should not include culture-specific conditions. This appears some-
what inconsistent with the fact that, following skopos theory, a translator should take target
culture-specific conditions of the target audience into account in order to produce a translation
that functions in the recipient culture. It is also doubtful if one can conceive of action in the
Vermeerian sense as something taking place in a cultural vacuum. Perhaps, then, it would make
sense to integrate this thought into the modelling of translation (as such) on a general theoretical
level. One could argue that Vermeer’s refusal to integrate translational conventions on the level
of general theory can be attributed to his personal reservations about ethics as such (see earlier).
In any case, other TS scholars argue that translational conventions should be seen as part of the
skopos (Flynn 2004, 282). However, such integration does not imply that there are no possible
skopoi that go against certain given translational conventions.
As mentioned earlier, Nord (2004) sees loyalty as an ethical responsibility of the translator. In
short, it is the translator’s responsibility not to knowingly betray any of the action partners (236),
whilst at the same time producing a functional translation. This is summarized in the formula
“function plus loyalty,” replacing Vermeer’s “skopos rule” as the new guideline for translators
(Nord 2003). For Nord, the translator’s responsibility evolves from the fact that his/her partners
are not in a position to judge whether the translation complies with the requirement of func-
tionality or whether it is sufficiently linked to the source text. They need to rely on the transla-
tor fulfilling the task in good conscience (Nord 1989, 102). Since the translators are the only
partners with knowledge of both cultures, they carry the responsibility for all parties involved,
including themselves (cf. Prunc’s position on loyalty, later) (Nord 2004, 236).
In Nord (2004, 237), the author describes loyalty with reference to (Chesterman 2001) as
an “ethics of conflict prevention, trust, professionality, and truthfulness” (“Ethik der Konflikt-
prävention, des Vertrauens, der Professionalität und der Wahrhaftigkeit”). Whereas the integra-
tion of “translational conventions” was an important step forward in the discussion on loyalty,
this new approach appears to be less convincing. Chesterman’s article is explicitly anchored in
value theory and virtue ethics (see also Chapter 2 “Virtue ethics in translation” in this volume),
and for Chesterman, the central values are clarity, truth, trust, and understanding, with related vir-
tues such as fairness, truthfulness, trustworthiness, empathy, courage, and determination. Nord (2004)
does not explicate her meta-ethical position, nor does she discuss these concepts in depth or
clarify their relationship to loyalty. Chesterman (1997) identifies trust and upholding trust as
catalysts for loyal behaviour: “one is loyal in order not to lose trust; it is not the case that one
trusts in order not to lose loyalty” (153). In Nord (2004), the picture is less clear. Loyalty appears
as both a means and a goal in itself. Furthermore, the wording “loyalty as an ethics of …” seems
to position loyalty as an ethical umbrella category covering the whole range of translation eth-
ics, which leads to the danger of blurring concepts rather than clarifying and developing them.
65
Gernot Hebenstreit
Prunc (1997b) proposed a different kind of “broadening” of the loyalty concept (136). Prunc
criticizes Nord’s approach, claiming that it limits the translator’s responsibility to resolving any
conflicting goals between loyalty to the author, the commissioner, and the target audience. He
concedes that such a model of loyalty widens the translator’s scope of action (in comparison to
what would be acceptable from a traditional translational equivalence-based point of view) but
fails to recognize the translator’s own ethical position. Therefore, in addition to the loyalties to
the source text author, to the initiator, and to the recipients, Prunc introduces a fourth loyalty:
the translator’s loyalty to him-/herself. This loyalty to oneself ranks above the other loyalties and
as such functions as the decisive authority in case of any other conflicts of loyalty. Prunc regards
such conflicts as inevitable, considering the nature of translation as an ideology- and culture-
laden process. This fourfold conceptualization of loyalty provides the researcher with greater
flexibility in modelling translational action. It enables, for example, the modelling of translation
that takes place under conditions where the social relationship between the action partners is
characterized by extreme asymmetries in power, status, and ideologies and where translation is
employed as a strategy of resistance or subversion (36). Prunc’s agenda is not limited to research.
TS has the responsibility to engage in the construction of a “democratic translation culture”
(see the next section) and to ethically empower translators to implement a translation ethics that
does justice to the central role that translators have played and continue to play in transcultural
communication. In line with this agenda, Prunc (2008) added further aspects to his concept of
loyalty: the translator’s loyalty to the profession, and, more importantly, the idea of reciprocal
loyalties (31). In a democratic society, with its consensus on equal rights, loyalty should never
be a one-way street, and as such the partners in a given translational action should therefore be
committed to reciprocal loyalty.
4.1 Translation cultures

In 1997 Prunc introduced the concept of translation culture and continued to elaborate on the
concept in the following decade (especially 1997a, 2005, 2008, 2012). The birth of the concept
of translation culture was the result of Prunc’s efforts towards advancing the functionalist trans-
lation theory. As a functionalist with a deep interest in and broad understanding of systemic,
cultural, and sociological approaches, Prunc was well aware of the shortcomings in the func-
tionalist theories of Vermeer and Holz-Mänttäri. For Prunc, one, if not the central, problem was
the implied equality of the players involved; i.e. equality in terms of the possibility to achieve
one’s own goals in a given setting. Prunc’s aim was to embed functionalist thinking in a frame-
work that takes broader social contexts and dimensions such as power, status, and intention into
account. Prunc (2012) defines translation culture as
the historically grown, self-referential and self-regulating sub-system of a culture that relates
to the action feld of translation, which derives from a dialectical relationship to transla-
tion practice. It consists of a set of socially established, controlled and controllable norms,
conventions, expectations, values and habitualized behavioural patterns shared by all actors
actually or potentially involved in the translation processes within the relevant culture.
(340, my translation)
Prunc sees translation culture as a social construct, a relatively independent subculture that refects
social consensus and dissent with regard to allowed, recommended, and obligatory forms of
66
translation. As such, this construct is the result of a balance between the interests of individu-
als and institutions engaged in the various levels and felds of translation. Translation cultures
develop dynamically over time. Contemporary translation practice always takes place in rela-
tion to a given consensus, preserving it or deviating from it, and thus the practice itself plays an
active role in shaping translation culture. Over the years, Prunc identifed various constructive
elements of translation culture, i.e. issues that can become the focal point of norms, conventions
etc. Amongst these elements we fnd qualitative parameters; loyalties (see earlier); translation
directionality; the role of the mother tongue and foreign language acquisition; institutional-
ized translator education; felds of translation; standard relationships between source text and
target text; conventional skopoi (distinction between “implicit” and “explicit” skopoi, cases of
obligatory skopos explication); the status of translation; the roles and visibility of translators/
interpreters; selection of source texts; the translator’s capital; and habitus (see Hebenstreit 2018).
Prunc (1997a) argues that TS should engage in researching historical as well as contempo-
rary translation cultures. This is primarily a call for descriptive, explanatory research, but it is
developed further in Prunc’s (2005) strong conviction that TS should become actively involved
in the shaping of translation cultures and help to build a democratically organized translation
culture, where translators, as equals among other actors, can act as co-creators of intellectual
spaces, textual worlds, and cultures. One might argue that, on the level of theoretical model-
ling, Prunc rejects the implication of the total equality between action partners that underlies
Holz-Mänttäri’s thinking, whilst personally sharing her egalitarian values as a goal worth fighting
for. One step towards what today might still be deemed a “utopia” (Prunc 2012, 342) would
be the improvement of the social status of translation and translators. Attaining that goal would
require a joint effort from individuals, professional organizations, and academia. The promotion
of the status of translation in a society as an ethical responsibility of TS has also been addressed
by (Vermeer [1990] 2007b, 17–18) and Holz-Mänttäri (1994, 370–371).
4.2 Towards a democratic translation culture and a functionalist

ethics of translation
In 2008, Prunc identified four principles underlying the construction of a democratic translation
culture: cooperation (“Kooperativität”), loyalty (“Loyalität”), transparency (“Transparenz”), and ecol-
ogy (“Ökologizität”). The cooperation principle comprises respect for the legitimate interests of
all action partners and a willingness to negotiate sound solutions, to balance everyone’s interests,
and to work towards a lasting minimization and prevention of conflicts (30). In relation to loy-
alty, Prunc strongly rejects any kind of unidirectionality, rather viewing loyalty as a multilateral
principle that binds all action partners (see earlier). When conflicts of interests prove irresolvable,
the translator has to take responsibility for his/her decision to act to the (dis)advantage of one or
more of the action partners. (Not only) In such situations, transparency is essential in order to
ensure mutual trust. Transparency involves clarifying the individual premises of a given transla-
tion and its skopos, enabling a review of translational decisions and also aspects such as visible
authorship and accountability (32). Finally, the ecology principle aims at preserving resources in
the widest sense of the word. Its application highlights the fact that translatorial acts are not only
about efficiency, but also about sustainability, i.e. taking into account long-term consequences
of a given translatorial action at social and cultural levels in the participating cultures, including
the source, target, and translation cultures (32).
The constructive principles of cooperation, loyalty, transparency, and ecology connect trans-
lation culture to translation ethics. When addressing the issue of translation ethics, Prunc (2012)
explicitly refers to value theory and virtue ethics. Following Pieper’s (2007) construction of
67
Gernot Hebenstreit
value hierarchies in democratic societies, Prunc lists the following values as the pinnacle of a
democratic translation culture: human rights, human dignity, tolerance, respect for the otherness
of others, equality of opportunities (with reference to Cronin), solidarity, openness to dialogue
and consensus, emancipation of the deprived and of minorities (with reference to Venuti), eco-
nomical use of resources, minimization of conflicts, and sustainability (Prunc 2012, 358).
Whilst Chesterman (2001) proposes a “Hieronymic Oath” (see Chapter 2 “Virtue ethics in
translation” in this volume), Prunc (2012) formulates a “maxim of action” for translators:
Act loyally to your action partners, but also be self-confdent enough to demand their
loyalty; use both your own and your partners’ resources economically and consider the sus-
tainability of your actions; act professionally and protect the reputation of your profession;
act in compliance with the norms of your translation culture, however, have the courage to
act against these norms, assume the responsibility for such a step, and lay open the reasons
for your decision.
(357–358, my translation)
This maxim of action is not intended to replace ethical codes (see also Chapter 20 “Ethics codes
for interpreters and translators” in this volume). Unlike many ethical codes, it provides a way out
of moral dilemmas caused by conficting norms. It does not pretend to be universally applicable,
insofar as it clearly pertains to current European translation cultures. In this context, it is worth
noting that Prunc (1997a) views the refusal of translation (“Translationsverweigerung”) and the
decline of translation (“Translationsverzicht”) as possible translational action and, consequently,
as important options in the context of translation ethics (2005).
Although Prunc speaks of translation culture as a “deontic” system and places it at the centre
of his reflections on translation ethics, it would be wrong to equate translation culture with transla-
tion ethics or a proper system of morals, because translation cultures can contain various kinds of
norms that are not necessarily moral. Rather, translation ethics, of which professional codes of ethics
are usually an important part, is just one of many constituents of a given translation culture. The
understanding of translation culture as a subsystem of culture implies that there can be several
coexisting translation cultures. Today’s professional world is characterized by ongoing processes
of diversification and the hybridization of professional profiles, giving birth to new translation
subcultures with potentially differing ethical systems. Furthermore, there is a growing field of
“non-professional” translation that should not be ignored when discussing translation ethics (see
also Chapter 16 “Ethics of volunteering in translation and interpreting” in this volume). The
concept of translation culture may serve as a flexible framework for an analysis of translation
ethics in all of these fields, particularly considering that its conceptualization as a subsystem of
culture, with the inherent possibility of various kinds of nesting and overlap, fits well with the
general conception of ethics as group-related norms (cf. Pieper 2007).
5 Conclusions
Looking at the development of TS over the past decades reveals a clear shift of interest away
from purely or primarily linguistic aspects to more general aspects of human interaction in the
widest sense of the word. Vermeer’s skopos theory and Holz-Mänttäri’s theory of translational action
stand at a point in this historical development where the focus had only just started to move
towards the broader scope of interaction between people. If one views ethics as an aspect of
interpersonal relationships, it is hardly surprising that these early theories do not initially incor-
porate translational ethics; even less so, when taking into consideration that the model inherent
68
to those theories is that of an “ideal translator.” However, the authors do address issues that are
interesting from an ethical viewpoint, namely freedom, the translator’s responsibilities, cooperation,
and professionalism.
Both theories regard the translation’s intended function, its skopos, in the target culture as
the main driving force of the translation process and the only means of control. This raises the
question as to whether there are or should be limits imposed on the eligibility of skopoi. For
Nord, such limits are drawn according to parameters pertaining to the translator’s loyalty, i.e. the
responsibility not to betray any of the action partners. When the debate on translation ethics
gained more scholarly interest within TS at the beginning of the new millennium, Nord tried
to expand the concept to cover a greater range of ethical issues. Prunc then went on to present
his value- and virtue-based approach to functionalist translation ethics within the framework of
translation culture. Contrary to Vermeer, Prunc takes an almost activistic position towards transla-
tion ethics and advocates the construction of a democratic translation culture with cooperation,
loyalty, transparency, and ecology as guiding principles for translational action.
If Christiane Nord was the first amongst functionalist TS scholars to address the issue of transla-
tion ethics, it was with Erich Prunc that functionalism fully embraced the issue of ethics in transla-
tion. Prunc’s loyalty principle is both multilateral and reciprocal. His understanding of ethics does
not reduce the translator to a bearer of moral obligations. Instead, he advocates that the translator
is also bestowed with moral rights. This advocacy appears to be an important contribution towards
empowering translators on the ethical frontier. In a contemporary professional world where trans-
lation technologies have been taking away more and more one-dimensional routine tasks from the
translators’ sphere of work, Prunc argues that what remains for human translators is “the realm of
a creative and ethically responsible treatment of texts” (Prunc 2012, 337, my translation).

Virtue ethics/Aristotelian ethics; Hieronymic Oath and linguistic first aid; professional transla-
tor; codes of ethics.
References
Chesterman, Andrew. 1997. “Translation Ethics.” In Translation as Intercultural Communication: Selected Papers
from the EST Congress: Prague 1995, edited by Mary Snell-Hornby, 147–60. Benjamins Translation
Library 20. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Chesterman, Andrew. 2001. “Proposal for a Hieronymic Oath.” The Translator 7, no. 2: 139–54. https://
doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2001.10799097
Flynn, Peter. 2004. “Skopos Theory: An Ethnographic Enquiry.” Perspectives 12, no. 4: 270–85. https://doi.
org/10.1080/0907676X.2004.9961507
Hebenstreit, Gernot. 2018. “Translating and Interpreting Cultures: Discussing Translation and Interpreting
Ethics in a Postmonolingual Age.” In Translating and Interpreting Justice in a Postmonolingual Age, edited by
Esther Monzó-Nebot, and Juan Jiménez Salcedo, 61–75. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press.
Holz-Mänttäri, Justa. 1984. Translatorisches Handeln: Theorie und Methode. Suomalaisen Tiedeakatemian
toimituksia Sarja B. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.
Holz-Mänttäri, Justa. 1988. “Translation und das biologisch-soziale Gefüge ‘Mensch’.” In Translationstheo-
rie: Grundlagen und Standorte, edited by Justa Holz-Mänttäri, 39–57. Studia translatologica Ser. A 1.
Tampere: Tampereen Yliopisto.
Holz-Mänttäri, Justa. 1990. “Funktionskonstanz – eine Fiktion?” In Übersetzungswissenschaft und Sprach-
mittlerausbildung: Akten d. 1. Internationalen Konferenz, Berlin 17. – 19. Mai 1988, edited by Heidemarie
Salevsky, 66–74. Berlin: Humboldt-Universität.
Holz-Mänttäri, Justa. 1993. “Textdesign – Verantwortlich Und Hirngerecht.” In Traducere Navem: Festschrift
Für Katharina Reiß Zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by Justa Holz-Mänttäri, 301–20. Studia translatologica
Series A 3. Tampere: Tampereen Yliopisto.
69
Gernot Hebenstreit
Holz-Mänttäri, Justa. 1994. “Translatorisches Handeln – theoretisch fundierte Berufsprofile.” In Über-

setzungswissenschaft – eine Neuorientierung: Zur Integrierung von Theorie und Praxis, edited by Mary
Snell-Hornby. 2., durchges. Aufl., 348–74. UTB für Wissenschaft Uni-Taschenbücher 1415. Tübin-
gen: Francke.
Hönig, Hans. 1992. “Von der erzwungenen Selbstentfremdung des Ubersetzers – Ein offener Brief, an
Justa Holz-Mänttäri.” Textcontext 7: 1–14.
Kadric, Mira, and Klaus Kaindl. 1997. “Astérix – Vom Gallier zum tschetnikjäger.” In Translation as Inter-
cultural Communication, vol. 20, edited by Mary Snell-Hornby, Zuzana Jettmarová, and Klaus Kaindl,
135–46. Benjamins Translation Library. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Kalina, Sylvia. 2012. “The Search for Skopos in Interpreting.” In Sed sensum exprimere de sensu. In memoriam
Hans J. Vermeer, edited by Hanna Risku, Christiane Schäffner, and Jürgen F. Schopp. Special issue of
mTm 4: 91–118.
Kohlmayer, Rainer. 1988. “Der Literaturübersetzer zwischen Original und Markt. Eine Kritik funktion-
aIistischer Ubersetzungstheorien.” Lebende Sprachen 33, no 4: 146–456.
Kopp, Ruth Katharina. 2012. “Skopos Theory and Ethics: A Paradox?” In Sed sensum exprimere de sensu. In
memoriam Hans J. Vermeer, edited by Hanna Risku, Christiane Schäffner, and Jürgen F. Schopp. Special
issue of mTm 4: 145–66. www.mtmjournal.gr/datafiles/files/MTM_4.pdf
Nord, Christiane. 1989. “Loyalität statt Treue. Vorschläge zu einer funktionalen Ubersetzungstypologie.”
Lebende Sprachen 34, no. 3: 100–5.
Nord, Christiane. 1991. “Scopos, Loyalty, and Translational Conventions.” Target 3, no. 1: 91–109. https://
doi.org/10.1075/target.3.1.06nor
Nord, Christiane. 2001. “Loyalty Revisited.” The Translator 7, no. 2: 185–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/1
3556509.2001.10799100
Nord, Christiane. 2003. “Function and Loyalty in Bible Translation.” In Apropos of Ideology: Translation
Studies on Ideology: Ideologies in Translation Studies, edited by Maria Calzada Perez, 89–112. London:
Routledge.
Nord, Christiane. 2004. “Loyalität als ethisches Verhalten im Translationsprozess.” In Und sie bewegt sich
doch: Translationswissenschaft in Ost und West; Festschrift für Heidemarie Salevsky zum 60. Geburtstag, edited
by Ina Müller, 235–46. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.
Nord, Christiane. 2010. “Nord: Functionalist Approaches.” In Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by
Yves Gambier, and Luc van Doorslaer. Repr. with corrections and updated index. Amsterdam: Ben-
jamins. Accessed January 03, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1075/hts.1.fun1
Nord, Christiane. 2018. Translating as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist Approaches Explained, 2nd edition.
Translation Theories Explored. London, New York: Routledge.
Pieper, Annemarie. 2007. Einführung in die Ethik. Sechste, überarbeitete und aktualisierte Auflage. UTB für Wis-
senschaft Uni-Taschenbücher Philosophie 1637. Tübingen, Basel: A. Francke Verlag.
Prunc, Erich. 1997a. “Translationskultur: (Versuch einer konstruktiven Kritik des translatorischen
Handelns).” Textcontext 11(= NF 1), no. 2: 99–127.
Prunc, Erich. 1997b. “Versuch einer Skopostypologie.” In Text, Kultur, Kommunikation: Translation als
Forschungsaufgabe: Festschrift aus Anlaß des 50 jährigen Bestehens des Instituts für Übesetzer- und Dolmetsch-
erausbildung an der Universität Graz, edited by Nadja Grbić, and Michaela Wolf, 33–52. Studien zur
Translation 4. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Prunc, Erich. 2005. “Translationsethik.” In Fluctuat Nec Mergitur: Translation Und Gesellschaft; Festschrift Für
Annemarie Schmid Zum 75. Geburtstag, edited by Peter Sandrini, 165–94. Forum Translationswissen-
schaft 4. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.
Prunc, Erich. 2008. “Zur Konstruktion Von Translationskulturen.” In Translationskultur: Ein Innovatives Und
Produktives Konzept, edited by Larisa Schippel, 19–41. TransUD – Arbeiten zur Theorie und Praxis des
Ubersetzens und Dolmetschens 16. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Prunc, Erich. 2012. Entwicklungslinien der Translationswissenschaft: Von den Asymmetrien der Sprachen zu den
Asymmetrien der Macht, 3rd edition. TRANSUD 43. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Reiß, Katharina, and Hans J. Vermeer. 1984. Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie. 2. Aufl. 1991,
reprint 2010. Linguistische Arbeiten 147. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Vermeer, Hans J. 1990. Skopos und Translationsauftrag: Aufsätze, 2nd edition. Translatorisches Handeln 2.
Heidelberg: Univ.
Vermeer, Hans J. 1994. “Translation Today: Old and New Problems.” In Translation Studies: An Interdisci-
pline, edited by Mary Snell-Hornby, Franz Pochhacker, and Klaus Kaindl, 3–16. Benjamins Translation
Library 2. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
70
Vermeer, Hans J. 1996. A Skopos Theory of Translation: (Some Arguments for and against). Textcontext Reihe
Wissenschaft 1. Heidelberg: Textcontext-Verl.
Vermeer, Hans J. 2006. Versuch einer Intertheorie der Translation. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Vermeer, Hans J., ed. 2007. Ausgewählte Vorträge zur Translation und anderen Themen: Selected Papers on Trans-
lation and Other Subjects. TransUD. Arbeiten zur Theorie und Praxis des Ubersetzens und Dolmetschens
Bd. 13. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Vermeer, Hans J. [2001] 2007. “Die Rolle von Kultur und Sprache in der Translation.” In Vermeer 2007,
178–95.
Vermeer, Hans J. [1990] 2007a. “Is Translation a Linguistic or a Cultural Process.” In Vermeer 2007, 19–29.
Vermeer, Hans J. [1990] 2007b. “Quality in Translation: A Social Task.” In Vermeer 2007, 13–29.
Vermeer, Hans J. 2009. “Ethik, gibt’s das denn?” “Translation und Ethik” at FTSK. Germersheim, Ger-
many. Unpublished manuscript.
Further reading
Nord, Christiane. 2018. Translating as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist Approaches Explained, 2nd edition.
Translation Theories Explored. London, New York: Routledge.
This monograph is a comprehensive overview of and introduction to functionalist approaches in TS.
Individual chapters are devoted to historical development; the theory of translational action; skopos
theory; functionalism in translator training, in literary translation, and in interpreter training studies;
translation criticism; and loyalty. The book closes with chapters on the developments in the 1990s and
the new millennium.
Kopp, Ruth Katharina. 2012. “Skopos Theory and Ethics: A Paradox?” In Sed sensum exprimere de sensu. In
memoriam Hans J. Vermeer, edited by Hanna Risku, Christiane Schäffner, and Jürgen F. Schopp. Special
Issue of mTm 4: 145–66. www.mtmjournal.gr/datafiles/files/MTM_4.pdf
This article starts with an overview of the development of the concept “responsibility” in ethics from
its historical origins to current approaches. It covers the traditional distinction between “responsibility”
and “accountability” and moves on to prospective dimensions, i.e. social and future aspects of responsi-
bility and, against this background, discusses responsibility in Vermeer’s skopos theory.
Künzli, Alexander. 2004. “Die Loyalitätsbeziehungen der Ubersetzungsrevisorin.” In Neue Perspektiven in
der Ubersetzungs- und Dolmetschwissenschaft: Festschrift für Heidrun Gerzymisch-Arbogast zum 60. Geburt-
stag, edited by Juliane House, Werner Koller, and Klaus Schubert, 89–98. Fremdsprachen in Lehre und
Forschung 35. Bochum: AKS-Verlag.
This study makes use of the loyalty concept in the context of translation revision, adding translation
editors to the list of possible roles in translational action and shedding light on a case where translators
are a possible target of loyalty.
Hebenstreit, Gernot. 2018. “Translating and Interpreting Cultures: Discussing Translation and Interpreting
Ethics in a Postmonolingual Age.” In Translating and Interpreting Justice in a Postmonolingual Age, edited by
Esther Monzó-Nebot, and Juan Jiménez Salcedo, 61–75. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press.
The article provides an historical introduction to Prunc’s concept of translation culture and offers a
comparative analysis of translational values and virtues as found in the works of Prunc and Chesterman,
including Chesterman’s “Hieronymic Oath” and Prunc’s “maxim of action.”
71
6
Ethics in Berman and
Meschonnic
1 Introduction
This chapter examines the notion of ethics in the works of two influential French authors,
Antoine Berman (1942–1991) and Henri Meschonnic (1932–2009). Specifically, it aims to
clarify the ways in which these two important thinkers conceive of ethics and what their con-
tributions may be to the discourse of ethics in translation, specifically in literary translation.
Both Berman and Meschonnic depart from the French linguistic tradition in Translation
Studies, as represented, first, by the extremely influential Comparative Stylistics of French and
English: A Methodology for Translation (1958) by French Canadian linguists Jean-Paul Vinay and
Jean Darbelnet, in which they offered a list of rules and a taxonomy of translation procedures;
and second by the work of linguist Georges Mounin, in particular Les Problèmes théoriques de la
traduction (1963) and Linguistique et traduction (1976), in which he attempted to provide a scien-
tific linguistic account of translation. Instead Berman and Meschonnic, each in his own way,
developed an interdisciplinary approach that mixes philosophy, poetics, criticism, and sociology
to talk about what translation, specifically literary translation, does.
To understand how Berman and Meschonnic developed their thinking about translation and
more specifically their views of ethics in translation, it is useful to have a sense of their socio-
cultural environment. Antoine Berman studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and wrote a dis-
sertation on the poetics of the German Romantics, but he worked mostly outside of the French
university system. After a five-year detour through Argentina, he published a translation of
Yo el supremo by Argentinian writer Augusto Roa Bastos as well as L’épreuve de l’étranger (The
Experience of the Foreign) based on his dissertation. He then became the first program director
at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, which was co-founded by philosopher
Jacques Derrida outside of the university system. The college focused on interdisciplinary
approaches and themes not usually studied in French universities, and Berman offered a num-
ber of seminars on translation, one of them on Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Task of
the Translator” in 1985.
72
Ethics in Berman and Meschonnic
Berman’s work with the German Romantics led him to advocate an approach to translation
that is non-ethnocentric. He emphasized its role as a positive cultural and literary force that
should respect the otherness of the source text (its language and culture) while recognizing
the agency of the translator. His articulation of difference in translation has been influential on
postcolonial and feminist approaches to translation in particular. At the same time, during his
time as director of the Centre Amyot, a short-lived government-funded centre for terminol-
ogy and translation, his interest in various aspects of translation and his desire to have the work
of translators properly recognized led to the publication of booklets on specialized translation
geared at businesses. His last work Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne in which he devel-
oped a method for analyzing translations, what he called a “positive criticism,” was published
posthumously in 1995.
In contrast, Henri Meschonnic spent his long career within the French university system,
albeit most of it in a university known for its radicalness. He trained as a literary scholar and a
linguist and became a professor of linguistics in Lille, then in 1969 at Vincennes Paris VIII, a new
experimental institution where Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Luce
Irigaray, Etienne Balibar, and Jacques Lacan, among others, were also professors. Meschonnic
participated in the creation of the important reference work, the Larousse Dictionnaire du français
contemporain (1967). He was extraordinarily prolific, and his interests were varied. He authored
some sixty works of poetics, linguistics, philosophy, poetry, essays, and translations. His poetry
earned him major literary prizes (Prix Max Jacob in 1972 for Dédicaces proverbes and the Prix
Mallarmé in 1985 for Voyageurs de la voix). He also contributed greatly to the rediscovery of the
German linguist philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1737–1835), who was also among the
thinkers Berman analyzed in his first book.
For Meschonnic, the theory and the practice of translation are inseparable, as are literature
and translation. He is known both for his translations of the Old Testament from Hebrew
into French and for theoretical works that challenged the tenets of structuralism. In particular,
he authored Pour la poétique II, Épistémologie de l’écriture, Poétique de la traduction (1973) and a
monumental 800-page work titled Critique du Rhythme (1982). In the same way as Berman did,
Meschonnic rejected the conception and practice of translation as “annexation” (what Berman
called “ethnocentric translation”) in favour of “decentering,” a translating gesture which allows
a textual relation between two texts that does not erase the differences in culture, time, and
linguistic structures that exist in those texts.
Berman has been influential among Anglophone scholars. His works, especially in L’Épreuve
de l’Etranger (1984) translated by S. Heyvaert as The Experience of the Foreign (1992), “La Traduc-
tion et la lettre, or l’auberge du lointain” (1985), and Pour une critique des traductions (1995), trans-
lated by Françoise Massardier-Kenney (Toward a Translation Criticism, 2009), participated in what
Barbara Godard has called the “ethical turn” (2001) in Translation Studies. Witness the number
of works influenced by Berman, among them Lawrence Venuti’s seminal book The Scandals of
Translation (1998). Venuti’s much quoted essay “The Ethics of Translation” even begins with
a reference to Berman’s concept of translation ethics as one based on the recognition of the
Other and on the importance of intercultural relationships; Berman is the most quoted author
in Anthony Pym’s 1997 Pour une Ethique du Traducteur (For a Translator’s Ethic). Berman is also
known through French philosopher Paul Ricœur who ends his book Sur la Traduction (2004)
with the titles of Berman’s works L’Epreuve de l’étranger and La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du
lointain (Translation and the Letter or the Inn of the Faraway).
Meschonnic is less well known in the Anglophone world because of the astonishing unavail-
ability of his work in English, which is perhaps due to his opposition to the theoretical move-
ments that became popular in the Anglophone world (i.e. structuralism and deconstruction) and
73
his often belligerent remarks about living critics, authors, and translators. However, the publica-
tion of his last work, Ethique et Politique du Traduire (2007), translated as Ethics and Politics of Trans-
lating by Pascale Piers Boulanger in 2011, has received critical attention and provides translation
studies scholars with a point of entry into his thought. Similarly a special issue of Comparative
Critical Studies (2019) devoted to Meschonnic will contribute to the dissemination of his works,
as should the forthcoming volume Henri Meschonnic Reader: A Poetics of Society (2019).
Both thinkers propose in different ways an ethics of translation that is at heart a reflection
on the relations between identity and alterity and on the role of translation as a de-centering
process.

While Berman’s work triggered an “ethical turn” in Translation Studies and has led to numerous
publications and conferences on the topic, it has also become clear that a multitude of definitions
of ethics are at work in Translation Studies (Chesterman 2017) and that we need more than lists
of do’s and don’ts supposed to guide professional translators. In fact, the study of translation has
lacked an explicit examination of ethics grounded in concepts and terms elaborated in philoso-
phy. It is important, however, to interpret the works of Berman and Meschonnic using existing
philosophical frameworks so that their ethics of translation may be evaluated consistently and
meaningfully.
In the 2001 special issue of TTR devoted to the work of Berman, the feminist translation
scholar Barbara Godard wrote about Berman and the “ethical turn” in translation. She charac-
terized Berman as “Kantian,” a statement which, if not inaccurate, was at least incomplete. It is
true that Berman’s notion of ethics is indeed a type of “duty-type normative ethics.” In moral
philosophy, normative ethics refers to the questions that come up when we consider how we
should act. In turn, duty-based moral theories are based on principles of obligation (duties) that
determine whether an action is right or wrong. Kant emphasized a single principle of duty (what is
also called a priori categorical imperative) and asserted that the morality of all actions can be deter-
mined by appealing to this single well-known a priori principle: “Treat people as an end, and
never as a means to an end.” However, Berman does not embrace an a priori categorical impera-
tive, a single pre-existing moral law valid in all cases, which is characteristic of Kant. In fact,
before we can discuss Berman’s and Meschonnic’s ethics, it is important to note that the word
“ethics” is often loosely used in Translation Studies to refer to some kind of universal category,
but in moral philosophy, this notion of one principle for all practices refers to only one type of
ethics. Thus it is inaccurate to state as Gouanvic (2001, 33) does, “Any ethics worth its name
must account for all the practices in a given domain; if it does not, it could be seen as elitist or
populist, depending on the case, and thus go against the universal aims of ethics,” and then to
propose to integrate all the practices of translation; as we shall see, he is misreading Berman’s
emphasis on the principle of welcoming the stranger/foreigner into the host culture.
Berman’s discussion of ethics begins with L’Epreuve de l’étranger (1984) in which he examines
the theories of translation developed by nineteenth-century German authors (including Novalis,
Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Goethe, Humboldt, and Herder). In this work, he conceives of the
ethics of translation as resting on a priori notions of what is “good,” what he calls “the pure
aim of translation” (Berman 1992, 6), which he argues needs to be liberated from its ideological
ghetto. He reminds his readers that at one time questions of fidelity and treason did not matter
because the mother tongue was not considered sacred. It is when this sacralization occurs in
given cultures that translation becomes repressed and resisted because it is at odds with the eth-
nocentric tendency and illusion of self-sufficiency held by every culture. On the contrary, “true”
74
translation seeks to establish a relation with the Other and “fertilize what is one’s Own through
the mediation of what is Foreign” (Berman 1992, 4). At such times, when translation reflects the
cultural illusion of self-sufficiency and its accompanying need to appropriate other cultures (he
gives as examples ancient Roman culture, classical French culture, and modern North American
culture), it results in “ethnocentric translations,” or what he calls “bad” translations. In contrast,
he proposes that the “ethical aim of translating is by its very nature opposed to this injunction:
“The essence of translation is to be an opening, a dialogue, a cross-breeding, a decentering” (4).
As we will see, Meschonnic also mentions this notion of decentering in opposition to what he
calls annexation when he describes poetics and translation. Berman further explains, “A bad
translation I call the translation which, generally under the guise of transmissibility, carries out
a systematic negation of the strangeness of the foreign work” (Berman 1992, 5). This statement
is what probably led Barbara Godard to characterize Berman’s position as Kantian. As we have
seen earlier, Kant’s notion of ethics rests on the a priori universal principle of duty. For him,
moral rightness and wrongness are based on a moral law that is in place prior to the action tak-
ing place and there is only one basis of moral obligation: the Good Will. Berman’s notion of the
essence of translation, of “bad” and “good” translations, can indeed be seen as based on a kind
of categorical imperative that mandates behaviour, parallel to Kant’s imperative to treat people
as an end and never as a means to an end. Berman’s notion of dialogue and decentering, of
cross-breeding with the other, implies a respect of the other, a duty of hospitality regardless of
circumstances. This fundamental duty of openness to the other is expressed in the title La traduc-
tion et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain (1999), a work in which he opposes ethnocentric translation
to an ethical translation which is in its essence “motivated by the desire to open the Foreign as
Foreign to one’s own space of language” (Berman 1995, 74) as opposed to rejecting or attempt-
ing to dominate the Other. However, Berman’s position is not quite an a priori imperative since
it is obviously based on Berman’s observations of human beings and past and present behaviour
with regard to translation. In particular, it is based on his study of past and current practices in
translation and his observation that, in the French tradition (and in most Western traditions and
the Arabic tradition), translation tended to appropriate and digest the other rather than provide
a welcoming space.
Berman’s focus on the strangeness of the foreign work is a legacy of Friedrich Schleierm-
acher’s call to bring the reader to the author and to transmit a “feeling of foreignness” ([1813]
1982, 46), and of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s ([1816] 1992) famous distinction between das
Fremde (the flavour of the foreign) which the translator should strive to convey, and die Fremd-
heit (foreignness, strangeness), which the translator should avoid (159). However, Berman goes
beyond this tradition in that he transforms this aesthetic and literary imperative – which was also
a political one since this desire to bring the foreign into German stems from a desire to expand
the resources of the receiving language and culture, in other words, to enrich German – into an
ethical imperative. He credits Schleiermacher for making the choice of presenting the “foreign
in the mother tongue” (150) and of presenting this choice as that of authenticity, which, accord-
ing to Berman, unites “the ethical and the ontological dimension, justice and correctness.” (151).
However, this ethical dimension seems more a concern of Berman himself rather than what
Schleiermacher is actually proposing. Schleiermacher does say that authentic translation (which
brings the foreign into the mother tongue) must be applied extensively: “a transplantation of
whole literatures into a language, and it makes sense and is of value only to a nation that has the
definite inclination to appropriate what is foreign” (151, emphasis added). But as this quote makes
clear, at the same time as Schleiermacher’s notion of translation expresses the ideal of Bildung,
the process of human development by which one “can only gain access to oneself through the
experience of the other” (88) in society, his notion also indicates that translation is perceived as
75
a type of utilitarian ethics focused on the receiving culture: translation will expand the capacity
of one’s language and thus benefit its many speakers. In other words, the receiving culture, the
self that is accessed, is at the centre of the process described by Schleiermacher.
In contrast, Berman’s (1992) goal in affirming the alterity of the source text is an ethical
imperative that requires a decentering and that moves away from utilitarianism. As he concludes
in The Experience of the Foreign:
The issue is to defend language and the relations among languages against the increasing
homogenization of communication systems – because they endanger the entire realm of
belonging and diference. Annihilation of dialects and local speech; trivialization of national
languages; leveling of the diferences among them for the beneft of a model of non-
language for which English served as guinea pig (and as victim) . . . this is a process that
thoroughly attacks language and the natural relation of human beings to language.
(181)
So rather than Kantian or utilitarian ethics, Berman’s ethics, especially as expressed in Pour une
critique des traductions, can be more fruitfully described using the nuanced ethical theory of moral
philosopher W.D. Ross. Berman does not reference Ross (nor Kant for that matter), but Ross’s
system is directly related to Berman’s thinking about ethics in translation and provides us with
precise philosophical concepts. Ross’s ethics of prima facie duties was developed in The Right and
the Good ([1930] 2002), in which he argued that there is a plurality of moral requirements and
goods (as opposed to Kant’s a priori unitary principle). Ross (1877–1971), a translator and editor
of Aristotle’s works, is considered a major twentieth-century ethicist who developed his theory
to address what he saw as limitations in Kant’s moral theory. In particular, as Anthony Skelton
(2012, 7) argues, Ross rejects Kant’s belief that only one motive has value. Instead, moral life
consists in the struggle among many desires which have “various degrees of worth.” For Ross,
basic moral propositions are self-evident; duties can be weighted of and we should recognize
that there are competing versions of the “right” or “good” depending on circumstances, as Ber-
man also intimated in Toward a Translation Criticism. For Ross, duties are not absolute and may
be conficting in a given situation, but we can come to an intuitive decision through a process
of weighing which of these duties is the one that we must follow. Prima facie duties are those
that give us genuine moral reasons to do certain actions. They include responsibilities both to
ourselves and to others; what we should do is determined by the balance of these responsibili-
ties. One obligation can be overridden by another obligation. What we should do is what is
appropriate to the situation. The prima facie duties come from relationships, the past, the future,
and the good. It is important to note that the inclusion of relationships among the duties is an
innovation in moral philosophy. For instance, the prima facie duty of fdelity can take the form
of keeping a promise. This duty has its grounding in a relationship that emerges when a promise
is made, and grounded in the past. In The Right and the Good, Ross (1930, 21) provides a list of
duties: those based on previous acts (those resting on a promise, for instance, the implicit promise
not to tell lies when entering a conversation, or translating accurately) and duties of reparation,
of gratitude, of justice, of benefcence, of self-improvement, and of non-malefcence (not to
harm others).
In Toward a Criticism of Translation, Berman (2009) develops a method that expresses a view
of ethics in translation that relies on an understanding that some considerations (duties) are
weightier than others depending on circumstances and on relationships, these circumstances
being the horizon and the project of the translator. When he says, “Ethics lies in the respect, or
rather, in a certain respect for the original” (74, emphasis original), he acknowledges the fact that
76
this notion of respect involves an inter-subjectivity, that is, an awareness of the presence of a
subject in the text translated, which involves a duty of non-maleficence (the translator must not
deny this subject) or fidelity (the translator must attempt to best transfer source text – call this
the prima facie duty of fidelity), but also the duty of the translator to him/herself to create a
text in her own language (this is a type of justice duty and even of self-improvement duty, that is
respect for one’s intelligence). Berman observes that the translator “must always want to create
a text [faire oeuvre]” and “stand up” to the original (74–75).
Sometimes, fidelity (usually conceived of as the promise of accuracy at the word level) must
be weighed against integrity (which could be a rendering that hews most closely to the rhythm
or cadence of the original work). In some cases (for instance the translations of Beowulf by Sea-
mus Heaney), integrity is more important than fidelity. So respect for the alterity of the text is
not in and of itself “ethical” if it is not also accompanied by the acknowledgement of the work
of the translator as a subject and an agent. For Berman, respect necessarily implies a dialogue
between the one and the other, the translator and the author. Further, he rejects servility, the
unthought reliance on equivalence at the word or phrase level which implies the “annihilation”
of the translator (2009, 75), and the non-recognition of the translator’s oeuvre (work as in artistic
creation) or the non-recognition of what the translated text “does” with its own language, to
use Meschonnic’s expression.
Berman also emphasizes that an ethical translation must be true to (respectful of) the work
translated and the translator’s own work, but also true to (respectful of) the readers. In keeping
with the “relationships” aspect of Ross’s prima facie duties, we can say that there is a fiduciary
relationship between the translator and the work that is being translated, but also between the
translator and the audience for whom the work is being translated. This relationship is the basis
of many obligations. Translators must acknowledge what they do and to what purpose. Indeed,
Berman states, “the translator has every right as soon as he is open about it” (2009, 75). He gives
the example of the Quebecois poet, translator, and theatre director Michel Garneau, who play-
fully comments in his translation of Macbeth that he is omitting lines because they are confusing
and who uses the Quebec sociolect joual in his translation. Garneau even coins the neologism
“tradaptation” (translation and adaptation) to describe his renderings of Shakespeare.
To establish the translator’s right to make choices, to decide how to translate, Berman relies
on the notion of translating position and translation project. He defines translating position as
the articulated (or unarticulated and unexpressed) conception the translator has about transla-
tion, what translation means, what its purpose is, and what its forms may be. He (2009, 58)
defines the translating position as “the compromise between the way in which the translator, as
a subject caught by the translation drive, perceives the task of translation, and the way in which
he has internalized the surrounding discourse on translation (the norms).” Thus, the translating
position refers to the subjectivity of the translator as it is shaped both by cultural norms (which
are part of what Berman calls “the horizon,” following Gadamer’s notion of horizon as the
cultural-historical context out of which interpretation always occurs) and a more personal striv-
ing. Every translator has a position because s/he is a subject in language and is part of a language
community. This position can be inferred by analyzing a translator’s translations and the paratexts
surrounding her/his activity as translator.
In addition, every translation has a project, that is, an articulated purpose. The project is
determined by the translating position of the translator as well as the “specific demands of each
work to be translated. . . . The project defines the way in which the translator is going to realize
the literary transfer and to take charge of the translation itself ” (Berman 2009, 60). Berman’s
notion of project implies a self-reflexivity on the part of the translator without the project being
an a priori theorizing. The project can emerge in the process of translating. A Bermanian project
77
refers to the existence of a translating subject who inscribes its presence in the language in which
s/he translates. A project is not good or bad, ethical or unethical, in and of itself. What makes it
ethical or unethical has to do with whether it is acknowledged or hidden. Berman mentioned
French Canadian translations of Shakespeare and Lorca as examples from the 1970s. A more
recent example might be the translation of Korean Han Kang’s The Vegetarian translated by
Deborah Smith (2015). The translator was criticized by a number of reviewers for embellishing
and expanding a number of sentences from the source text, as Jiayang Fan’s New Yorker article
“Buried Words” documented (2018). However, the translator was very open about what she did
and articulated her reasons in a number of interviews and articles and in a workshop with the
author herself. In addition, the author was in full agreement regarding her strategies, and the
translator was transparent with her readers and was attentive to the author’s own project. The
book was awarded the Man Booker Prize, and Smith just published the translation of Kang’s
latest novel The White Book. On the other extreme, there is the example of the 1944 translation
of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in Belgium under Nazi occupation. Gouanvic shows that the
many omissions, additions, and changes to the text aim at making the source text fit into a Nazi
ideology that is at odds with Steinbeck’s purpose, and that these changes are all unacknowledged
(Gouanvic 2001, 40). As Berman (2009) explains, “The project or aspiration is determined both
by the translating position and the specific demands of each work to be translated” (60, emphasis
added). This translation does not respect the integrity of the source text and, whether it keeps
some of its foreignness or not at the syntactic or lexical level, in hiding its purpose, it fails in its
fiduciary duty to the author and its audience.
Following Ross’s model, we can say that Berman’s ethics goes beyond recognizing the rela-
tion of a translation to its original and of making visible the foreign in the target text. His
insistence of the translator’s “right” and the need to acknowledge the translator’s position and
project avoid simplifying the relationships that exist among the work, the audience, the transla-
tor, and the author. Responsibility toward the source text does not mean that the source text is
autonomous. On the contrary.
Berman recognizes that the duty of “fidelity” (i.e. the duty to keep promises) depends on
circumstances (the cultural horizon, the translator’s position and project as we have seen) and one
of these circumstances is obviously the agency of the translator. A crucial development in Ber-
man’s notion of ethics is the recognition of the translator as subject, especially as developed in his
last work Toward a Translation Criticism: John Donne. Berman’s early ethics of non-ethnocentric
translation focusing on the recognition of the Other as developed in The Experience of the Foreign
is complemented and complicated by his recognition that in order to make sense, any notion of
ethics based on relationships (thus of duties, among which are the Rossian duties of justice and
self-improvement) must be accompanied by the existence of a subject (i.e. “the translator”) who
is free to make choices and whose experience must be taken seriously. His last work outlines
a model of translation criticism that is meant to question the subordination of the translating
subject (the translator is recognized as having a position and a project), and promotes a recogni-
tion that translation criticism must acknowledge both the duties to the source text, the author,
and his/her source language and to the translating subject, with his/her project, position, and
horizon.
Although Berman uses a vocabulary that is different from Meschonnic’s, his ethics, like
Meschonnic’s, is based on the recognition and preservation of plurality, of both identity and
alterity, and on a theory of non-ethnocentric translation.
However, unlike Berman, Meschonnic’s views on ethics have not been studied as such, in
part because his work has remained mostly untranslated but also because of the volume, variety,
and difficulty of his works. That said, his Ethique et Politique du Traduire, published in 2007 two
78
years before his death, provides an extended and useful description of what he means by ethics.
Although he shares with Berman (or Berman shares with him) the notion of the centrality of
the translator as subject, the Rossian model discussed earlier cannot be applied to Meschonnic’s
notion of ethics because, for him, ethics is embedded in a much larger system that includes his
notion of language and of subjectivity, and his rejection of the binary opposition between signi-
fier and signified on which the notion of the sign is based, a binary opposition which he calls the
“poison” of the “heterogeneity of the categories of reason” (2004, 121). His ethics of translation
are inseparable from his aesthetics, politics, and metaphysics and parallel his central notion of
the “continuum body-in-language” (127). This bringing together of ethics with epistemological
and metaphysical concerns grounds his thinking about language, translation, and ethics. It can be
most fruitfully related to the Spinozian tradition in which ethics is the sum of epistemological
and metaphysical notions.
Meschonnic rejects translating the sign in favour of what he calls translating “the poem,” that
is the site where the subject constitutes itself. Meschonnic’s use of the term refers not to a literary
form but to a way of thinking, a process of creating subjects. He uses “poem” in its etymological
sense of work, creating, making. He summarizes his principles as follows:
Because if the poem is the activity of the subject of the poem, it is frst an ethical act, and
if it is an ethical act, because it concerns all subjects, an ethical act is a political act. Thus,
a poem is an ethical and a political act. Whence a poetics of translating is an ethics and a
politics of translating.
(2011, 77)
Thus, while Berman can be understood through moral philosopher David Ross’s notion of
prima facie duties, Meschonnic leads us back to notions found in Spinoza’s Ethics and also to
von Humboldt’s understanding of language. In works such as Spinoza, poème de la pensée (Spi-
noza Poem of Thought) (2002) and “Humboldt, plus d’avenir que de passé” (2004), Meschonnic
emphasizes the connection between poems, ethics, and politics. He (127) states that poetics
is theory, in the sense that theory is a reflection about the unknown, about what systems of
knowledge as they are constituted (essentially the sign) prevent us from knowing: the continuum
body-language, the poem as ethical act and system of discourse, the continuum language-poem-
ethics-politics.
Meschonnic’s ethics is inseparable from his radical reconceptualization of language; for him
language is the place where we can resist dominant ideologies (modes of thinking and of feel-
ing), and translation is the way in which we can transform a language system “by importing a
foreign mode of consciousness” (Underhill 2013, 11). The ethics and politics of literature consist
in creating discourses that develop alternative modes of thought that allow subjects to come to
existence.
Meschonnic’s thinking about ethics can be teased out of his earlier numerous writings, which
include, beside several works of poetry and translation, an 800-page work on his theory of
rhythm (1982), books on philosophers (on Heidegger in 1990; Spinoza in 2002), many articles
and books on various topics (translating the Bible, Hugo’s poetics), as well as his Pour La poé-
tique II. Epistémologie de l’écriture. Poétique de la Traduction (1973), Poétique du Traduire (1999),
Ethique et Politique du Traduire, and his posthumous magnus opus Langage, histoire, une même théorie
(Language, History, One and the Same Theory 2012),1 which brings together his essays and
prefaces spanning over three decades and documents his life-long concern with the connection
of language theory (of which translation theory is part) to ethics and politics. All these works
exemplify what could be called the Meschonnic ecosystem. This ecosystem derives from the
79
Spinozian tradition in which ethics is the logical outgrowth of epistemological and metaphysi-
cal notions.
The Jewish Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677) was an early proponent of
rationalism and freedom of thought.2 His major works include the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
(1670), a mixture of biblical criticism, political philosophy, and metaphysics. In Tractatus Spinoza
argues that since divine law is necessary and eternal, it cannot be changed by any human or
divine action (thus miracles must have scientific explanations). Likewise, the Bible should be
studied as a historical document in a scientific way, and people should be allowed to think, write,
and publish freely. In opposition to Descartes, Spinoza rejects the mind/body dualism. His major
work Ethics (Spinoza 1677) is written like a geometrical proof with a series of definitions, axi-
oms, and derived propositions, which Meschonnic emulates in his essay “Propositions pour une
Poétique de la Traduction” (Propositions of a Poetics of Translation) (1973, 306–326). In Ethics,
Spinoza argues that there is just one substance apprehended by us through “extension” (i.e. mat-
ter, the physical world or things) and thought (spirit). For him, the order of matter is causal in
nature and so is the Spirit, but one order does not affect the other, which means that matter is
not the cause of the spirit, and reciprocally, the spirit is not the cause of matter. They are just two
parallel ways of viewing one thing: substance. Spinoza is not a materialist; he brings matter and
spirit together. His emphasis on the body, on correlation and interrelation, on the non-binary,
and on the process of understanding to attain freedom are key notions shaping Meschonnic’s
ethics. Meschonnic also adopts Spinoza’s linking of ethical theory to social and political theory.3
In his book on Spinoza (2002),4 Meschonnic argues that Spinoza’s ethic of language is the
ethic of his entire thought, and thus makes Spinoza’s conception of language part of his ethic
and political thought, what Meschonnic will call the “body-language, language-poem-ethics-
politics continuum.” Meschonnic rejects readings of Spinoza that reinstate the sign, that is the
mind/body dualism and the signifier/signified opposition and that ignore the “relation con-
ceived between rhythm, prosody, and thought” (119) to focus on Spinoza’s thinking about “the
inseparation between affect and concept” (119).
Meschonnic’s analysis of Spinoza’s language, with is emphasis on “poetics,” is one of the major
places where Meschonnic articulates his own views about the interrelation between poetics and
ethics, thought and language. When he speaks about Spinoza, he is weaving in his own think-
ing. He states, “Philosophers are interested in thought. Poetics attempts to hear in language the
movements of the body. Spinoza thinks the unity of the two,” (2002, 128) and links this poet-
ics to ethics. Throughout his commentary, Meschonnic insists on the continuum of Spinoza’s
thought (what he calls “la pensée Spinoza”), his language “la langue Spinoza” and his rejection
of dualism as these examples (a few among many) show: “a word is not a tool. Poetics rejects this
conception of language. . . . The sign is not the nature of language. It is only one representation”
(129); “the particular is included in the universal . . . Spinoza’s conceptual power issues from this
connection” (151). Near the end of the book, Meschonnic again emphasizes that the unity of
spirit and body as conceived by Spinoza implies “an activity of the continuum in language. . . .
It implies the thought of what a body does to language” (2002, 270). This continuum body/
language is for Meschonnic at the core of ethics in the act of language because it both inscribes
the subject in language and language in the subject. Language, here in the sense of empirical
discourse, is where the subject manifests itself. Since ethics has to do with leading a good life, to
use Spinoza’s terms, that is, a life in which human beings strive to exercise reason and to develop
adequate emotions in order to preserve their essence as human beings, it is necessarily linked to
this presence of the subject in language, which Meschonnic calls poetics. He (2002, 296) repeats,
“In this continuous invention of language by a subject and of the subject by language is ethics in
the act of language.” And he adds: “Hence the act of thinking, the act of language is an ethical
80
act, hence a poetic act, hence a political act” (300). To sum up, from Spinoza, Meschonnic takes
his insistence on the inseparability of matter and spirit, as two attributes of one substance, in
opposition to duality, and develops his notion of thinking as an act in language which demotes
the sign to one (false) representation of language to replace it with the continuum of language.
Meschonnic rejects translating the sign in favour of what he calls translating “the poem,”
that is, not a literary form, but the site where the subject – understood as the “very property of
transformation and continuity” – not the individual as a person (1988, 100) – constitutes itself
through its historical activity. For him, poetics is the place where notions that are usually (and
mistakenly) treated in separate disciplines can be brought together. He defines poetics (thus
ethics and politics) as the history of the concepts with which literature and language have been
thought, in particular the concepts regarding the relation between literature and language, the
relation between the subject who exposes itself and invents itself [s’expose et qui s’invente] in lan-
guage, the subject and its relation to society, of the interrelation between history and language
and society (1999, 140). The understanding that strives to recognize the interrelations between
the concepts mentioned earlier constitutes Meschonnic’s ethics and politics and is founded on
a critique of the sign, what he calls the striving for the continuum between language and lit-
erature, language and society, and language and subject, and for which he credits Wilhelm von
Humboldt’s (1999, 141) seminal thinking about both the diversity and specificity of languages.
In “Humboldt, plus d’avenir que de passé” (Humboldt, more future than past) (2004),
Meschonnic specifically refers to von Humboldt’s role in thinking the connection between
poem, ethics, and politics.
While Spinoza informs Meschonnic’s correlation of epistemological, metaphysical, and ethi-
cal system, Wilhelm von Humboldt is central specifically to Meschonnic’s thinking about lan-
guage (thus about ethics) because, as he says, he is an antidote “to the poison of the current
heterogeneity of the categories of reason, the separation of knowledge in ‘regional sciences’”
(2004, 121). Meschonnic sees in Humboldt a thinker who refused to separate disciplines, thus to
separate translation from ethics and politics. Humboldt (1767–1835) was a philosopher, educa-
tional reformer, translator, and a linguist who pioneered the scientific study of language (Basque
and the Kawi language of Java). In particular, he was interested in the interrelation of culture and
language (what is now called ethnolinguistics). Like Spinoza, he also rejected the mind/body
dualism in favour of a vital unity of mind and body. He saw speech as the product of simultane-
ous interactions:
A word is more than just the sign of a concept, for the concept could not come into exis-
tence, let al.ne be grasped, without the word; the indeterminate force of a thought forms
itself into a word just as soft clouds form out of a clear blue sky.
(von Humboldt, [1816] 1992, 55)
In other words, Humboldt recognizes that there are two interacting elements present in speech:
the existing language of the speakers, who depend on it to be understood by others (that is, a
linguistic and cultural mindset), and the individual character of each speaker’s speech, which
modifies these traditions and expresses a personal perspective.
As Mueller-Vollmer puts it,5 Humboldt does not view human speech as applying and manip-
ulating a fixed system of arbitrary signs but consisting of the “operation of joining together [empha-
sis mine] these two different sets of orders: that of the articulated sound, the signifier, and that of
the ‘thought’ or signified. Signification (speaking) is defined by him as the synthesis (Saussure’s
combination) of sound and idea.” For Humboldt (and for Meschonnic and Berman of course),
language is not merely instrumental: linguistic signs are not the instruments of communication
81
for ideas that already exist. In addition, Humboldt perceives language not as a fixed entity or
object, but as something that is real only in the moment of speaking, as an activity. This emphasis
on activity is picked up by Meschonnic when he insists throughout his works that what matters
is what language does. That “does” expresses Humboldt’s key concept of language as “Energeia”
against a view of language as instrumental. It is in Humboldt that we can find Meschonnic’s
emphasis on translation’s need to attend to what the language “does”: “Language is not a prod-
uct but an activity” (2004, 122). Indeed, Meschonnic repeatedly urges us to consider “what
the poem does” rather than “what it says” (2011, 69). This doing is tied to his notion of rhythm
as the organization of the movement of speech within a rhythm-syntax-prosody continuum.
Rather than translating a language system, we should focus on the action of a subject on her/
his language; not on what an utterance says but on “what a system of discourse does, or what it
does to you” (2011, 90). Translators must invent “discourse equivalences in the target language,
prosody for prosody, metaphor for metaphor, pun for pun, rhythm for rhythm” (71). In short,
translation must be experimental and transformative. It is the subject that must be translated and
heard through attention to discourse instead of language, information, and communication (98).
As James Underhill succinctly puts it, “The Subject ‘becomes’ through language” (2012, 32).
Meschonnic points out that Humboldt’s importance for our understanding of language,
translation, and ethics is that he sees its origin in its functioning. He (2004) sees Humboldt’s
conception of language as a way to escape what he calls “the anthropologies of totality, of the
binary one plus one equals everything (generalized semiotization of thought)” (122).
Meschonnic again stresses that ethics is part of a continuum, a diversity of thinking, an aware-
ness that there are different worldviews (2004, 122). This diversity, theorized by Humboldt,
allows him to think of poetics as anthropology, the theory of language as a continuum of body-
language, language-poem-ethics-politic. Meschonnic refers to Humboldt’s recognition of the
role of translation to “enlarge the significance and the expressive capacity of one’s own language”
(2004, 35–37) and his insistence that identity arises only through alterity. However, he warns
us not to think of identity and alterity in terms of individualistic conceptions of the individual
and to avoid going back to the traditional dualism between the individual and the social. On the
contrary, Meschonnic (1988) explains, “what one calls a work [œuvre] is what can be passed on
to others, indicating that the subject is that very property of transformation and continuity – not
the individual as a person. The writer and the reader become subjects through the work” (100).
In an effort to do away with dualistic theories of the sign, Meschonnic uses notions of sig-
nifiance, rhythm, and orality, which are all tied to his view of literature, translation, and poetry
as ethical acts. Signifiance is a concept Meschonnic finds in the linguist Benveniste who creates
this neologism to go beyond the concept of signification, which was linked to the sign and its
referent (Meschonnic 1997). In contrast, signifiance is linked to the very activity of signifying,
so that there is no longer a signifier opposed to a signified (as in the definition of the sign).
Meschonnic expands Benveniste’s notion of signifiance as what constructs a subject in and
through a text (Bedetti 1992, 449). For him, signifiance is more than meaning. It establishes the
new into the established. It is a creative value (445). And it is this creative value that translation
must strive to express.
In turn, Meschonnic defines rhythm in language as the movement of signifiance, as a con-
tinuous movement that exposes the subject. He began developing his theory of rhythm, which
arose from his practice as a writer and translator, when he began reading the Bible in Hebrew.
He realized that the writing was full of oral marks: accents and counter-accents, echoes, which
contributed to the production of meaning and to its effects, but which had not been visible in
the French translations he had previously read (Meschonnic 1994). As theoretician of rhythm
Pascal Michon (2012) describes it, Meschonnic thus developed the new concept of “the rhythm
82
of a discourse” to account for this active production of signification through a “linguistic activity
that doesn’t separate the signified from the signifier” (2). Meschonnic’s definition of rhythm dif-
fers from the traditional (Platonic) definitions which involve the organization of a movement of
sounds as a binary, arithmetic series of beats (another form of dualism against which he rebels).
In contrast, he returns to the pre-Socratic conception of the word rhuthmos to mean a “way of
flowing,” and redefines it as “an organization of the movement of speech in writing” (Michon
2012, 3). In his Critique du rythme, Meschonnic (qtd in Michon 2010) explains:
I defne rhythm in language as the organization of the marks through which the signifers,
whether they are linguistic or extra-linguistic (in the case of oral communication), produce
a specifc semantics, distinct from the lexical meaning, and that I call the Signifance: i.e.,
the values that belong to one discourse and to only one. These marks can be located on any
level of language: accentuation, prosody, lexicon, syntax.
(3)
This rhythm of discourse produces a new kind of subject, which explains why attending to this
rhythm (in translating or in writing) is an integral part of his ethics and politics of language as
reading or hearing literary works change “our ways of feeling, thinking, behaving or acting”
(Michon 2012, 4). The last important element of Meschonnic’s theory of rhythm is his notion of
“oral” and “orality” which goes beyond the binary opposition of written and spoken. This third
term refers to the bodily, rhythmic element in writing, which translation must strive to render.
For Meschonnic, rhythm is what “governs meaning” as the continuous movement of signifance
constructed by the historical activity of a subject (4). Since rhythm/signifance/writing is the site
where the subject (both social and individual) becomes, writing, and even more so translation, is
profoundly political: it is where ideology can be transformed, where worldviews can be resisted,
and where new modes of feeling and of thinking can emerge.
4 Conclusions
Although Meschonnic and Berman come out of different philosophical traditions (Spinozism
for Meschonnic, hermeneutics for Berman), they are both influenced by Humboldt’s view of
language as that which both shapes us and is shaped by us. They both share a conviction that
language is where the subject is constructed, and that an ethics of translation should be based
on an understanding of the system of relations in which this construction or shaping occur, be
they social, cultural, linguistic, or political relations, and of the system of relationships involved
in translation (author, translator, reader). They share a common passionate drive to think about
translation and its role as a site where the subject can “become” at the intersection of sameness
and alterity. They also share the willingness to go against the dominant models that have created
binary oppositions (form/content, word/thing, biological/historical, individual/society, source
oriented/target oriented, foreignization/appropriation, linguistic/cultural, ordinary language/
literary language, etc.) and that allowed discussions of translation to continue using unexamined
moral notions of “fidelity,” which pre-suppose the existence of a stable, fixed, individual original.
One of the issues Meschonnic’s and Berman’s work brings up is the question of whether it
is legitimate to speak about ethics in a context where the translator does not have autonomy or
power, and whether one can talk about translation ethics broadly in an attempt to conceptual-
ize a system that will include the translation of all kinds of texts. Both Meschonnic’s and Ber-
man’s writings about what ethics in translation can and should be are based on their recognition
that literary translation ethics can only make sense if it is accompanied by a recognition of the
83
existence of a free translating subject, a recognition that is often absent from much of the dis-
course on translation ethics. In other words, there cannot be a translation ethics if there is no
translating subject in the language. At a time when artificial intelligence and neural machine
translation are developing at such a rapid pace, and when translators may well be soon replaced
by language workers who will merely work to clean up the output of machine systems, the work
of Meschonnic and Berman with its emphasis on the subject can encourage Translation Studies
scholars to avoid separating discussions of the role of translation from discussions of the role of
literature and language, and to reflect further on the notion of the “foreign.” Because Berman
and Meschonnic deeply cared about the subject in translation, about the forgotten translator,
about what the text does, about the interconnectedness of the material practice of translators and
of their theoretical and cultural positions, their writing can help us reflect about the conditions
under which it is still possible to speak about translation ethics.

Virtue ethics; the ethics of linguistic hospitality and untranslatability in Derrida and Ricœur;
Venuti and the ethics of difference; literary translator ethics.
Notes
1 For a recent discussion of this work, see Marko Pajević’s “A Poetics of Society: Thinking Language with
Henri Meschonnic” (2019).
2 For a useful summary of Spinoza’s life and works, see the article by Richard H. Popkin, www.britannica.
com/biography/Benedict-de-Spinoza (2019), or Roger Scruton, “Spinoza, A Very Short Introduction”
(2002).
3 See philosopher Don Garrett, “Spinoza’s Ethical Theory” (1996), for a full description of Spinoza’s ethical
terms and his relations to topics of ethical theory; 267–314.
4 All translations from Spinoza, Poème de la Pensée are mine since there is no existing English translation.
5 For a clear and thorough description of Humboldt’s theory of language, see Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt and
Messling, Markus (2017), “Wilhelm von Humboldt,” and for an exposition of his thinking about transla-
tion, see his 1816 Introduction to his translation of Agamemnon.
References
Bedetti, G. 1992. “Henri Meschonnic. Rhythm as Pure Historicity.” New Literary History 23, no. 2: 431–50.
Berman, A. 1984. L’épreuve de l’étranger: Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique: Herder, Goethe,
Schlegel, Novalis, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin. Paris: Gallimard.
Berman, A. 1985. “La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain.” In Les Tours de Babel, 1st edition,
35–150. Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress.
Berman, A. 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Translated by
Stefan Heyvaert. Albany: SUNY Press.
Berman, A. 1995. Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne. Paris: Gallimard.
Berman, A. 2009. Toward a Translation Criticism: John Donne. Translated by Françoise Massardier-Kenney.
Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.
Chesterman, A. 2017. Reflections on Translation Theory: Selected Papers 1993–2014. Amsterdam, Philadel-
phia: John Benjamins.
Garrett, D. 1996. “Spinoza’s Ethical Theory.” In The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, edited by D. Garrett,
267–314. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Godard, B. 2001. “L’Éthique du traduire: Antoine Berman et le virage éthique en traduction” [The Ethics
of Translating: Antoine Berman and the Ethical Turn in Translation]. Antoine Berman Aujourd’hui, edited
by Alexis Nouss. TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 14, no. 2: 49–82.
Gouanvic, J.-M. 2001. “Ethos, éthique et traduction: vers une communauté de destin dans les cultures.” In
Antoine Berman aujourd’hui, edited by Alexis Nouss. TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 14, no. 2: 31–46.
84
Fan, J. 2018. “Han Kang and the Complexity of Translation.” New Yorker, January 15: 62–4.
Kang, Han. 2015. The Vegetarian. Translated by Deborah Smith. London, New York: The Hogarth Press.
Meschonnic, H. 1973. Pour la poétique II. Epistémologie de l’écriture. Poétique de la traduction, 306–26. Paris:
Gallimard.
Meschonnic, H. 1988. “Interview.” Diacritics 18, no. 3: 93–111.
Meschonnic, H. 1994. “Le Rythme comme éthique et poétique du traduire.” In Atti della Fiera Internazio-
nale della Traduzione, vol. 2, edited by Michèle A. Lorgnet, 63–86. Bologna: Cooperativa Lib. Univ.
Ed. Bologna.
Meschonnic, H. 1997. “Benveniste: sémantique sans sémiotique.” Linx 9: 307–26.
Meschonnic, H. 1999. Poétique du traduire. Lagrasse: Verdier.
Meschonnic, H. 2004. “Humboldt, plus d’avenir que de passé.” Ars Semeiotica: An International Journal of
Semiotics 27, no. 1–2: 119–29.
Meschonnic, H. 2002. Spinoza, poème de la pensée. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose.
Meschonnic, H. 2007. Éthique et politique du traduire. Lagrasse: Éditions Verdier.
Meschonnic, H. 2011. Ethics and Politics of Translating. Translated by Pascale Piers Boulanger. Amsterdam,
Meschonnic, H. 2012. Langage, histoire, une même théorie. Lagrasse, France: Verdier.
Michon, P. 2010. “Rythme, langage et subjectivation selon Henri Meschonnic.” Rhuthmos, juillet 15.
Accessed February 16, 2019. http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article32
Michon, P. 2012. “Une brève histoire de la théorie du rythme depuis les années 1970.” Rhuthmos. Accessed
February 16, 2019. http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article608
Mueller-Vollmer, K., and M. Messling. 2017. “Wilhelm von Humboldt.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, Spring 2017 edition, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed November 30, 2018. https://
plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/wilhelm-humboldt/
Pajević, M. 2019. “A Poetics of Society: Thinking Language with Henri Meschonnic.” Comparative
Critical Studies 15, no. 3. Accessed February 21, 2019. www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/
ccs.2018.0297
Popkin, R. 2019. “Benedict de Spinoza.” Accessed February 23, 2019. www.britannica.com/biography/
Benedict-de-Spinoza
Pym, A. 1997. Pour une éthique du traducteur. Lille: Artois Presses Université.
Ross, D.W. [1930] 2002. The Right and the Good, 2nd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. [1813] 1982. “On the Different Methods of Translation.” Translated by André
Lefevere. In German Romantic Criticism, edited by A. Leslie Willson, 1–30. New York: Continuum.
Scruton, P. 2002. Spinoza, a Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Skelton, Anthony. 2012. “William David Ross.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by
Edward N. Zalta. Summer 2012 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/
william-david-ross/
Spinoza, Benedict de. 1677, 2005. Ethics. Translated by Edwin Curley. London: Penguin Classics.
Underhill, J. 2012. Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts: Truth, Love, Hate and War. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Underhill, J. 2013. Creating Worldviews. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Venuti, L. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London, New York: Routledge.
von Humboldt, W. [1816] 1992. “From Introduction to His Translation of Agamemnon.” In Theories of
Translation, edited by Rainer Shulte, and John Biguenet, translated by Sharon Sloan, 55–9. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Further reading
Berman, Antoine. 2009. Toward a Translation Criticism: John Donne. Translated by Françoise Massardier-
Kenney. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.
This is the essential primary source text to become acquainted with Berman’s thinking. The first part,
“The Project of a Productive Criticism,” will be particularly helpful.
Berman, Antoine. 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Trans-
lated by S. Heyvaert. Binghamton, NY: SUNY Press.
This early work is useful to understand the origin of Berman’s thinking about translation.
85
Meschonnic, Henri. 2011. Ethics and Politics of Translating. Translated by Pascale Piers Boulanger. Amster-
The first four chapters deal specifically with the question of ethics in translating and provide a good
introduction to Meschonnic’s style and thought.
Meschonnic, Henri. 2019. The Henri Meschonnic Reader: A Poetics of Society. Edited by Marko Pajević,
Translated by Pier-Pascale Boulanger, Andrew Eastman, John E. Joseph, David Nowell Smith, Marko
Pajević, and Chantal Wright. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
This volume provides a variety of primary texts for readers interested in reading several of Meschon-
nic’s essays on translation (the chapters in part 4) and his essay “Realism, Nominalism: The Theory of
Language Is a Theory of Society.”
86
7
The ethics of linguistic
hospitality and untranslatability
in Derrida and Ricœur
1 Introduction
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) with his deconstruction and Paul Ricœur (1913–2005) with his
hermeneutic theory of interpretation can be seen as the two central figures in 20th-century
continental philosophy who have contributed to the study of translation as a philosophical and
ethical question. Of the two approaches, deconstruction has been given a much more promi-
nent position in translation studies than has the notion of translation ethos by Paul Ricœur, as
evidenced by various introductory textbooks and handbooks on translation studies (see e.g.
Gentzler 1993; Pokorn 2003). This prominence given to Derrida may create “an impression
of relevance and popularity, but in reality, deconstruction is little known, poorly understood
and seldom bears influence in mainstream TS thinking” (Koskinen 2018). Likewise, the relative
absence of Ricœur is not to be understood as an indication of lesser relevance of his views. In
this chapter we discuss these two approaches together, teasing out both their differences and their
commonalities with the aim of presenting a coherent overview of the continental philosophi-
cal perspective on the issue of ethics in translation and of tracing the influences both have had
within translation studies.
While Derrida’s project of deconstruction challenged all great philosophical systems from
the position of postmodern, dispersed subjects, who no longer believed in the limitless power
of human reason, finding themselves in the deconstruction of all great systems and grand nar-
ratives, Ricœur’s philosophical anthropology and hermeneutic theory of interpretation were
more focused on a way these subjects understand their relations to the world and to others
that coexist with them in a particular moment in time. Derrida addressed the issue of transla-
tion briefly in several essays, however most exhaustively in the essay “Des Tours de Babel,”
published in 1985 in French and English version. Similarly, although Ricœur had written
some 20 books and 600 essays in all, in which translation found its place in his ethical agenda
(e.g. Ricœur 1996), he also devoted only one work, “Sur la Traduction” (2004; “On transla-
tion” [2006]) exclusively to the issue of the possibility of the transfer of meaning from one
language to another.
Both philosophers knew and were critical of each other’s work, in particular regarding the
issue of the referential power of metaphor. They encountered each other on several roundtables
87
from 1971 onwards; however, they were never able to engage in a fruitful dialogue. While they
both agreed that any attempt to recover all determinations in linguistic mediation is bound to
failure, they disagreed on its relative success: for Derrida mediation is qualified as différance that
prevents any safe transition and renders translation both necessary and impossible; for Ricœur,
although he too admits that mediation never reaches an absolute degree, translation is more pos-
sible than impossible (Pirovolakis 2010, 4). Although, similarly to Derrida, Ricœur states that
complete and ultimate translation is impossible and theoretically incomprehensible, he neverthe-
less argues that it is practicable (Ricœur 2006, 13–14) and that complete mediation remains a task
the translator needs to pursue.
Whereas theoretical focus on translation arrives late in Ricœur’s academic career, for Der-
rida engagement with translation issues is particularly explicit in his mid-career in the 1980s.
This is quite logical in two senses: first, Derrida had himself been subject to increasing transla-
tion activity into English and other languages, encountering at first hand the aporias, supple-
mentarities and transformations entailed in translating his work. Second, his philosophical
project that revolved around language philosophy, semantics, text analysis and close reading
was naturally inclined to address translation as well. Koskinen (2018) defines deconstruction
as a way of reading:
Deconstruction can be seen as a mind-set, a systematic way of reading texts closely, criti-
cally and paying particular attention to the aporias and moments of différance in them (see
e.g. Koskinen 1994; Davis 2001). This reading requires the reader to acquire an extensive
understanding of the text’s context, relational network and contemporary reception, as well
as to practice a careful method of reading that resists smooth progress and easy interpreta-
tions, and instead goes against the grain of the text, attentive to the blind spots, double
meanings and internal contradictions that allow the text to mean more and differently than
the author intended.
The idea of texts meaning “more and diferently” has numerous consequences for translation,
and for translation ethics. The understanding of the source text as unstable and undecided
unsettles any simple notion of fdelity as re-rendering or repetition. And taking the idea of
meaning more to its logical conclusion in translation evokes the Benjaminian idea of translation
as the sur-vival and supplement of the source text (Benjamin [1923] 2000; Derrida 1985), viewing
translation not only from a perspective of loss but also from that of gain.
Because of its radical open-endedness, deconstruction has been seen as nihilistic and unethi-
cal by many. This view is a simplification, as we aim to show in this chapter (see also Derrida
1988). In translation studies, the radical rethinking of translation in deconstruction has been
particularly fruitful in creating new openings and a renewed interest in the ethics of translation
in the 1990s and onwards. Scholars have approached the challenge of translation and ethics posed
by deconstruction from different angles, focusing on empowerment (Arrojo 1998), undecidability
(Jones 2004), and responsibility (Koskinen 2000). In terms of translation ethics, it may be that
Derrida’s later writings offer a more optimistic and more enriching view to translation issues
than his earlier views on writing and translating. This is also where similarities with Ricœur’s
ideas begin to emerge. In contrast to Derrida, Ricœur’s philosophy can be characterized as
encouraging. Ricœur’s core concept of linguistic hospitality, in particular, resonates with Der-
rida’s deconstructive reading of hospitability, bringing to light how these two philosophers aim
at similar ethical encounters across language barriers, and they also share an understanding of the
challenges of successfully doing so, but one does so with a more positive outlook and the other
never loses his characteristic systemic doubt.
88
The ethics of linguistic hospitality
2 Historical trajectory of Derrida’s and Ricœur’s thought

Derrida saw the postmodern subject as someone whose former trust in the limitless power of
human reason was shattered. Through detailed close readings of texts, focusing on the points
where a line of argument breaks down to reveal incongruities and inner contradictions, Derrida’s
deconstructive method attempted to reveal the inconsistencies and fissures within seemingly
solid structures of all great systems, including the grand Enlightenment narrative that marked
the modern era. His deconstruction thus became the most praised theoretical approach of the
postmodern age, which, contrary to the modern era that was characterized by the overwhelm-
ing presence of a scientific thought, faced the world which could not provide immediate and
comprehensible answers to our reason and understanding and was thus defined by Jean-François
Lyotard as “incredulity toward metanarrative” (Lyotard 1984, xxiii–xxiv).
For translation studies scholars Derrida’s work is particularly interesting since it focused on
language: his deconstruction was, in fact, a particular method of textual analysis involving the
close reading of texts through which he showed that texts that on surface may appear clear and
coherent, in fact, often say the opposite of what they wanted to say initially – his reading of
Roman Jakobson’s “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” of Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of
the Translator” and of the Biblical story of the tower of Babel is a fine example of his method-
ology in use (Derrida 1985). Contrary to structuralists, Derrida claims that the signifier only
partially covers the meaning of the signified, which is eternally evasive and escapes any final
definition into an endless play of signifiers. But since, according to Derrida, the signifieds dwell
only in language, this means that they are nothing but signifiers that refer to, and at the same
time avoid, the full grasp of other signifiers. The meaning becomes elusive and intangible: we
try to capture it with words, words are then again explained by words which never fully fulfil the
task and are themselves constantly inadequately explained, thus forming an inescapable circle.
Derrida celebrates this free play of language, which he defines as an endless, eternal différance of
meaning. Derrida’s neologism différance thus denotes the double effect of writing where signs are
defined based on the fact that they differ one from the other, and where meaning of the signs
is deferred or postponed through an endless chain of signifiers (Derrida 1982). Derrida’s aim
is therefore to reveal the basic phantasm of our time: identity and sameness between the signi-
fier and signified, between the expression and its meaning, have never existed nor will exist as
something graspable, known or understood. Meaning “is always differential and deferred, never
present as an original unity” (Venuti 1995, 17–18). Plurality of meanings and complexity are
intrinsic to every interpretation of textual meaning, so that our desire for dominance and uni-
vocity inevitably fails in the last instance and capitulates to the plurality, elusiveness, equivocity
and fuzziness of language (cf. Derrida 1989). As a result, Derrida challenges every definition of
translation which defines translation as re-creation or transference of the original “meaning.”
Translation is, according to him, an event revealing that the language constantly adapts and
changes the original text. Moreover, translation shows that we cannot ever truly know and
understand what the original text wants to name. Translation becomes “necessary and impos-
sible” (Derrida 1985, 170).
Through his play of deconstruction Derrida thus attempted to discredit every affirmation, to
negate without cessation, to leave all possibilities open, never to take the final decision, never
to mark his position, trying to remain in the place of eternal oscillation. Derrida argued that
the position of a philosopher should be “emancipated from every external power (not lay, not
secular), for example from dogmatism, orthodoxy or religious authority” (Derrida 1996, 16).
Through his deconstruction, Derrida aimed to disrupt all univocal classifications typical of what
he called the logocentric bias of Western philosophy, and in his writings he therefore insisted
89
on the “undecidability,” on the non-position, experiencing “the impossible possibility of the

impossible” (Derrida 1992, 290; 1993, 32).
If Derrida was the philosopher who developed a thought that best reflected the fragmented
state of a late-20th-century sceptical post-modern subject, his contemporary Paul Ricœur is
the main representative of what is sometimes described as phenomenology’s late-20th-century
“theological turn” (Wall 2005, 17). Like Derrida, Ricœur was defined by some scholars as a
post-structuralist (e.g. Clark 1990, 5–7); however, unlike Derrida, Ricœur did not see mean-
ing as unstable and completely undefinable (Sweeney 2002). Ricœur was a philosopher and a
Christian, whose thought was informed by the Judeo-Christian tradition of Western Europe. He
described his work as pertaining to phenomenology, hermeneutics and reflexive philosophy, i.e.
focusing on how we understand ourselves in relation to our world (see Wall 2005). As a former
prisoner of war in Germany during the Second World War, he was someone who was not afraid
to take political positions, e.g. against fascism, Communist oppression, colonialism and war in
Algeria. In his long career, he got interested in various different topics: his works thus focused
on the freedom of the will, the unconscious, personal identity, the question of evil and justice,
the relation of faith and reason, and countless other topics, including the problem of language.
Ricœur was also a translator from Greek, German (he translated a book of Husserl during his
imprisonment in a German camp) and Italian, and he also practiced translation into English
(Scott-Baumann 2009, 2; Pellauer and Dauenhauer 2016). But, in spite of translation having
always been a part of his life, he devoted himself theoretically to this subject only later in life.
Translation and communication are, according to Ricœur, always possible. On one hand,
the text creates a world of its own, no one has the ultimate control over its intended meaning,
and there is the absence of demonstrable identity of meaning of the text; on the other hand,
translation creates a paradoxical equivalence without total adequacy, and some trace of meaning
is transferred through translation. Moreover, he believes that a text provides only certain inter-
pretational possibilities and that not all interpretations are acceptable, since “not only can we say
the same thing in another way, but we can say something other than what is the case” (Ricœur
2006, 28; emphasis original).
This emphasis on the fact that the meaning can be distorted on purpose reveals another
important facet of Ricœur’s work – the ethical dimension. Indeed, the guiding thread that runs
through Ricœur’s numerous writings is his emphasis on ethics that he defines as “a good life,
with and for others, within just institutions” (Ricœur 1992, 172), which means that we should
strive to be true to ourselves, but at the same time we should show the same concern and care
for our neighbour and seek justice for others in the society we all live in. Ricœur argues that
we should be ethically engaged to create a better society through “crossed narration,” i.e. we
should try to understand and acknowledge the perspectives of others, including the way they see
themselves and us. In addition to sharing narratives about each other, we also need to exchange
memories. Through the shared reinterpretation of the past we should attempt to understand the
suffering of the others and reach forgiveness since the power of forgiveness “consists in shat-
tering the law of the irreversibility of time by changing the past, not as a record of all that has
happened but in terms of its meaning for us today” (Ricœur 1996, 10). And the third model that,
according to Ricœur, could help reconcile nations is “translation ethos” or “ethics of linguistic
hospitality” (Ricœur 1996, 5).
Ricœur defines translation, like Schleiermacher does, not only as a transfer from one lan-
guage to another, but also as a transfer of meaning within one’s own language. When engaging
more than one language, translation performs transference from the mental universe of one
culture to that of another, taking into account all the significant features of the source-language
culture, including “its customs, fundamental beliefs and deepest convictions.” In performing
90
this task, translation becomes, according to Ricœur, an ethical paradigm. He writes, “Indeed, it
seems to me that translation sets us not only intellectual work, theoretical or practical, but also
an ethical problem” (Ricœur 2006, 23). He therefore defines translation in ethical terms as “a
matter of living with the other in order to take that other to one’s home as a guest” (5). The goal
of a translation ethos is thus “to repeat at the cultural and spiritual level the gesture of linguistic
hospitality” (Ricœur 1996, 5), whose aim is to help us breach the confines of our own linguistic
traditions and open ourselves to those who speak other languages, have other traditions, beliefs
and convictions while preserving our differences. And, according to Ricœur, the irreducible
pluralism of cultures and languages, manifested, for example, in contemporary Europe, deserves
to be protected (Ricœur 1996, 4).
Scott-Bauman (2009, 107) discerns in Ricœur’s work on translation three main areas of
ethical engagement: translation facilitates “linguistic hospitality,” it represents an act of toler-
ance, and it accepts ultimate untranslatability. And indeed, for Ricœur the plurality of human
languages is not a curse, but a gift that allows translation to reconstitute the plurality of human
discourse in its unity and allows for an ethics of linguistic hospitality that demands respon-
sibility toward others and gives birth to mutual recognition (Ricœur 2004, 19–20, 42–43;
Jervolino 2006).
Translation is thus an ethical task: it is the result of the practice of linguistic hospitality, result-
ing from the double gift: the gift of the mother tongue and that of foreign languages, which
allows us to engage ourselves in an act of linguistic hospitality through which we open ourselves
to welcome meanings different from our own. Therefore, translation constitutes an act of toler-
ance, since by means of translation we attempt to understand the point of view of the other. And
finally, every act of translation presupposes the acceptance of the fact that there is no absolute
translatability. Ricœur argues that a “good translation can aim only at a supposed equivalence
that is not founded on a demonstrable identity of meaning. An equivalence without meaning”
(Ricœur 2006, 22). Although translators accept this unavoidable limitation, they nevertheless
try to practice translation, and are therefore comparable to peace workers: “Despite fratricides,
we campaign for universal fraternity. Despite the heterogeneity of idioms, there are bilinguals,
polyglots, interpreters and translators” (Ricœur 2006, 18).
3 Core issues and topics in translation studies

In the 1990s, many scholars aiming to forward the young discipline of translation studies were
searching for theoretical foundations from a number of philosophical and cultural theories with
a poststructuralist bend. Alongside postcolonial and feminist approaches, deconstruction was
also among the sources for inspiration (Koskinen 2000; Davis 2001). The notion of translation
as both supplement and loss, as both a poison and a cure, resonated with a number of scholars
looking for surpassing pre-theoretical discussions centred on the concept of fidelity and search-
ing for new ways of thinking about translation ethics. Similarly, deconstructive unpacking of
hierarchical binary oppositions resonated in a field struggling with permanent inferiority issues
(Simeoni 1998) as it offered a way of challenging the authority of the source text author. In
her article on postmodern theory and translation, Rosemary Arrojo (1998) links the rise of
translation studies directly to the dominance of postmodern theories and their anti-essentialist
take on texts and their meanings, and she uses deconstruction to dismantle the binary logic of
(high) theory and (low) practice to urge translation and translators to fully engage with their
transformative potential.
Arrojo’s international articles such as the aforementioned were preceded by several publica-
tions on deconstruction in Portuguese (e.g. Arrojo 1992). These largely went unnoticed by
91
the international TS audience, and only quite recently one of them was translated into English
(Arrojo [1993] 2012).
Another early contribution to deconstruction in translation studies was Koskinen 1994, but
it was only in her PhD dissertation (Koskinen 2000) that the ethical weight of taking the world-
view and methodology of deconstruction seriously was extensively discussed, leading to an
emphasis on self-reflexivity and personal responsibility for translation decisions as fundamentals
of a postmodern ethics of translation. This deconstructive stance has led both Arrojo and Koski-
nen to promote a translation pedagogy enriched by critical pedagogy:
Some form of “critical pedagogy” applied to the teaching and formation of translators
would help promote critical refection on the unsatisfactory role that translators and their
activity have been allowed to play in a culture that is still obsessed with the futile search
for forever stable truths or original meanings that could be immune to change. This type
of pedagogy should give future translators the opportunity to problematize the conditions
in which their profession has been structured and operates inside their culture and their
historical moment, and the opportunity of bettering or reversing these conditions.
(Arrojo [1993] 2012, 107; see also Koskinen 2012)
If we accept the notions of undecidable moments in texts, their open-ended signifcations and
play of meaning, translatorial decisions indeed become crucially important in terms of creating
closures and directing interpretations, and hence subject to ethical reasoning. Because of the
need to fx meanings, translatorial decisions are not always innocent and benign. Derrida’s own
dense writing style has provided a platform for testing the limits and possibilities, losses and
supplementarities of translation, leading Derrida’s translators to comment on their translation
solutions (e.g. Venuti [2003] 2013; Johnson 1981; see also Davis 2001, Ch. 5; Carreres 2008),
with or without a link to the notion of abusive fdelity coined by Philip Lewis (1985) to label
deconstructive translation practice.
As Derrida emphasizes, following a pre-set protocol of right and wrong choices does not yet
take you into the realm of ethics; it is only when these guidelines no longer serve and the terrain
of unsatisfactory and impossible choices needs to be navigated without a map that we encounter
the ethical. “A decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free
decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process,”
Derrida has argued (1988, 24; see also Koskinen 2000, 26–30). Without ever openly referring
to Derrida’s work, deconstruction’s core concepts of decision and undecidability were also taken
up by Francis Jones (2004) in his personal account of the dilemmas of a literary translator in
the aftermath of Yugoslav war. Translation as a balancing act not only between the self and the
other but also between these two and “other others” (Jones 2004), and a situation where “any
outcome brings as many problems as it solves,” places the translator firmly within the ethical
realm, reaffirming the agentic and creative nature of literary translation: “[s]een in this light, the
fact of having to confront apparently insoluble textual, interpersonal and ethical dilemmas is not
an aberration in the work of literary translators. It is what defines their status as creative agents
rather than interlingual copyists” (Jones 2004).
Deconstruction is a stance that refutes fixture and dwells on aporias, traces and inconsisten-
cies; it is thus only logical that deconstructive ethics is similarly open-ended and undecidable.
Translation, too, is an endeavour that is both impossible and necessary, and the ethics govern-
ing it is based on a double bind of unresolvable undecidability and the necessity to arrive at a
translation decision. This leads to the conclusion that translators need to be empowered to reach
the decisions and that they need to be responsible and self-reflexive to understand and accept
92
the unavoidable incompleteness of their choices. In contrast to notions of fidelity and accuracy
that focus on mapping the translation against the source text to identify its shortcomings, the
deconstructive take on the ethics of translation is quite liberating. Hence its allure to a number
of translation scholars.
While Derrida’s approach seemed to offer a new perspective to prevalent translation studies
debates in the 1990s, Ricœur’s work on ethics resonates with some current burning societal
issues. It is thus no wonder that during recent years, Ricœur’s conceptualizations and in particu-
lar his notion of “linguistic hospitality” have become central to some translation studies works:
for example, Ricœur’s influence could be found in the articles by authors such as Wu (2008),
Büyüktuncay (2017) and Bottone (2007, 2011), who see linguistic hospitality as the foundation
of translational ethics, and in some monographs. For example, in his monograph dedicated to
the development of a philosophy of translation, the Italian philosopher and politician Domenico
Jervolino (2008) posits that we use and develop our humanity in and through language and there-
fore urges us to practice linguistic hospitality. Similarly, François Ost in his monograph Traduire
(2009) argues that against the possibility of a world of one single language or that of innumer-
able idiolects, multilingualism and translation seen as linguistic hospitality represent humanity’s
only alternative to barbarity. This is also a position taken by Arnaud Laygues (2006), who in his
article connects the philosophical notions of “Being-together” (l’être-ensemble) as developed by
Ricœur with that of “the common good” found in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and with “the
philosophy of dialogue” as conceptualized by Buber and Marcel (see also Chapter 11 “Transla-
tor ethics” in this volume). Laygues calls for the ethical behaviour of translators, who are often
seen as a visible signs and promoters of increasing globalization, and argues that if translators
maintain linguistic hospitality and therefore recognize the difference of the Other, they reduce
tensions between different cultures and are also capable of resisting the process of standardization
and uniformity. By enabling individual relations between persons, translators thus preserve and
defend the basic principles of humanity in the world of increasing commercialization.
Sarah Maitland (2015) in her discussion of newsreel production as a form of cultural transla-
tion uses the notion of “linguistic hospitality” to describe the ethical problem of a translator who
attempts, on one hand, to make difference of the Other (i.e., of what constitutes the opposite of
the Self, of Us, and of the Same) accessible to the target audience, while protecting the otherness
of the Other from appropriation. She develops this argument even further in her recent book
What Is Cultural Translation? (Maitland 2017), in which she focuses on translation in its broad-
est term and studies it within and beyond texts in different environments and cultural domains.
She argues that translation, seen as an ethical model that facilitates linguistic hospitality, makes
thoughtful encounter with the Other possible and enables us not only to understand ourselves
but also our position in the world.
The notion of linguistic hospitality is also central to the work of Moira Inghilleri (2012), in
which she connects it to the practice of community interpreting, in particular to the ethics and
politics of interpreting justice. Through her analysis of real interpreted situations, she shows that
interpreters follow the principles that are based on linguistic hospitality, and consequently may,
in the event of gross injustice and power abuse, breach the conventional deontological principles
of neutrality in order to avoid unethical consequences. Similarly, in her book on migration and
mobility, Inghilleri (2017) argues that translation is not only a communicative but also an ethical
task that allows us to demonstrate linguistic hospitality by enabling us to reside in more than
one language and become the host to another’s culture (31). The ethical impulse of translation
becomes even more important in inhospitable environments where the participatory rights of
individuals are hampered, as was the case, for example, when translators and interpreters were
employed by the Immigration Service on Alice Island and Ellis Island. She also draws attention
93
to the fact that the withdrawal of linguistic hospitality is possible, for example, when transla-
tion is branded as heretical and therefore silenced, as it was the case in Wycliffe’s and Tyndale’s
translations of the Bible (65).
As can be seen from the aforementioned, the concept of linguistic hospitality has resonated
among TS scholars in recent years. It seems to capture a current preoccupation of the linguistic
consequences of globalization, and hence speaks to many researchers. In contrast, Derrida’s take
on the question of hospitality and languages has attracted less attention. In an article entitled
“Hostipitality,” a neologism he coined, he unpacked the concept of hospitality “which allows
itself to be parasitized by its opposite, ‘hostility’” (Derrida 2000, 3). A deconstruction of this
binary opposition of hospitality/hostility through a typically complex etymological reasoning
leads him to emphasize “the troubling analogy in their common origin between hostis as host
and hostis as enemy, between hospitality and hostility” (15) and the consequent impossibility
of full and unconditional hospitality as it always carries within itself the possibility of hostility.
According to Derrida, hospitality, which presupposes a home or a nation, is like a door the host
can choose to open to welcome the other, and as such it is always also potentially hostile, hence
the neologism. Derrida also explicitly links hospitality and translation, describing translation as
“an enigmatic phenomenon or experience of hospitality, if not the condition of all hospitality
in general” (6). Consequently, the notions of home and strangers, as well as the threshold of
acceptance, are also known to affect translation flows and translation strategies. Similarly, the
ambivalent power dynamics of hospitality and hostility in translation are well known through a
plethora of historical and contemporary case studies. And as we remember, translation is simi-
larly plagued by a double bind of the impossibility of full and unconditional transfer of meaning
(Derrida 1985).
In translation studies, hostipitality has been taken up by Africa Vidal Claramonte (2014) to
rethink the tasks of the translator and interpreter in contemporary multilingual societies and to
re-vision the representation of other voices through translational practices. We can expect the
ethics of hospitality to gain in importance in the near future with issues such as immigration,
globalization and diversity (Molz and Gibson 2016). Recent developments across European
borders and the increasing tensions and hate speech within many Western societies have brought
into stark relief the immanent hostility of many encounters with strangers, and translating and
interpreting practices are often implicated in the techno-political apparatus of hostipitality.
In Ricœur’s thinking, too, hospitality is not without risk and loss. Linguistic hospitality also
means that translators attempt to bring the reader to the author and the author to the reader
“at the risk of serving and of betraying two masters” (Ricœur 2006, 23), and at the same time
they have to renounce the perfect translation. The translation ethos thus demands that transla-
tors accept imperfection: in order to be able to open ourselves to the difference of the other
provided by the act of translation, the translator has to suffer. The suffering of translators stems
from their awareness of the deficiency of every translation; they know that something will be
inevitably lost through translation and they mourn the fact that perfect translation is impossible.
However, this displeasure is “balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in
one’s own welcoming house” (Ricœur 2006, 10). Scott-Baumann (2009) argues that translators
can thus achieve satisfaction as translators only if they accept “the untranslatability, the irrefutable
otherness of the other text, and, by implication, the otherness of the other person.” Translations
thus promote “linguistic hospitality,” which is based on mutual recognition that “the translator
and the translated are able to cohabit and agree to be different” (109).
Ricoeur’s insistence that translations are texts that create a paradoxical equivalence
without total adequacy, and at the same time that the translator may deliberately distort
the meaning additionally enables us to consider and assess the translator’s interventions in
94
ethical terms. Ricoeur’s insistence that translations are texts that create a paradoxical equiva-
lence without total adequacy, and that the translator may deliberately distort the meaning
additionally enables us to consider and assess the translator’s interventions in ethical terms.
Weissbrod (2009) compares Ricœur’s definition of translation as “equivalence without ade-
quacy” and the concept of the (non-existing) “third text” with Toury’s concept of “the
adequate translation as a hypothetical construct.” Ricœur’s definition of a hermeneutic self
is also fruitfully used by Maitland, in particular his notion of trust and his insistence on the
heterogeneity of readings, which is reminiscent of deconstruction. For example, in her arti-
cle “Performing Difference” Maitland (2012) argues, following Ricœur, that the existence
of difference within the original demands an act of hermeneutic trust in the heterogeneity
of possible interpretations that proceed from a text. By believing in a play’s potential to
speak, translators thus affirm the existence of difference within the original and recognize it
as “that which requires hermeneutic trust in order to be interpreted” (66). Deconstruction
further reminds us that even with optimal trust, the interpretations are always already partial
and subject to further supplementarity. According to Lisa Foran (2015, 25), Ricœur’s view
is therefore a “happy” one while Derrida ruthlessly underlines the uncomfortable impos-
sibilities involved, and it is this discomfort, in particular, that allows us to reach the realm
of ethics:
[W]hile Ricœur’s account of translation as a model of hospitality has much to recommend

it, and indeed much in common with Derrida’s account, it ultimately runs the risk of put-
ting everyone on the same level. Ricœur’s account of ethical hospitality is “happy” and
pragmatic rather than uncomfortable and impossible. My claim is that his model of transla-
tion therefore (although perhaps unintentionally) levels the playing field of exchange and
does not sufficiently guard against complacency. Derrida, on the other hand, by holding on
to the untranslatable as the model of exchange, keeps us on the knife edge of discomfort.
For Derrida we are not all on the same level where we can all be equally understood. Rather
at the heart of Derrida’s account is an insurmountable difference that prevents a comfortable
settling into sameness.
4 Conclusions: new debates, emerging issues

Deconstruction is not currently in vogue in ethical debates, and Ricœur is equally seldom
referred to. New debates and emerging issues are therefore difficult to find. Perhaps one such
issue is the status and role of these two thinkers in itself: while deconstruction was among the
early theoretical supports of the new discipline in the 1990s, perhaps Ricœur will be found
useful in the years to come. The notion of linguistic hospitality surely resonates in the multilin-
gual societies of contemporary world of migration, globalization and trans-border employment.
Hospitality and its limits also address the question of domestication versus foreignization, but
from a different perspective. Rather than measuring distances between texts, both hospitality
and hostipitality focus on the imagery of home, guest, invitation, alterity and otherness, open-
ing up questions of ethics beyond the textual level. And finally, the ideas of supplementarity, gift
and hospitality allow us to begin to develop non-binary ethical perspectives on non-professional
volunteer forms of translating and interpreting that are not predetermined by them being the
(negative and unwanted) other of professional practice.
We also believe that a reinvigorated deconstructive ethos, with its systematic doubt, would
be welcome in contemporary translation studies. The increasing automation of translation, for
example, is creating new ethical demands that a non-binary approach to the man versus machine
95
dichotomy might help us untangle in novel ways, moving from either/or perceptions to the
logic of both/and (Koskinen 2000), envisioning new forms of “humachinic” translation (see
also Chapter 19 “Translation and posthumanism” in this volume). On the other hand, the
radical indecision of deconstruction would be a sobering approach to machine translation that
celebrates instant and easy translatability of everything. Similarly, the ordeal of imperfection and
undecidability present in both Ricœur’s and Derrida’s thinking, and the following necessity of
self-reflexive praxis, allows us to contemplate the limits of the current codification of profes-
sional practice and the concomitant tendency towards normativization of ethical behaviour in
the various subfields of translation and interpreting.

Translator ethics; the ethics of postcolonial translation; feminist translation ethics; ethics of trans-
lating sacred texts; ethics in public service interpreting; linguistic first aid; translation and post-
humanism.
References
Arrojo, Rosemary. 1992. O Signo Desconstruído. Implicações para a tradução, a leitura e o ensino. Campinas:
Pontes.
Arrojo, Rosemary. [1993] 2012. “Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and the Teaching of Translation.” Trans-
lation and Interpreting Studies 7, no. 1: 96–110. Translated by Ben Van Wyke. https://doi 10.1075/
tis.7.1.06arr
Arrojo, Rosemary. 1998. “The Revision of the Traditional Gap between Theory: Practice & the Empow-
erment of Translation in Postmodern Times.” The Translator 4, no. 1: 25–48, 110. https://doi.org/10.
1080/13556509.1998.10799005
Benjamin, Walter. [1923] 2000. “The Task of the Translator.” In Translation Studies Reader, edited by Law-
rence Venuti, translated by Harry Zohn, 15–25. London, New York: Routledge.
Bottone, Angelo. 2007. “Translation as an Ethical Paradigm in the Work of Paul Ricoeur.” In Betwixt and
between: Place and Cultural Translation, edited by Stephen Kelly, and David Johnston, 222–8. Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Bottone, Angelo. 2011. “Translation and Justice in Paul Ricoeur.” In Translation and Philosophy, edited by
Lisa Foran, 65–74. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Büyüktuncay, Mehmet. 2017. “Cultural Diversity, Linguistic Hospitality and Ethical Reflection in Paul
Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Translation.” Manisa Celal Bayar Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi/Journal of
Social Sciences 15, no. 1: 189–218. https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/283449
Carreres, Ángeles. 2008. “The Scene of Babel.” Translation Studies 1, no. 2: 167–81. DOI:
10.1080/14781700802113481
Clark, Stephen H. 1990. Paul Ricoeur. London: Routledge.
Davis, Kathleen. 2001. Deconstruction and Translation. Translation Theories Explained. Manchester: St.
Jerome Publishing.
Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1985. “Des Tours de Babel.” In Difference in Translation, edited and translated by Joseph F.
Graham, 209–48. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1988. “Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion.” In Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: North-
western University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1989. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” In Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Nega-
tivity in Literature and Literary Theory, edited by S. Budick, and W. Iser. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1992. “Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices.” In Derrida and Negative Theology, edited
by H. Coward, and T. Foshay. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Sauf le nom. Paris: Editions Galilée.
Derrida, Jacques. 1996. “Foi et Savoir.” In La religion, edited by Jacques Derrida, and G. Vattimo. Paris:
Éditions du Seuil.
96
Derrida, Jacques. 2000. “Hostipitality.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5, no. 3: 3–16. Trans-
lated by Barry Stocker, and Forbes Morlock.
Foran, Lisa. 2015. “An Ethics of Discomfort: Supplementing Ricoeur on Translation.” Études Ricoeuriennes/
Ricoeur Studies 6, no. 1: 25–45.
Gentzler, Edvin. 1993. Contemporary Translation Theories. New York: Routledge.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2017. Translation and Migration. Abingdon, New York: Routledge.
Jervolino, Domenico. 2006. “Pour une philosophie de la traduction, a l’école de Ricœur.” Revue de
métaphysique et de morale 50, no. 2: 229–38. www.cairn.info/revue-de-metaphysique-et-de-morale-
2006-2-page-229.htm
Jervolino, Domenico. 2008. Per una filosofia della traduzione. Brescia: Morcelliana.
Johnson, Barbara. 1981. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Dissemination, edited by Jacques Derrida, vii–xxxiii.
London: The Athlone Press.
Jones, Francis. 2004. “Ethics, Aesthetics and Décision: Literary Translating in the Wars of the Yugoslav
Succession.” Meta 49, no. 4: 711–28.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 1994. “(Mis)translating the Untranslatable: The Impact of Deconstruction and Post-
Structuralism in Translation Theory.” Meta 39, no. 3: 446–52.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2000. “Beyond Ambivalence: Postmodernity and the Ethics of Translation.” PhD diss.,
Acta Universitatis Tamperensis 774, University of Tampere, Tampere.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2012. “Public Translation Studies in the Classroom.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer
6, no. 1: 1–20.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2018. “Deconstruction.” In History of Translation Knowledge: A Dictionary, edited by Yves
Gambier, and Lieven D’hulst, 317–22. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Laygues, Arnaud. 2006. “Pour une réaffirmation de l’‘être-ensemble’ par la traduction.” Meta 51, no. 4:
838–47.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Maitland, Sarah. 2012. “Performing Difference: Bodas de sangre and the Philosophical Hermeneutics of
the Translated Stage.” Quaderns: Revista de Traducció 19: 53–67.
Maitland, Sarah. 2015. “Culture in Translation: The Case of British Pathé News.” Perspectives: Studies in
Translation Theory and Practice 23, no. 4: 570–85.
Maitland, Sarah. 2017. What Is Cultural Translation? London, New York: Bloomsbury.
Molz, Jennie Germann, and Sarah Gibson, eds. 2016. Mobilizing Hospitality: The Ethics of Social Relations in
a Mobile World. London, New York: Routledge.
Ost, François. 2009. Traduire: défense et illustration du multilinguisme. Millau: Arthème Fayard.
Pellauer, David, and Bernard Dauenhauer. 2016. “Paul Ricoeur.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philoso-
phy, Winter 2016 edition, edited by Edward N. Zalta. <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/
entries/ricoeur/>
Pirovolakis, Eftichis. 2010. Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters between Deconstruction and
Hermeneutics. New York: State University of New York Press.
Pokorn, Nike K. 2003. Misliti prevod: izbrana besedila iz teorije prevajanja od Cicerona do Derridaja (Zbirka
Scripta). Ljubljana: Študentska založba.
Pokorn, Nike K. 2012. Post-Socialist Translation Practices: Ideological Struggle in Children’s Literature. Benjamins
Translation Library, vol. 103. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins.
Ricœur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Ricœur, Paul. 1996. “Reflections on a New Ethics for Europe.” In The Hemeneutics of Action, edited by
Richard Kerney, 3–14. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Ricœur, Paul. 2004. Sur la traduction. Paris: Bayard. (English translation: Ricœur, Paul. 2006. On Translation.
London, New York: Routledge.)
Scott-Baumann, Alison. 2009. Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. London, New York: Continuum
International Publishing Group.
Sweeney, Robert. 2002. “Paul Ricoeur on Language, Ethics and Philosophical Anthropology.” In Phenom-
enology World-Wide, Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, vol. 80, edited
by A.T. Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Springer.
97
Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge.
Venuti, Lawrence. [2003] 2013. “Translating Derrida on Translation. Relevance and Disciplinary Resis-
tance.” In Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice, 57–79. London, New York: Routledge.
Vidal Claramonte, Maria del Carmen Africa. 2014. “Translating Hybrid Literatures: From Hostipitality to
Hospitality.” European Journal of English Studies 18, no. 3: 242–62.
Wall, John. 2005. Moral Creativity: Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Possibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Weissbrod, Rachel. 2009. “Philosophy of Translation Meets Translation Studies: Three Hebrew Transla-
tions of Kipling’s If in Light of Paul Ricœur’s Third Text and Gideon Toury’s Adequate Translation.”
Target 21, no. 1: 58–73.
Wu, Guangjun. 2008. “Translation as Hermeneutics: Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Translation.” Chinese Transla-
tors Journal 3: 16–19.
Further reading
Davis, Kathleen. 2001. Deconstruction and Translation. Translation Theories Explained. Manchester: St.
Jerome Publishing.
A concise introduction to Derrida’s thinking on translation.
Derrida, Jacques. 1985. “Des Tours de Babel.” In Difference in Translation, edited by Joseph F. Graham,
209–48. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
This essay is Derrida’s most elaborate expression of his thoughts on translation, in which he discusses the
Biblical account of the destruction of the tower of Babel, writings on translation by Roman Jakobsen
and Walter Benjamin and the legal definitions of translation.
Maitland, Sarah. 2017. What Is Cultural Translation? London, New York: Bloomsbury.
This monograph, which discusses translation in its broadest term, outlines Ricœur’s thoughts on transla-
tion, and through the use of his concept of linguistic hospitality argues that translation makes thoughtful
encounter with the Other possible.
Ricœur, Paul. 2004. Sur la traduction. Paris: Bayard. (English translation: Rico Ricœur, Paul. 2006. On
Translation. London, New York: Routledge.)
A short essay which provides a clear insight into the basic concepts of Ricœur’s understanding of transla-
tion and its ethical task.
Scott-Baumann, Alison. 2009. Ricœur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. London, New York: Continuum
International Publishing Group.
This volume, in particular chapter 6 (“Linguistic Analysis”), offers a very clear introduction into
Ricœur’s conceptualization of translation as ethical activity and links the concept of “linguistic hospi-
tality” with his other works, in particular those focusing on tolerance.
98
8
The ethics of postcolonial
translation
Douglas Robinson
1 Introduction
The English word “ethics” derives from the Greek ἠθικός/ēthikós, from ἦθος/ēthos, “character”:
an ethical person is a person of good character. The implication is that ethics is not just a moral
code but also a social value system governing good behavior. The ethical person behaves in accor-
dance with social norms for good character, the “good person.” Technically, an ethical person
is a good person, a person of good character; but since the interiority of ἦθος/ēthos/“character”
is a black box to which other people have no direct access, ethics has come to refer to outer
behavior as a (hopefully reliable) sign of inner character.
This shift from good (inner) character to normative (outer) behavior has two further axi-
omatic ramifications. The first is that the ethical person is subordinate to social norms for good
behavior. In Louis Althusser’s ([1970] 1971) terms, the ethical person has been “interpellated”
or “hailed” by society as a good person, and in that manner subjected to reigning ethical norms.
Ethicality is in this sense a state of social subjection. The ethical subject is “overpowered” by
social norms, and therefore subjectified or subjectively organized by those norms.
Politically in the colonial and postcolonial context, this subordinacy axiom entails resistance
to coloniality – or, to put that differently, subordination to an ἦθος/ēthos of anticoloniality/deco-
loniality. A postcolonial ethics is a decolonizing ethics. One can thematize this ethics negatively,
as organized by a collective desire and effort to negate the social, political, cultural, and affective
effects of colonization, or positively, as organized by a collective desire and effort to mobilize
forces for the egalitarian restructuring of postcolonial society. In the negative sense, the post-
colonially ethical person is what Albert Memmi ([1957] 1991, 19–44) calls “the colonizer who
refuses”; in the positive sense, the postcolonially ethical person is a proactive member of that com-
munity that is collectively rebuilding the postcolonial society. In both senses, postcolonial ethics
implies the submergence or surrender of the subject’s ego to larger decolonizing forces in society.
The second axiomatic ramification, however, is that this submergence also strengthens the
ethical ego. To the extent that the postcolonially ethical person is widely accepted and even
acclaimed as a good person, a right-thinking person, a properly behaved person, that gives them
a certain stature in the community as an authority on postcolonial ethics. How should we act
now? Look at X. Follow that model. When in doubt, ask X’s opinion. Let X pronounce. What-
ever X says on this head should be given the imprimatur of authority.
99
Douglas Robinson
The obvious tension between the subordinacy and authority axioms of postcolonial ethics
puts a shimmer at the core of this chapter – a wavering across the boundary between willingness
to submit to outside forces and the ability to dominate outside forces. Rhetorically this becomes
a wavering between receptivity and dogmatism.
Running like a scarlet thread all though printed discussions of the postcolonial ethics of
translation, for example, is the Schleiermacherian dualism between domesticating and foreigniz-
ing translation, which Antoine Berman ([1984] 1992) and later thinkers have mobilized for a
postcolonial “ethics of difference”: the translator who domesticates the source text imposes
hegemonic target-cultural norms on it, and so fails to respect the difference or Otherness of the
source-cultural and source-textual situation; to foreignize that same text, by contrast, is to sur-
render to its difference, and so to practice an ethics of difference.
Of course, this prescriptive postcolonial ethics of translation only applies to cases in which
the translator is translating a text from a former colony to a former colonizing culture, or, more
generally, as Richard Jacquemond (1992) puts it, from a less powerful to a more powerful culture.
As Vicente Rafael ([1988] 1993) has shown, in his discussion of the Tagalog response to the
Spanish colonization and conversion of the Philippines to Christianity, a domesticating transla-
tion undertaken by the colonized can be the strongest form of anticolonial resistance, and can
be recuperated by postcolonial generations for decolonizing purposes. In this light, any attempt
to universalize foreignization as the postcolonial ethics of translation becomes an object lesson
in shimmering over into the recolonizing axiom of authority, becoming not only dogmatic but
domineering, and so effectively recolonizing.
The knotty ethical and epistemological question – indeed, psychosocial, affective-becoming-
cognitive question – facing any postcolonial ethics of translation is whether it is even possible to
remain so thoroughly and transparently open and flexible and receptive to decolonizing social
forces that one never veers over into authoritative dogmatism.
The most radical (and, some would say, cynical) blanket response to a postcolonial ethics
of difference would be that it is always basically complicit with colonialism, in the sense
that it mobilizes a sympathetic ethics of identification with the (formerly) colonized Other
as a new power identity. Power takes many forms, including the apparent surrendering of
power.
On the other hand, vis-à-vis the affective bass note to ethics, perhaps we would want to make
some kind of affective “sincerity” the authenticating criterion for a postcolonial ethics of transla-
tion. If so, do we want, in response to the quite reasonable epistemological challenge – “How
could you possibly know how sincere the translator’s sympathy is?” – to make our own empathic
response to the translation the litmus test of affective-becoming-ethical authenticity?
If we really feel that the translator really feels sympathy for the Other, say, should we hold off
denouncing her or him as complicit in colonial power regimes, and indeed extol him or her as
a paragon of the ethics of difference? Or if we get a strong feeling that the translator’s sympathy
for the Other is not sincere, should we shame him or her as a fraud and secret toady to capital-
ist/colonial power?
Should the target reader’s affect be used first epistemically, as a vetting of the translator’s ethi-
cal affect, and then consequentialistically, as a reward (approval, acclaim) for perceived ethicality
or a punishment (disapproval, blame, shame) for perceived ethical infractions?
The ethics of postcolonial translation begins, as one might suspect, as a reaction against the
ethics of colonial translation – namely, against the mandate to enforce loyalty to the colonial
100
The ethics of postcolonial translation
power. One of the early forms that colonial ethics takes, as George Steiner ([1975] 1998,
314) reminds us in his second stage of the hermeneutic motion, is the recurring metaphor
of translation as conquest: “Saint Jerome uses his famous image of meaning brought home
captive by the translator.” Especially once the European powers began colonizing the rest
of the world in the fifteenth century, dozens of commentators on language and translation
underscored the parallels between translation and conquest. Steiner goes on to insist that the
ethics of translation requires restoration of what was destroyed or stolen and hauled away in
translation-as-conquest:
The translator, the exegetist, the reader is faithful to his text, makes his response responsible,
only when he endeavours to restore the balance of forces, of integral presence, which his
appropriative comprehension has disrupted. Fidelity is ethical, but also, in the full sense,
economic.
(Steiner ([1975] 1998, 302)
Just as the former colonizing powers, having enriched themselves through devastating exploi-
tation of the former colonies, must make restitution through economic development, so too
must the translator, having plundered the source text in the creation of a brilliant translation,
make restitution through semantic development. What that means in practice, Steiner never
quite makes explicit, but it seems to have something to do with the radical literalism enjoined
by German Romantic and post-Romantic thinkers from Herder and Goethe to Benjamin and
Heidegger.
In more practical terms, this ideological and imagistic alignment of translation with empire
meant that, if one was translating from the language of the colonized to the language of the
colonizer, one could ethically foreignize strange-sounding items so as to heighten the impression
of primitivity or exoticism, but if one was translating from the language of the colonizer to the
language of the colonized, one was ethically constrained to impose source-cultural and source-
language norms universalizingly on the target text. The former “imperial” use of foreignization
has survived into the modern era; Roger Hart (1999), for example, cites the case of Jean-Claude
Martzloff (b. 1943) translating passages from the 1607 Chinese translation of Euclid’s Elements
by Xu Guangqi 徐光啓 (1562–1633) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) in his History of Chinese
Mathematics (1987) and using foreignizing strategies to exaggerate the radical otherness of the
Chinese: “King speak: Sage! not far thousand mile and come; also will have use gain me realm,
hey?” (quoted in Hart 53). The purpose is to make classical Chinese seem not only strange,
and even childish, but utterly incommensurable with Western languages. This imperial ethics
tended to be reinforced by the dominant religion of the West, namely Christianity, according
to which the universal ethics of colonization began with Jesus’s Great Commission: “Go ye and
make disciples of all nations.”
Postcolonial complexity enters the conversation when the voice of the colonized begins to be
taken seriously as having an ethical claim on the translator’s loyalty. Thus for example Malinche,
the indigenous interpreter and lover of conquering Spanish general Hernán Cortés, was cel-
ebrated by the Spanish colonizers for betraying her people to the invading forces but vilified by
later Mexicans as “a betrayer of her own people who facilitated Cortés’s colonization of Mexico
and then mothered a race of bastardized mestizos that eventually displaced the ‘pure’ indigenous
native population of Mexico” (Cutter 2010, 1; see also Cronin 2002). Negotiating the ethical
tensions between those two perspectives becomes even more complicated when gender loyal-
ties begin to be taken into account, as some Chicana feminists have defended and recuperated
Malinche as a strong religious woman whose action in the long run caused fewer of her people
101
Douglas Robinson
to suffer. Cutter’s (2010) summary of that complexity is a good introduction to the problematics
of the ethics of postcolonial translation:
Malinche instantiates translation’s potential both to be unfaithful to a source text but also
to beget a new kind of fdelity that creates something unique from the disparate parts of
experience and language that the translator brings into linguistic and cultural contact.
(2)
3.1 The ethics of difference

It is generally agreed that the dominant postcolonial ethics of translation in the West emerges
out of German Romantic thought, especially Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1813 Academy address
on the different methods of translating – which is ironic, given the tendency that one finds at
the end of that address to follow the Schlegel brothers in celebrating translation into German
in imperialistic terms: “the domain of scholarship and art – a domain in which no fetters curb
the human spirit’s natural desire for expansion and conquest” (Friedrich von Schlegel; Robin-
son [1997] 2015, 220); “the German language will become the speaking voice of the civilized
world” (August Wilhelm von Schlegel; Robinson [1997] 2015, 221) and
our respect for the foreign and our mediatory nature together destine the German people
to incorporate linguistically, and to preserve in the geographical center and heart of Europe,
all the treasures of both foreign and our own art and scholarship in a prodigious historical
totality, so that with the help of our language everyone can enjoy, as purely and as perfectly
as a foreigner can, all the beauty that the ages have wrought.
(Friedrich Schleiermacher; Robinson [1997] 2015, 238)
Nevertheless, Schleiermacher’s nationalistic insistence that translators leave a “feeling of the for-
eign” (232) in their translations has been picked up as the basis of an “ethics of diference” or an
“ethics of alterity,” based on respect for the voices of nonlocal Others. This is in fact very much
a self-critique launched from within the bastions of white privilege, or white male privilege: the
implication is that membership in dominant groups tends to blind one to one’s own ideological
commitments and the power diferentials those commitments perpetuate, and that ethical postcolo-
nial translation demands of the privileged an unending series of critical self-refections and self-lim-
itations aimed at a more just and equitable balance of power (see e.g. Berman 1992; Venuti 1992).
One interesting application of this approach comes from Mahasweta Sengupta (1990) in her
paper on Tagore, “Translation, Colonialism, and Poetics: Rabindranath Tagore in Two Worlds,”
in which she argues that for the 1912 poetry collection that won him the Nobel Prize for litera-
ture, Gitanjali: Song Offering, Tagore translated from the original Bengali only his more mystical
poems, and translated them in such a way as to confirm the Orientalist stereotype of Asians as
“natural” mystics. The idea in this reading is that it was relatively easy for Tagore to “disguise”
himself as the perfect “Oriental” “native” precisely because of the blindness white male privilege
imposed on his Western champions, from William Rothenstein to W.B. Yeats, A.C. Bradley, and
Stopford Brooke to the Nobel Prize committee. Sengupta criticizes Tagore for his “imposture,”
but the “ethics of difference” model would also extend the criticism to the authorities among
Tagore’s target readers who were looking not for difference but for sameness – for confirmation
of their Orientalist stereotypes.
102
Sengupta’s reading rests on two pillars:
The frst is that I believe that his understanding of English language and literature was
largely infuenced by the aesthetic ideology of the Romantic and Victorian periods, the
time when imperialism reached its high-water mark in the expansion of the British empire.
Though Tagore himself did not have any formal education and heartily disliked the British
educational system that was being imposed on India, he nevertheless imbibed the aesthetic
ideology that was prevalent at the time of his growing up and learnt the language primar-
ily through its literature. . . . What is apparent is that Tagore deliberately chooses to write
like these poets when he translates his own poems into English; he makes adjustments to
suit the ideology of the dominating culture or system and therefore his translations ft the
target-language poetics quite easily.
(1990, 57–58)
The second is that Tagore deliberately chose his more “devotional or spiritual” (Sengupta 1990,
59) poems from several previously published collections, and in translating them into English
adapted them to Christian assumptions about religious devotion and spirituality. And indeed,
as Sengupta shows, the Nobel committee, in awarding the prize for the very frst time to a
non-Westerner, explicitly identifed him as a British subject who had come under the sphere of
Christianizing infuence radiating colonially around the world:
The true inwardness of this work is most clearly and purely revealed in the eforts exerted
in the Christian mission-feld throughout the world. . . . Thanks to this movement, bub-
bling springs of living water have been tapped, from which poetry in particular may draw
inspiration, even though those springs are perhaps mingled with alien streams, and whether
or not they be traced to the depths of the dreamworld. More especially, the preaching of the
Christian religion has provided in many places the frst defnite impulse toward a revival and
regeneration of the vernacular language, i.e., its liberation from the bondage of an artifcial
tradition, and consequently also toward a development of its capacity for nurturing and
sustaining a vein of living and natural poetry.
(the Nobel Prize award text, quoted by Sengupta 61)
As Sengupta reads this, “the West was prepared to accept the poet Tagore only on two dis-
tinct grounds, as a mystic or a religious prophet” – and thus as a stereotypical exemplar of the
Orientalist conception of Asian culture – “and as a person who was following the Christian
missionaries in their task of unshackling the natives from the bondage of tradition and history”
(61). The irony of this convergence of political and poetic values is not only that Tagore himself
successfully pandered to Orientalist stereotypes in his self-translations, but that his success coin-
cided historically with the new modernist upheavals, which in a matter of years overthrew the
nostalgic modalities of Romantic and Victorian poetry and pushed Tagore out of favor.
If one pushes tough-mindedly enough on this problem of white Western privilege and the
blindness to the Other that it imposes, in fact, the postcolonial ethics of difference tends to turn
recursively back on itself and undermine its own authority. At least this is the subversive argu-
ment made in what may be the most famous postcolonial text ever published, Gayatri Spivak’s
([1985] 1993) essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak’s argument is that the well-intentioned
attempt by Western intellectuals to empathize with the subaltern – to be postcolonially ethical –
is in large part a continuation of the colonial project to aggrandize the Western Subject and
silence the subaltern, especially the subaltern woman, as a mute object:
103
Douglas Robinson
Let us now move to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent, silenced center)
of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women among the illiterate
peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat. According to Foucault
and Deleuze (in the First World, under the standardization and regimentation of socialized
capital, though they do not seem to recognize this) the oppressed, if given the chance (the
problem of representation cannot be bypassed here), and on the way to solidarity through
alliance politics (a Marxist thematic is at work here), can speak and know their conditions. We
must now confront the following question: on the other side of the international division
of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of
imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern
speak?
(78; emphasis original)
Or, to put that in the terms developed by the French sociologists Michel Callon and Bruno
Latour (1981, 279) in their sociology of translation, if translating entails “all the negotiations,
intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or a force takes,
or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force,”
can an ethically foreignized source author speak through the well-meaning Western translator’s
target text? “As soon as an actor speaks of ‘us,’” Callon and Latour go on, “s/he is translating
other actors into a single will, of which s/he becomes spirit and spokesman” (279) – which is to
say, those other actors become mute objects, subject to the “single will” of the Western Subject.
Another version of this postcolonial ethics of translation was launched by Kwame Anthony
Appiah (1993) in “Thick Translation,” building on Clifford Geertz’s (1973) famous anthropo-
logical manifesto “Thick Description.” Appiah’s idea, while similarly oriented to respect for
the voice of the other, was aimed strategically at the retention not so much of the feeling of the
foreign as of the source-textual density of the foreign. As Theo Hermans (2003) picks up this
notion, he expands it from a postcolonial ethics of translation to a postcolonial ethics of transla-
tion studies:
For all these reasons “thick translation” seems to me a line worth pursuing in the cross-
cultural study, interpretation, mapping and translation of translation. It seems well placed to
address both the epistemological complexities and the political implications of cross-cultural
translation studies, in that it is capable of bringing about a double dislocation: of the foreign
terms and concepts, which are probed and unhinged by means of an alien methodology
and vocabulary, and of the describer’s own vocabulary, which needs to be wrenched out
of its familiar shape to accommodate not only similarity but also alterity. Especially this
latter operation requires a measure of imaginative and experimental vigour. My emphasis
on this double dislocation will hopefully also make it clear that I think of thick translation
at least in part as a critique of current translation studies, and not as a generalized form of
description or translation (which also means that my use of the concept difers considerably
from Appiah’s).
(386)
If, then, the “ethics of diference” or “ethics of alterity” is based on respect for the voices
of nonlocal Others, must one respect every nonlocal Other? Mahasweta Sengupta’s reading of
Tagore’s Nobel Prize suggests that the Western authorities (including W.B. Yeats) who admired
his work were doing precisely that, respecting the voice of the nonlocal Other. An ethics of
alterity, then? No: the voice of the nonlocal Other was carefully calibrated to confrm Western
104
stereotypes of “innate” Asian mysticism. And Gayatri Spivak’s example of white men priding
themselves on saving brown women from brown men: an ethics of alterity? No: the (post)colo-
nial savior complex efectively deafens the white man’s ability to hear the voice of the brown
women he is attempting to save, so that she “can’t speak.” Appiah’s “thick translation” is efec-
tively an attempt to bring the silenced voices and nuances and implications of the source text to
Geertzian “thick description” – to uncover what white Western privilege blinds one to, deafens
one to. Is that, then, fnally, an ethics of alterity? Potentially. It too, in the end, is an attempt to
minimize the negative efects of white privilege – and may, like W.B. Yeats on Tagore, end up
reiterating the Western stereotypes it is striving to get past.
3.2 Confusion between ethics and respectability: the criss-crossing

ethics of transmajoritization and transminoritization
One quite widespread conception of ethics is that it is a rigid social code controlling inclusion
and exclusion: if you are widely perceived as an ethical person, you are not only approved and
acclaimed – the affective consequentialism adumbrated in the Introduction – but included. You are
accepted into “good society.” If on the other hand you come to be suspected of unethical deal-
ings, you are not only blamed and shamed, but excluded. You are declared not fit for good society
and banished to the periphery.
As George Mosse (1985) has shown at length, this is ethics or morality as respectability – a
social regime that historically, over the last few centuries, has been linked closely with national-
ism. Nationalist sentiment is respectable and therefore ethical; any perceived attempt to ques-
tion the nation and its heroes is disrespectful and therefore disreputable, and thus also morally
or ethically suspect.
Mosse is specifically interested in the emergence of National Socialism out of an increasingly
militant German Romantic respectability over the course of the nineteenth century – and one
of the key texts that must be reread in that light is Schleiermacher’s Academy address (a historical
text that continues to resonate throughout contemporary discussions of the ethics of difference).
Schleiermacher’s nationalism is in fact quite fervent in the address, even though it is cagily invo-
luted, presented as courting the ill repute of anti-nationalist cosmopolitanism:
There can hardly be a more astonishing form of self-abasement to which a good writer will
knowingly submit. Who would not want his native language to appear in the resplendence
most characteristic of his people and of each individual genre? Who would willingly breed
mongrels when he could instead sire loving children in the pure image of their father? Who
would publicly cripple his own verbal facility and grace in order to appear, at least at times,
churlish and clumsy, and as ofensive as is necessary to keep the reader aware of what is going
on? Who would gladly be thought a bungler just because he took pains to stick as close to
the foreign language as his own would allow – or be censured like parents who give their
children to be raised by acrobats, because he would not train his language in its own native
gymnastics but most inure it to alien and unnatural contortions?
(Robinson [1997] 2015, 232)
This seems to be saying that a true translational ethics of diference (“to keep the reader aware
of what is going on”) must fout social ideals of respectability. It is, however, not that simple.
For one thing, Schleiermacher is not saying that foreignization is mired in unrespectability; he’s
saying that it may be perceived that way, by moralizing nationalists who want the translator to
forswear foreign ways.
105
Douglas Robinson
More important, he also mobilizes figures of (un)respectability to attack domesticating

approaches to translation:
To be sure, some write in Latin or one of the Romance languages for their own pleasure;
and if their intentions in this were to write as well and as originally in the foreign language
as in their own, I would unhesitatingly pronounce it a wicked and magical art akin to going
doubled, an attempt at once to fout the laws of nature and to perplex others. But that is
truly not their aim; their hobby is but an exquisite mimetic game with which to beguile
away the hours out on the margins of philosophy and art. . . . If on the other hand, in def-
ance of nature and morality, a writer becomes a traitor to his native language by surrender-
ing his verbal life to another, it is no false or afected self-mockery when he protests that he
can no longer move about in that language; it is rather his attempt to vindicate himself by
portraying himself as a wonder, a miracle surpassing all natural rule and order, and a relief
to others that he at least does not go doubled like a ghost.
(235–236)
Schleiermacher’s analogical reasoning is somewhat farfetched here (see Robinson 2013, 120–
144): he is arguing that because it would be wildly immoral to attempt to write original literature
in a foreign language, it is by extension equally immoral to pretend in translating that the source
author wrote the work in the target language. Domesticating strategies in translation, after all,
seek to create a target text that sounds and feels to the target reader as if it had been written
directly by the source author, without translationese – and this ideal is what Schleiermacher
condemns moralistically as disreputable (“a wicked and magical art akin to going doubled”). In
other words, the apparently cosmopolitan strategy of “taking the reader to the author” – for-
eignizing – is actually the more nationalistically respectable. It respects national diference.
In fact, this foreignizing respectability works on two different levels. The first level is the
translator’s respect for the foreignness of the Other, which is designed to infect the entire target
readership with the same respect. This is the cosmopolitan (foreign- or Other-directed) ethical
respectability championed by Schleiermacher’s recent acolytes like Berman and Venuti.
The second level, however, which recent Schleiermacherians do not follow, is explicitly
nationalistic. The “feeling of the foreign” with which Schleiermacher’s ideal translator infuses
the target text is supposed to make target readers feel what intermediate students of the foreign
language feel when reading the source text: the awkwardness, the uncertainty about what
things mean, the alienation from smooth and easy understanding. On this nationalistic level,
the goal is to inoculate the target reader against the alienating force of the foreign. By chafing
and abrading the foreign speaking voice, and so marking it as alien, the foreignizing translator
protects the target reader against the potential alienating force of foreignness. By alienating
the German speaker/reader from the alien, by recursively doubling alienation, Schleiermacher’s
German foreignizer reconditions and reintensifies the experience of belonging to the German
Volk and the German landscape. The social ideal is respectable belonging, rooted in the authen-
tic German soil, but retrofitted as an alienation-like affect. It is rootedness staged as simulated
rootlessness, yielding an aestheticized simulacrum of cosmopolitanism that does not – cannot –
actually alienate one from the Volk and all that is humanly wonderful. Because one feels the
foreign in the German body, with German ears and a German tongue that are rooted in the
German Volk’s “naturally” embodied ability to distinguish and reproduce home-grown Ger-
man sounds, the outlandish feeling that the foreign sounds one is hearing and voicing produce
in one’s German breast tingles with awkwardness, with strangeness, with uprootedness – but
in actual fact, by signaling with its alien tingle the alienness of the other, the foreigner, the
106
stranger, that feeling confirms one’s homey Volkishness, one’s rootedness in the Heimat, the
German homeland.
As mentioned, however, the recent Schleiermacherians do not go to this nationalistic place
in their adaptations of Schleiermacher for a foreignizing ethics of difference. Where they do go
with the first level – the explicit ethics of difference – is a different kind of respectabilization:
namely, what Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987) call the “majoritization” of the source text
in transit to the target culture. The “majority” of the major writer, after all, for Deleuze and
Guattari is literary respectability; and the disreputable “minority” of the minor writer is like the
“self-abasement” of Schleiermacher’s foreignizer, who “would willingly breed mongrels when
he could instead sire loving children in the pure image of their father,” who “would publicly
cripple his own verbal facility and grace in order to appear, at least at times, churlish and clumsy,
and as offensive as is necessary to keep the reader aware of what is going on,” who is willing to
“be censured like parents who give their children to be raised by acrobats, because he would
not train his language in its own native gymnastics but most inure it to alien and unnatural
contortions.” If the majoritizing writer protects literary respectability, the majoritizing transla-
tor or “transmajoritizer” may even improve the text’s respectability by tacitly touching it up in
areas where the majoritizing source author may unfortunately have lapsed. The minoritizing
writer, by contrast, demolishes literary respectability, and the transminoritizer may seek to make
the source author even seedier, less reputable, less respectable, by intensifying any lapses s/he
may find in the text, capitalizing on half-submerged embarrassments, even building the entire
translation around them, in order to “send the major language racing” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980]
1987,116; emphasis original).
So far, so good. The problem arises, however, when foreignizing advocates of an ethics of
difference subtly elevate their approach to a new respectability – a new shame-driven regime of
conformity to ethical norms based on a fear of political shaming. This problem is amply evident,
for example, in the essays collected in Venuti (1998), which on one level champion transmin-
oritization as respect for Otherness while on another level converting respect into respectability,
and thus into literary majority.
The ethical question to ask would be whether minoritizing a problematic style is respectful
of a minoritizing impulse in the source author or an attack – a deliberate attempt to minoritize
a majoritizing writer. If the source author is striving valiantly for literary majority/reputation/
reputability and the transminoritizer gleefully highlights that writer’s failures, in order to debunk
her or his reputation, that would arguably not be ethical – especially, in a postcolonial context,
if the aim, conscious or unconscious, is to adopt an implicitly colonial power position in order
to put the “hapless” postcolonial majoritizer in his or her place.1 If on the other hand the source
author is launching a minoritizing attack on literary majority, the ethical translator will support
that. This would be the postcolonial ethics of difference.
Again, however, things are not so simple. It is possible, for example, that the postcolonial
writer has mixed aspirations: to be hailed as a major writer precisely by radically undermin-
ing literary majority, for example. It is also possible for the postcolonial writer to be serenely
unaware of one or the other aspiration: to majoritize consciously and minoritize unconsciously,
say, or vice versa. And it is possible for the postcolonial writer to want one thing and be read
as wanting another, for say nationalistic reasons: the source readership may elevate the writer
to majority out of national pride, for example, for decades or even centuries after the writer’s
death suppressing all awareness of her or his minoritizing impulses. Arguably Rabindranath
Tagore, for example, sought the global “majority” that resulted in his Nobel Prize without full
awareness of what it was he was attempting to achieve: major international poetry? Poetry that
would be seen as internationally “minor,” because “mired” in regionalism: Indian, Bengali,
107
Douglas Robinson
colonial, translated? Poetry that would be received as major precisely because it was so minor?
And so on.
A case in point is a conflict that arose a few years ago between a nationalistic reader of
Finland’s greatest writer Aleksis Kivi (1834–1872) and Kivi’s American transminoritizer. The
American translator-critic was appalled at the Finnish editor-critic’s (Nummi 2010) apparently
unmotivated reading of Kivi’s greatest play, Nummisuutarit (1864), translated by the American
translator-critic in 1993 as Heath Cobblers. In a review (Robinson 2014), he quoted the actual
passages from the play that the Finnish editor-critic (without quoting) was reading nationalis-
tically, wondering how it was even possible, let al.ne ethical, to dream up a reading of warm
harmonious loving kindness and communal acceptance out of a concluding scene that is mani-
festly racked with bitterness and failure. The Finnish editor-critic’s riposte (Nummi 2014) was
viciously ad hominem, and completely ungrounded in the text. What was going on?
So the American translator-critic undertook further research, and a few years later reported
(Robinson 2017a, 135–145) his discovery that the Finnish editor-critic’s reading was not at all
unmotivated: it was organized by a nationalist project that had been launched in the late nine-
teenth century, with the goal of mobilizing Kivi for national pride, leading up to independence
(and full postcoloniality) in 1917. Finland in the 1860s was in a sense a quasi-postcolonial cul-
ture: after six centuries of colonization by Sweden, it had been occupied and recolonized in
1809 by Russia, which allowed it a high degree of proto-national autonomy, until the Russifica-
tion regime around the turn of the twentieth century – precisely the period during which Kivi
began to be lionized as Finland’s National Writer, in support of a resurgent revolutionary spirit.
Another discovery: the American translator-critic realized that his own minoritizing approach
to Kivi wasn’t unmotivated either. It had been shaped by minoritizing readings of Kivi in the
1960s and 1970s by Finland’s rebellious modernists, who had spurned the still-dominant nation-
alistic majoritizations of Kivi and celebrated a proto-modernist Kivi who hated literary majority
as much as they did. The powerful majoritarian voice in mid-nineteenth-century Finland was
the (post)colony’s only professor of Finnish literature, August Ahlqvist (1826–1889), whose
conception of Finnish literary majority was all about respectability. Ahlqvist effectively hounded
Kivi into an early grave, through a series of vicious pre-publication attacks on Kivi’s great 1870
novel, Seitsemän veljestä, translated into English as Seven Brothers (Matson 1929; Impola 1991)
and The Brothers Seven (Robinson 2017b), as “haplessly” disreputable, the author himself as a
“taitamatoin tahruri/Ja hullu viinan juoja vaan”/“a skill-less hack/and just a crazy boozer”2
(quoted in Finnish in Ketonen 1989: 121; translation by DR). The nationalist move to ideal-
ize Kivi as Finland’s National Writer was conceived as a series of knock-down refutations of
Ahlqvist’s attack: he was not immoral, not unrealistic, not anti-religious, not bitter or brutal, and
so on. The modernist revision of Kivi in the 1960s and 1970s, by contrast, argued that Ahlqvist
got Kivi right: he was a dangerous iconoclast! Ahlqvist’s only error, said the modernists, lay in
thinking that was a bad thing.
In The Brothers Seven, the American translator-critic joined forces with the modernists’
minoritarian Kivi by participating gleefully in his anti-majoritarian project: indulging in play-
ful proto-postmodern antics like metafiction/metatranslation, breaking the fourth wall, playing
with anachronism and the other “strange loops” (Hofstadter [1979] 1989, 2007) of translation,
and in general, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “sending the major language racing” – in this case,
minoritizing “major” English. This transminoritizing approach is different from an ethics of
difference, something other than respect for the Other, in that it seeks not to represent the Other
as fairly and accurately as possible but rather to engage with an ally in interactionist solidarity. The
transmajoritizer seeks to respect the Other through accurate but static reproduction; the trans-
minoritizer seeks to engage the Other dialogically, through a series of participatory responses
108
that may well end up parodying or pastiching the source text in playful ways. To the transma-
joritizer, the Other-ēthos is a stable identity that must be captured and displayed equitably; to
the transminoritizer, the Other-ēthos is a back-projection of a series of actions that provoke
reactions, performances that invite the target author and target reader to play along, to improvise
(“don’t deny – add to the action”).
This transminoritizing strategy in The Brothers Seven is strongly allied to the trend Boris Groys
(2016) identifies in modern art, where “Already a long time ago modern artists practiced a revolt
against the identities which were imposed on them by others – by society, the state, schools,
parents.” In refusing to identify with the identities imposed on them by power-holders they are
not, however, clinging defensively to their “own” “true” identities, Groys notes, but rather chal-
lenging the very idea of identity:
Here the question is not whether the true self is real or merely a metaphysical fiction. The
question of identity is not a question of truth but a question of power: Who has the power
over my own identity – I myself or society? And, more generally: Who exercises control
and sovereignty over the social taxonomy, the social mechanisms of identification – state
institutions or I myself?
The “question of power” is specifcally a majoritizing ethics of power, grounded in respect

for stable and above all respectable identities. “Rather,” Groys (2016) continues, these artists
“began to use their nominal identities as ready-mades – and to organize a complicated play
with them. But this strategy still presupposes a disidentifcation from nominal, socially codifed
identities – with the goal of artistically reappropriating, transforming, and manipulating them.”
And if as a result “the politics of modern and contemporary art is the politics of nonidentity,” it
is also thereby the ethics of minority, seeking to disrupt majority by courting audience rejection
through perceived disreputability. Identities are roles, playthings, not prisons. Since audiences
often project identities onto actions, artists play with actions as with masks, styles of dressing and
walking, props. Artistic actions are used to defect and redirect the attention, like a matador’s
red fag, behind which the bull thinks the matador stands. “Art says to its spectator: I am not
what you think I am (in stark contrast to: I am what I am).” I’m not where you think I am. I’m
somewhere else, heading in another direction.
This transminoritizing strategy in The Brothers Seven is strongly allied as well to the icono-
clastic Finnish modernist revision of Kivi, of which there is not a single mention in the Finnish
Literature Society’s nationalistic critical edition (Nummi 2010). The Brothers Seven is not merely
a disreputable travesty, not just a shameful dragging of Finland’s National Writer through the
mud of unrespectability (a line of attack leveled against the Finnish modernists as well, by a group
of establishment conservatives that included one of the original nationalist majoritizers of Kivi
[Koskenniemi 1934]). It is also an unrespectable translation. In the American translator-critic’s
view, the very disreputability of its minoritizing attack on nationalist respectability is what makes
it an example of the ethics of postcolonial translation.

Inspired by Homi Bhabha’s (1994) notion of “cultural translation,” new trends in the postcolo-
nial ethics of translation often focus on the translator less as a heroic mediator across linguistic
and cultural lines and more as a migrant, a “translated person” whose physical body bears the
brunt of movement in time and space. As Anthony Pym (2010) writes of this approach, “The
focus is cultural processes rather than products. The prime cause of cultural translation is the
109
Douglas Robinson
movement of people (subjects) rather than the movement of texts (objects)” (144). This shift of
focus from manipulation to migration tends to privilege the translator as an intercultural media-
tor whose in-between “hybridity” problematizes traditional distinctions between the foreign and
the local. In Laura Lomas’s (2011) terms,
Metaphors of migration, the bodies of “translated persons,” to allude to Salman Rushdie’s

meditations on diaspora crop up regularly in translation studies. They suggest how histori-
cal processes of migration on an unprecedented scale and a relatively recent, if incomplete,
recognition of conditions of diference and impurity in any cultural formation press for a
distinct conception of the foreign.
(15)
Bhabha originally introduced the notion of cultural translation in a discussion of Salman Rush-
die’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, a novel written in English, not translated from an Indian
language into English: a product of cultural translation, in that Rushdie was an Indian immi-
grant in London writing about Indian immigrants in London, encountering and engendering
cultural and linguistic hybridities. And as the Gujarati writer, translator, and translation scholar
Rita Kothari (2006) notes, Gujarati “curricula in English literary studies” have begun to favor
literature by Indian writers like Rushdie and Anita Desai, and thus also cultural translation and
its attendant hybridity, over “pure” imports like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen – “not only a
structural change,” she says, “but also a refection of a postcolonial ethos and a shift from ‘English
literature’ to ‘literature in English’” (97). This curricular “de-Anglicization”/“Indianization” has
also, she notes, “made room for many Indian texts available in English translation, creating an
institutionalized consensus for translation” (97).
Kothari tracks the historical imbalances among Indian languages, with an extraordinarily
high level of translation from other Indian languages into Gujarati, but virtually no translation
at all from Gujarati into other Indian languages – perhaps, she suggests, because Gujarati is
widely (though incorrectly) thought to be “devoid of literary merit since it is the product of
a mercantile, business-oriented community” (94). As Kothari notes wryly in her introduction,
“Translators, researchers and publishers seldom acknowledge that translation sharpens, makes
and unmakes hierarchies among the Indian languages” (93).
In the twenty-first century, however, as “translation . . . emerges in the minds of Gujarati
literati as an index of inequality” (Kothari 2006, 95), and the collective cultural resentment at
that inequality has grown and found voice, attitudes are changing, especially in regard to English,
long sidelined in the state as the interloper colonial language:
A possible corollary to this realization would have been to make concerted eforts to have
Gujarati texts translated into other Indian languages. However, given the signifcance of
English as the only language of the urban bourgeoisie (Ahmad 1994, 78), the Gujarati
community has sought to have Gujarati texts translated into that language. The underlying
assumption is that translation into English would correct the linguistic/literary balance by
“representing” Gujarat, making it available to a wider readership. The feeling that Gujarati
literature has not been given its due at the national level makes leading literary fgures in
Gujarat advocate English translation to correct this historical wrong (Kothari 2003, 76).
(95)
Several signifcant diferences present themselves between this ethics of postcolonial trans-
lation and the “ethics of diference” promoted by Western translation scholars: (1) while
110
Gujarati and Westerners are both dealing with translation from postcolonial languages into
colonizing languages, the Western postcolonial translation scholars are dealing with target-
driven translation projects and the project of translating Gujarati literature into English is
source-driven. As a result, (2) while the representational ethics of diference in the West seeks
to enforce respect for the Other, in Gujarat it seeks to enhance the Other’s respect for the
collective self. And because in the West the (colonizing) target culture is more powerful and
privileged than the (post-/decolonial) source culture, (3) representatives of the former have
to work hard to be “representationally accurate” and “fair” (without being condescending) to
the latter, while representatives of the latter are able to mobilize the former to serve their own
political and cultural ends. The afects driving the two opposed ethical norms also difer: (4)
where the Western ethics of postcolonial translation tends to be driven by guilt and/or shame,
in Kothari’s account the Gujarati ethics of postcolonial translation tends to be driven by
resentment at intra-Indian inequality and an ambitious desire to redress the inequitable imbal-
ance. And fnally, (5) to Westerners, English is the language of global power, global capitalism,
global Westernism, but to Gujarati literati English is an Indian lingua franca, strongly favored
by the Indian urban bourgeoisie – occupying a higher rung on the cultural status hierarchy,
perhaps, but specifcally a local status hierarchy.
The upshot of all this is something like a warning: don’t universalize. The ethics of post-
colonial translation is not one thing. It varies significantly from context to context, and from
rhetorical exigency to rhetorical exigency.
Notes
1 For an example, see the famous postcolonial dialogue on this topic between Fredric Jameson (1986/2007),
who adopts the power position that puts postcolonial writers in their place, and Aijaz Ahmad (1987/2007),
who challenges Jameson’s crypto-colonializing move.
2 From a poem written by Ahlqvist after Kivi’s early death at the age of 38, in an apparently gratuitous attack
on the author whose demise his earlier vicious attacks in print had hastened. Arguably, however, the attack
was not entirely gratuitous, as the nationalist movement to elevate Kivi to National Writer status, which
would not reach full fruition for several more decades, was already beginning to bud in the early 1870s,
and presumably Ahlqvist was trying to nip it in the bud.
References
Ahmad, Aijaz. 1994. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London, New York: Verso.
Ahmad, Aijaz. [1987] 2007. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’.” Originally
published in Social Text 17 (Autumn): 3–25. Reprinted in “Dialogue between Fredric Jameson and
Aijaz Ahmad.” In The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by David H. Rich-
ter, 1831–34. Boston, MA, New York, NY: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Althusser, Louis. [1970] 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Althusser, Lenin and Phi-
losophy and other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, 121–76. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1993. “Thick Translation.” Callaloo 16, no. 4: 808–19.
Berman, Antoine. [1984] 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany.
Translated by S. Heyvaert. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London, UK, New York, NY: Routledge.
Callon, Michel, and Bruno Latour. 1981. “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-Structure
Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So.” In Advances in Social Theory and Methodology:
Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies, edited by Karin Knorr-Cetina, and A.V. Cicourel,
277–303. Boston, MA, London, Henley, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Cronin, Michael. 2002. “The Empire Talks Back: Orality and the Cultural Turn in Interpreting Studies.”
In The Interpreting Studies Reader, edited by Franz Pöchhacker, and Miriam Shlesinger, 386–97. London,
New York: Routledge.
111
Douglas Robinson
Cutter, Martha J. 2010. “Malinche’s Legacy: Translation, Betrayal, and Interlingualism in Chicano/a Litera-
ture.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 66, no. 1: 1–33.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. [1980] 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2.
Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpreta-
tion of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York, NY: Basic.
Groys, Boris. 2016. “The Truth of Art.” e-flux 71 (March). Accessed February 7, 2019. www.e-flux.com/
journal/71/60513/the-truth-of-art/
Hart, Roger. 1999. “Translating the Untranslatable: From Copula to Incommensurable Worlds.” In Tokens
of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, edited by Lydia H. Liu, 45–73. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Hermans, Theo. 2003. “Cross-Cultural Translation Studies as Thick Translation.” Bulletin of the School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London 66, no. 3: 380–89.
Hofstadter, Douglas R. [1979] 1989. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York, NY: Basic.
Hofstadter, Douglas R. 2007. I Am a Strange Loop. New York, NY: Basic.
Impola, Richard, trans. 1991. Aleksis Kivi, Seven Brothers. New Paltz, NY: FATA.
Jacquemond, Richard. 1992. “Translation and Cultural Hegemony: The Case of French-Arabic Transla-
tion.” In Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 139–58.
London, UK, New York, NY: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric. [1986] 2007. “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Origi-
nally published in Social Text 15 (Autumn): 65–88. Reprinted in “Dialogue between Fredric Jameson
and Aijaz Ahmad.” In The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by David H.
Richter, 1830–31. Boston, MA, New York, NY: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Ketonen, Oiva. 1989. Kohtalon vaihtoehdot: Aleksis Kivi, August Ahlqvist ja sivistyneistön vähäinen kansalais-
rohkeus [Fate’s Options: AK, AA, and the Intelligentsia’s Paltry Civic Courage]. Porvoo, Finland: WSOY.
Koskenniemi, V.A. 1934. Aleksis Kivi. Porvoo, Finland: WSOY.
Kothari, Rita. 2003. Translating India: The Cultural Politics of English. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome.
Kothari, Rita. 2006. “English Translation in Gujarat: Emerging Consensus.” In Sociocultural Aspects of Trans-
lating and Interpreting, edited by Anthony Pym, Miriam Schlesinger, and Zuzana Jettmarová, 93–100.
Amsterdam, Netherlands, Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
Lomas, Laura. 2011. “Thinking-Across, Infiltration, and Transculturation: José Martí’s Theory and Practice
of Post-Colonial Translation in New York.” Translation Review 81, no. 1: 12–33.
Matson, Alex, trans. 1929. Aleksis Kivi, Seven Brothers.. New York, NY: Coward-McCann.
Memmi, Albert. [1957] 1991. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Translated by Howard Greenfeld. Boston,
MA: Beacon.
Mosse, George L. 1985. Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe.
New York, NY: Howard Fertig.
Nummi, Jyrki. 2010. “Nummisuutarit: Komedia viidessä näytöksessä” [Heath Cobblers: Comedy in Five
Acts]. In Aleksis Kivi, Nummisuutarit; Komedia viidessä näytöksessä [Heath Cobblers: Comedy in Five
Acts], edited by Jyrki Nummi (editor-in-chief), edited by Petri Lauerma, Sakari Katajamäki, and Ossi
Kokko, 54–120, critical edition. Helsinki, Finland: Finnish Literature Society.
Nummi, Jyrki. 2014. “Partly Funny: Enters Il Dottore.”Journal of Finnish Studies 18, no. 1 (October): 153–66.
Pym, Anthony. 2010. Exploring Translation Theories. London, UK, New York, NY: Routledge.
Rafael, Vicente L. [1988] 1993. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society
under Early Spanish Rule. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Robinson, Douglas. 2013. Schleiermacher’s Icoses: Social Ecologies of the Different Methods of Translating. Bucha-
rest, Romania: Zeta Books.
Robinson, Douglas. 2014. “Partly Sunny: A Critical Edition of Kivi’s Greatest Play.” Review-Essay on
Aleksis Kivi, Nummisuutarit: Komedia viidessä näytöksessä. Kriittinen editio [Heath Cobblers: A Comedy in
Five Acts: A Critical Edition], edited by Jyrki Nummi (editor-in-chief), Sakari Katajamäki, Ossi Kokko,
and Petri Lauerma. Journal of Finnish Studies 18, no. 1 (2015): 130–52.
Robinson, Douglas, ed. [1997] 2015. Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche. London, UK,
New York, NY: Routledge.
Robinson, Douglas. 2017a. Aleksis Kivi and/as World Literature. Leiden, Netherlands, Boston, MA: Brill.
Robinson, Douglas, trans. 2017b. Aleksis Kivi, Seven Brothers. Bucharest, Romania: Zeta Books.
Sengupta, Mahasweta. 1990. “Translation, Colonialism and Poetics: Rabindranath Tagore in Two Worlds.”
In Translation, History and Culture, edited by Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere, 56–64. London, UK,
New York, NY: Cassell.
112
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. [1985] 1993. “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice.”
In Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman,
66–111. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Steiner, George. [1975] 1998. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford, UK, New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.
Venuti, Lawrence, ed. 1992. Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. London, New York:
Routledge.
Venuti, Lawrence, ed. 1998. “Translation and Minority.” Special issue of The Translator 4, no. 2. Manchester,
UK: St. Jerome.
Further reading
Asimakoulas, Dimitris, and Margaret Rogers, eds. 2011. Translation and Opposition. Bristol, UK, Buffalo,
NY, Toronto, ON: Multilingual Matters.
Bandia, Paul F. 2008. Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa. Manchester, UK:
St. Jerome.
Bermann, Sandra, and Michael Wood, eds. 2005. Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Granqvist, Raoul J., ed. 2006. Writing Back in/and Translation. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Inggs, Judith, and Libby Meintjes, eds. 2009. Translation Studies in Africa. New York, NY: Continuum.
Kumar, Ravi, ed. 2012. Role of Translation in Nation Building. New Delhi, India: Modlingua.
Suh, Serk-Bae. 2013. Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Korea and Japan from the
1910s to the 1960s. Berkeley, CA, London, UK: University of California Press.
van Doorslaer, Luc, and Peter Flynn, eds. 2013. Eurocentrism in Translation Studies. Amsterdam, Netherlands,
Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
113
9
Feminist translation ethics
Emek Ergun
1 Introduction
The question of ethics is inherent to translation, which is a universal, yet conditional, practice
of the human condition that is plural – multilingual and multicultural, to say the least. As a
meaning-making practice of human relationality where differently interpellated, situated, sum-
moned, and invested subjects encounter one another in geohistorically contingent occasions
and (consciously or unconsciously) make choices of subjectivity and intersubjectivity (as well as
textuality and intertextuality) to connect with one another, translation indeed begs the ques-
tion of ethics. In a world where differences are hierarchically coded and violently regulated, the
following questions arise in regard to translation ethics: how to mediate across those differences
and navigate power-ridden borderings that demand translation? How to be accountable for the
power to translate? How to translate against the contemporary global currents of heteropatriar-
chal colonial capitalism, while the very mechanisms and conditions of translation are shaped by
that global order?1 How to engage in translation in ways that not only empower marginalized
communities, but also lay the groundwork to build cross-border affinities and solidarities of
resistance? How to translate the other so that we connect with them outside the assimilative and
oppressive parameters of the binary logic? In other words, how to translate ethically? As a matter
of plurality, connectivity, and alterity, translation invites us to ask those urgent ethical questions
of why and how to translate. This chapter explores the feminist responses to these ethical inqui-
ries, first within the context of feminist translation studies, and then within the larger framework
of feminist theories developed particularly by feminists of color and indigenous feminists.
The bridge between feminisms and translation is a two-way street fraught with ethical con-
cerns. On the one hand, translation is indispensable to feminist politics not only because trans-
lation is a gendered practice that too often serves to perpetuate heteropatriarchal regimes of
truth (and other intersecting systems of domination), but also because feminist movements,
heterogeneously organized across different locales, have always existed in and through transla-
tion, largely due to the ruling presence of differences and borders that justice movements have
to navigate as well as challenge to build transnational solidarities. The crucial role that translation
plays in reinforcing or challenging gender discourses is precisely why exploring translation ethics
from various feminist perspectives is an urgent task. Formulating such an ethical framework not
114
only helps us question existing practices of translation that connect (or fail to connect) people
and peoples across differences and borders, but also guides future translation practices, which,
when undertaken ethically, can facilitate the formation of resistant cross-border connectivities
and subversive transnationalities. In other words, without a feminist ethics of translation that is
solid enough to challenge intersecting operations of power and flexible enough to recognize
differences, the concrete struggle for achieving egalitarian cross-border exchanges of feminist
knowledges, establishing political commonalities of resistance, and building transnational femi-
nist solidarities will continue to suffer.
On the other hand, feminist critiques are also indispensable to translation because as a revo-
lutionary platform of political thought and action, feminisms have developed ground-breaking
discursive tools and frameworks that help destabilize the historically male-dominant norms of
translation and develop new translation praxes whose ethics are informed by a vision of gender
justice. In a multilingual planet that is ruled by heteropatriarchal colonial capitalist machineries
and mechanisms of meaning making and knowledge production, feminist theories – some more
than others – can provide us with crucial ethical and political insights on how to simultaneously
intervene in those interlocking machineries and mechanisms in our cross-border interpretive
practices, which is translation. That is, if globalization is an intense, yet unequal, process of
cross-border trafficking that happens in and through translation, then translation provides us
with a unique opportunity to disrupt the unjust operations of global contact and exchange and
engage in anti-hegemonic relational practices. This disruptive potential of translation is precisely
why we need a translation ethics that is tuned to globally and locally intersecting structures of
power – heteropatriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, etc. And feminist politics, with its focus on
theorizing, imagining, and materializing cross-border justice and liberation for all, can offer us
key lessons on how to realize that disruptive potential of translation – disruptive of unjust global
relations – and reconsider translation as an ethical praxis of meaning making and knowledge
production. This chapter aims to cover some of those lessons. In the rest of the chapter, I first
discuss how these mutually transformative political formations have ethically informed each
other, largely within the context of the Canadian School of Feminist Translation, and then, by
drawing particularly on women of color, indigenous, and transnational feminisms, propose new,
more complex, and more nuanced ways to revisit translation ethics.
2 Historical trajectory: the Canadian School

In the disciplinary framework of Translation Studies, translation has traditionally been under-
stood within the ethical confines of the Western logic of phallogocentrism that upholds the
assumed “truth” of the superior (masculinized) original as opposed to the assumed “untruth” of
the subservient (feminized) translation. Plagued by such a dualistic framework that simultane-
ously claims closure and fixity of meaning and privileges the masculine (the phallus), even the
field of Translation Studies itself has historically treated translation as a lesser form of textuality
whose worth is too often ascribed based on the gendered and sexualized notion of fidelity to
the original. This phallogocentric ethical stance is captured perhaps most notably in the French
phrase les belles infidèles that prescribes that translation can be either faithful or beautiful, thus
situating “ethics as the opposite of elegance, the drudgery of moral obligation as incompatible
with stylistic (and marital) felicity” (Simon 1996, 10). It is largely thanks to the Canadian School
of Feminist Translation scholars, like Sherry Simon (1996), Luise von Flotow (1991, 1997),
and Barbara Godard (1990), that “fidelity to the original” has not only been reframed as an
empty premise and promise, albeit with immense lasting power to dictate translation ethics, but
also been politicized as a patriarchal concept that is deeply invested in gender hierarchies. Lori
115
Emek Ergun
Chamberlain’s (1988) pivotal essay on the misogynistic metaphors of translation, particularly the
ones coded around issues of “fidelity,” has also been crucial in revealing the prevalence of hetero/
sexism in conceptions of translation.
Under the multiple influences of the Quebec sovereignty movement that challenged the
colonial hegemony of English, the 1970s’ “second wave”2 feminism, particularly North Ameri-
can radical feminist thought and its critiques of male language, and French poststructuralist
thought, especially Derrida’s work on phallogocentrism and différance (difference and deferral of
meaning), Canadian feminist translation scholars not only avidly pointed out the indeterminacy
and relational fluidity of meaning, but also highlighted the political agency of the translating
subject as a gendered producer of meaning. In doing so, they scandalously rejected the notion
of “objective translation,” which undergirds the conventional ethics of fidelity (Flotow 1997;
Simon 1996). In the context of the “cultural turn” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, this criti-
cal gesture was welcome by many translation studies scholars. However, such denunciation of
the heteropatriarchal ethics of fidelity that recognized both translation’s indeterminate nature
as a situated process of cross-cultural mediation and signification and the translator’s politi-
cal subjectivity as a determining factor in the making of textual and intertextual choices also
revived longstanding anxieties about translation’s insurgent potential to unsettle and challenge
the status quo and, thus, received some backlash – critiques of (Canadian) feminist translation
practices for being elitist and accessible only to a small group of bilingual scholars (Guillaumin
1995; Voldeng 1985), adhering to a universalistic (read: white-Western) and essentialist3 defi-
nition of womanhood and gender (Martín Ruano 2005), and pursuing a “double standard”
(Arrojo 1994).
The experimental translations produced by the textually assertive Canadian feminist transla-
tors and their “interventionist” rewriting strategies were particularly critiqued for violating the
ethics of fidelity. Especially Godard’s (1990) strategy of “woman-handling” and Flotow’s (1991)
classification of feminist translation strategies that included “hijacking” caused quite a stir, with
the most notable critique coming from Rosemary Arrojo (1994, 1995), well known for her
work on postmodern, psychoanalytical, and postcolonial perspectives on translation. Arrojo
(1994), while recognizing that “[Feminist translators’] successful determination to make them-
selves ‘visible’ in the texts they translate is a clear sign that both translation and women’s issues
have conquered a much deserved space within the prevailing, phallogocentric world of men and
alleged ‘originals’” (159) also called Canadian feminist translators “opportunistic traitors” that
appropriated texts for their own political gains, displaying “contradictory ethics” (1995, 73). The
underlying logic of this critique is problematic on two grounds. First, it assumes that translation,
when not presented with a self-admitted political agenda, is not invested in or influenced by
existing relations of power. That is, the façade of impartiality is mistaken for impartiality and
feminist translators are singled out for producing biased rewritings and transgressing the ethical
boundaries of fidelity. However, even when a translation is not framed as an ideological project,
it still is one. The notorious example of the first English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex immediately comes to mind here (Bogic 2010; Moi 2002; Simons 1983). While
this translation was presented to the Anglo audience as an impartial translation without an ideo-
logical agenda, studies revealed that it was indeed a heteropatriarchal translation that eliminated
a large amount of “sensitive” materials from the volumes (e.g. names of historically important
women, the issue of lesbianism, etc.), and, thus, caused a common misperception of de Beauvoir
as an incoherent, intellectually lacking philosopher in the Anglophone world. Perhaps nowhere
is the ideological nature of translation more evident than in the competing translations of holy
texts – allegedly unbiased (and institutionally authorized) ones versus feminist-identified ones.
In fact, part of the reason why the feminist English translations of the Bible and the Quran have
116
become so controversial is that, through their inclusive writing strategies, they have offered
alternative interpretations of these religious texts and revealed the ideological nature of all trans-
lation (Simon 1996, 111–133). In the face of such challenge to authority and the traditional
exegesis, heteropatriarchal translations that were previously deemed apolitical and mainstream
have become more suspect, albeit with continuing institutional safeguarding. Then, what makes
those seemingly disinterested translations more ethical than feminist translators’ rewritings?
The question brings us to the second issue with the aforementioned critique that labels
Canadian feminist translators as “hypocritical” (Arrojo 1994, 149). According to this critique,
Canadian feminist translators condemn patriarchal interventions while championing their own
political interventions in translation. Is this not an ethical “double standard,” as Arrojo (1994,
149) puts it? What is missed here is that heteropatriarchal and feminist agendas are not ethically
comparable, even if fidelity in the conventional sense were a possibility, since they serve dif-
ferent political causes – the former is invested in relations of domination while the latter is in
pursuit of equality and justice. Moreover, while heteropatriarchal translations are often cloaked
as apolitical, which increases their textual legitimacy and thus political reach, feminist transla-
tions are accompanied by ethical and political disclosures to the reader, which is also part of
the larger feminist task of increasing the visibility of the translator. As Castro and Ergun (2018)
note, “[u]nlike feminist translation’s ethical, celebratory recognition of the translator’s visibility,
hegemonic translation practices tend to demand the translator’s invisibility as a precondition of
successful translation, which further perpetuates the illusion of ‘objective’ translation” (134). In
this regard, it could in fact be argued that feminist translators are more ethical because they do
not pretend to be “nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively” (Haraway 1988, 584), but
rather openly recognize the incompleteness, ideological partiality, and geohistorical situatedness
of their work. Instead of claiming a false objective (faithful) stance, feminist translators are aware
of the fact that translation is necessarily an interventionist act of interpreting and rewriting and,
therefore, they inform their readers about the specific processes of intervening that they have
engaged in in the recreation of the text. This does not mean that feminist translators are right or
righteous in every decision they make or that their translation strategies necessarily serve trans-
gressive and liberatory ends for all marginalized groups. Rather, my argument here solely focuses
on their disclosure practices. This is an ethics of accountability that simultaneously recognizes
the translator’s agency and contingency and translation’s potential to perpetuate or disrupt rela-
tions of power, both locally and transnationally. This is how feminist translators have rede-
fined the concept of fidelity in translation, which “is to be directed toward neither the author
nor the readers, but toward the writing project – a project in which both writer and translator
participate” (Simon 1996, 2). Indeed, close collaborations, or “closelaborations,” a term coined
by Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante as reported by his feminist translator Suzanne Jill
Levine (1991, xiii), between the translator and the author have been quite a celebrated prac-
tice among feminist translators, especially in translations of feminist experimental writings. For
instance, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood (1991, 155), a prominent Canadian feminist transla-
tor, discusses her translations as products of a “shared process of co-authership” during which the
translator and the “auther” engage in working sessions, negotiations, and discoveries, all defined
in mutual respect and support.
After experiencing a period of high productivity in 1980s and 1990s thanks to the scholarship
produced mostly in Canada and the US (particularly by Carol Maier and Suzanne Jill Levine),
the field of feminist translation studies seemed to come to a standstill in 2000s, partly because
of its limited political focus on gender/women (in a largely essentialist and gender-only frame-
work) and partly because of its limited geopolitical focus on North American contexts. Similarly,
the ethical discussions in feminist translation studies continued to narrowly revolve around the
117
Emek Ergun
question of fidelity, keeping the field on the defensive. Then, under the impact of the third wave
feminism, whose sharper focus on differences, intersecting relations of power, and transnational
flows brought about a new surge of critical scholarship on feminist translation and the inter/
disciplinary, geographic, political, and ethical boundaries of the field began to expand. Two par-
ticular publications played a bridging role in this process of epistemic transition: Keith Harvey’s
(1998) innovative article that explored politics of sexuality and translation and José Santaemilia’s
(2005) edited collection, Gender, Sex and Translation. In the next section, I discuss the political
need for such an epistemic expansion and the feminist theories that have so far challenged the
field and pushed its boundaries.

In the 1990s, particularly with the determination of black and women of color feminisms and
the rise of postcolonial and Third World feminist theories, transnational feminist theory, post-
modern feminism, indigenous feminism, and queer theory, a “new” chapter was opened in the
history of North American feminisms, which has been branded as the third wave feminism. The
third wave has deeply challenged the essentialist and hegemonic politics of the second wave and
brought intersectionality and transnationality to the forefront, although none of the critiques
raised by the third wave was fully new, because feminists of color and queer feminists had been
voicing them for decades already. In fact, intersectionality itself was not a new idea since it had
been articulated by feminists of color actively throughout the Anglo-American history – most
notably, in Sojourner Truth’s 1851 talk, “Ain’t I a Woman?” and the Combahee River Collec-
tive’s 1977 “A Black Feminist Statement.” However, it was Kimberlé Crenshaw who officially
coined the term in 1989, and intersectionality has been at the center of Anglo-American femi-
nisms since then (and also has traveled to other feminist landscapes around the world through
translation). The concept importantly underlines the complex interfaces of multiple systems of
domination as well as identities that create distinctive, multifaceted living conditions for differ-
ently embodied and situated individuals. That is, intersectionality highlights the importance of
recognizing differences among women as a condition of solidarity and that women’s different
experiences with oppression, survival, and resistance demand more complex, nuanced, and flex-
ible ethical frameworks to achieve solidarity and social change.
While the focus of intersectionality theories has initially been on local relations of ruling
in the US, the framework has later been expanded to recognize its global scope. For instance,
in Black Feminist Thought (227–228), Patricia Hill Collins (2000), whose well-known concept
“matrix of domination” describes the “overall social organization within which intersecting
oppressions originate, develop, and are contained,” pointed out that the concept “encapsulates
the universality of intersecting oppressions as organized through diverse local realities.”4 Indeed,
such a seemingly paradoxical embrace of both the local (particular) and the global (universal) has
become a key problematic of third wave feminisms. And as a practice that is simultaneously local
and global, translation is at the center of that debate. However, the locally framed (US-centric)
intersectional focus has been most considerably expanded by postcolonial and transnational fem-
inists who have rightly called out North American feminists on their imperialistic, colonialist,
and orientalist tendencies – neatly packaged in universalistic claims of “global sisterhood” – and
demanded them to take responsibility (and make amends) on their exclusionary, monolinguistic,
and assimilative knowledge production, legitimization, circulation, and reception praxes (Grewal
and Kaplan 1994; Mohanty 2003; Spivak 1993). It is in this intersectionally and transnationally
re-envisioned political platform that translation has finally firmly appeared as a central question
of feminisms.
118
The impact of the third wave on feminist translation studies intensified particularly in 2010s
when a surge of scholarship began to explore the intersectional, transnational, and queer poli-
tics of feminist translation within inter/disciplinary contexts of translation studies and feminist
studies.5 For instance, Amireh and Majaj’s (2000) edited collection Going Global brought politics
of translation and reception into the forefront of discussions on transnational and postcolonial
feminisms. Davis (2007) and Thayer (2010) examined the transnational travels of feminist texts
and discourses between the Global North and the Global South asking critical questions on
the geopolitics of global flows (what flows in what direction and why?). Finally, a number of
publications exploring the queer politics of translation (particularly in relation to postcolonial-
ity) came out in the 2010s (Baer and Kaindl 2018; Epstein and Gillett 2017; Ruvalcaba 2016;
Spurlin 2014). “A Manifesto for Queer(ing) Translation,”6 collectively authored by the Queer
Translation Collective, also illustrates the third wave perspective on translation. In the following
paragraphs, I unpack the ways in which these large-scale epistemic and political shifts manifest
themselves in the study and praxis of feminist translation.
Third wave feminist translation scholars have not only reclaimed “feminist” to mark their
multifaceted political and ethical stance of “cross-border solidarity in difference,” but also
expanded the definition of feminism from its previous focus on gender equality to a more holis-
tic and geopolitically grounded understanding of equality and justice on all fronts of oppression
(Castro and Ergun 2017, 1–2). While gender, now redefined in line with queer and postcolonial
critiques of binarisms, essentialisms, and homogenizations, has remained the primary focus of
the field, feminist translation has moved beyond its simplistic (and largely depoliticized) focus
on “women in translation” and adopted a transnational framework, or “a politics of location,”
that now recognizes local and global differences and hierarchical power relations among women
across borders (Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Mani 1990; Mohanty 2003; Nagar 2019; Rich 1984).
As a result of this new attentiveness to how geopolitics affect the production, circulation, and
reception of translations and how translation plays a central role in global flows and exchanges,
the urgency of crafting a geoethics of feminist translation has also become clear (Costa 2006;
Costa and Alvarez 2014; Nagar 2019).
Within the context of the third wave, Gayatri Spivak’s (1993) pivotal essay, “The Politics of
Translation,” and her English translation of Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi’s (1995) short stories,
Imaginary Maps, have played a key role in expanding the epistemological scope of feminist trans-
lation studies by reframing translation as a simultaneously feminist and postcolonial question. In
the essay, focusing on translations of Third World women’s texts into Western languages, par-
ticularly English, Spivak charts a postcolonial feminist ethics of translation where the geopoliti-
cal directionality of translation/reception and language hegemony appear as key ethical issues.
Spivak recognizes that translation – as an encounter with the other – is ripe with potential to
further otherize, especially in a world heavily marked by gendered colonial violence, and asks
how to translate in pursuit of feminist solidarity. She writes, “The task of the translator is to
facilitate this love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits fraying, holds the
agency of the translator and the demands of her imagined or actual audience at bay” (1993, 202).
As the basic principle of her postcolonial feminist ethics, Spivak (1993), then, calls for a
“loving distance” between the translating subject and the translated subject to hold off the
colonial reflexes of Western feminists to appropriate Third World women’s texts in the name of
easy accessibility, which is driven by their belief in common gender oppression – a tradition of
“humanist universality,” in Spivak’s (1993) words (214). This is why she wants the translator to
“surrender to the text” and advocates for using foreignizing strategies and supplementary texts
like prefaces, where the translator’s mediating political agency serves to prevent reductionist and
assimilative readings (205). Spivak is aware of the fact that the risk of colonial readings never fully
119
Emek Ergun
disappears in translations of Third World women’s texts and therefore urges English-speaking
feminists (feminists of a “hegemonic monolinguist culture”) to learn Third World women’s lan-
guages: “Rather than imagining that women automatically have something identifiable in com-
mon, why not say, humbly and practically, my first obligation in understanding solidarity is to
learn her mother-tongue. . . . This is preparation for the intimacy of cultural translation” (215).
Learning another language enables inhabiting the symbolic world of the other, which is why
“translation is the most intimate act of reading,” during which the supposedly solid boundaries
between the self and (versus) the other blur (Spivak 1993, 201). The key question of ethics, then,
is how to make that porous, ambivalent, liminal space one of hospitality and generosity (rather
than of hostility and/or charity) where subjects of different languages, geohistories, and gender/
sexuality systems touch each other in (surprisingly) liberating ways and become (surprisingly)
anew together. This is precisely why we need an intersectionally and transnationally refined
feminist ethics of translation because intimacy also harbors a genuine potential for violence, and
if we want feminist translation to be attuned to liberation and solidarity in difference, we need
to ask more complex questions on how to connect with the other in and through translation.
In the next section, I explore this question by bringing in various theoretical tools from black
feminisms, indigenous feminisms, decolonial feminisms, and queer theory.

In her article “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” feminist philosopher María Lugones (2010),
who is well known for her work on the coloniality of gender, asks, “[h]ow do we learn about
each other? How do we do it without harming each other but with the courage to take up a
weaving of the everyday that may reveal deep betrayals? How do we cross without taking over?”
(755). In response to these questions, in this section, I draw on various feminist theories to
describe a decolonial feminist ethics of translation, where translation is reconceived as a praxis of
“world-travelling” that can enable “loving perceptions” of the other and noncolonizing mutual
connectivities (Lugones 2003). It should be noted that this will not be a blueprint of practical
steps for ethical translation. Rather, by borrowing theoretical insights from various decolonial
feminist scholars, I offer some broad ethical principles that could help translators (and readers
of translations) devise ethical practices that could work within the contingency of the particular
translational encounter they find themselves in.
While there is no single published work in translation studies that provides an overview of
a decolonial feminist ethics of translation, it is important to highlight some existing scholarship
outside the discipline that may help lay the theoretical foundation for the development of such
an ethics. Outside the terrain of translation studies, Mignolo and Schiwy’s (2002) chapter on the
de/colonial potential of translation, which draws on Anzaldúa’s concept of “borderlands” and
the Zapatistas’ politics of translation, directly focuses on translation and, thus, probably comes
closest to delivering an early theoretical framework for a decolonial feminist ethics of transla-
tion. Also, Alvarez et al.’s (2014) edited collection, Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics
of Translation in the Latin/A Américas is a key text revealing the urgency of such an ethics because
as Alvarez notes in the introduction to the volume, “[t]ranslation is politically and theoretically
indispensable to forging feminist, prosocial justice, antiracist, postcolonial/decolonial, and anti-
imperial political alliances and epistemologies”7 (2014, 1). This section, by building on these
existing foundational works, explores the ways in which Lugones, Anzaldúa, and Ricœur’s
theories may further add to a model of decolonial feminist ethics of translation.
By now, it has become clear that as an act of cross-border mobility and relationality, transla-
tion is deeply infused with power. Thus, translation can serve to produce and preserve “arrogant
120
perceptions” of the other, or it can enable “loving perceptions,” depending on what kind of
traveling and connecting it facilitates – one that assimilates and eradicates the other and their
world in self-assuring ways, or one that takes the risk of being surprised and challenged by the
unknowns (or the knowns) of the other and their world in self-reflexive and self-transformative
ways (Lugones 2003). I argue that a decolonial feminist ethics of translation can bring us closer
to the second model of translation, which Richa Nagar calls “hungry translations” (2019) and
which is deeply relevant to the question of global feminist resistance, because as Lugones (2003,
3) puts it, “The opportunity is of understanding by ‘translation’ a much larger act, a much more
faithful act, a more loving act, a more disruptive act, a more deeply insurgent act than the find-
ing of linguistic ‘equivalences.’”
A decolonial feminist (and queer) ethics envisions translation as a potentially transgressive
textual border-space where asymmetrically situated subjects of difference may engage in acts of
mutual recognition, confrontation, reconciliation, collaboration, and transformation (Mignolo
and Schiwy 2002; Nagar 2019; Spurlin 2014). Unlike “colonial translation” that silences, distorts,
and disciplines all voices and knowledges that do not serve the colonial machinery of moder-
nity, decolonial feminist translation not only disrupts or unsettles the oppositional and separatist
economy of the colonial border-spaces, but also enables cross-border flows and encounters of
connectionist energies – formation of transnational synergies, if you will – which is necessary to
what Lugones (2010) calls “coalition-in-the-making” (755). In other words, decolonial feminist
translation both disrupts the “coloniality of language” and monolingualism by facilitating the
co-existence of multiple (and fluid) languages, subjectivities, and epistemologies, and also helps
us theorize and exercise alternative planetary visions of being, knowing, and relating (Lugones
2010, 750). When we add to this discussion the fact that gender binary itself is a colonial project
of modernity, “queering” and “decolonizing” appear as inseparable components of the ethical
and political agenda of decolonial feminist translation (Lugones 2007). As William J. Spurlin
(2014) nicely puts it;
By attempting to inhabit the otherness of the source text when we work across languages
and cultures, by bringing to light the slippages of signifcation that cannot be accommo-
dated in accordance with the predominant cultural values of the target language, translation
becomes a transgressive practice that disrupts and challenges, producing new, unassimilable
circuits of linguistic and cultural diference.
(204)
Then, the key question is, how can translation enable such ethical cross-border encounters that
do not reduce us to instances of othering abstractions and repeat the epistemic violence of gen-
dered colonization? In Nagar’s (2019, 27) words, “what might it take to reimagine translation as
a dynamic, multidirectional process of ethical and politically aware mediation among otherwise
impermeable local diversities – a process that always hungers for new political possibilities that
we may never have imagined before?” (And the intersectional focus on dismantling the gendered,
sexualized, and racialized economy of colonization and imagining alternative – nonviolent –
forms of transnational relationality is what makes an ethical framework feminist and decolonial
at once.) This is a crucial question, for as much as colonialism itself is an unfnished enterprise
in translation,8 decolonization similarly needs to be confgured as a translational process where
borders are put to use to connect us in ways that do not pursue homogeneity, assimilation, or
annihilation. Then, the task that awaits us is to fnd ways to channel the borderwork of transla-
tion towards planetary togetherness, while that same planet is already divided by manmade bor-
ders – borders that demarcate the very cognitive and afective horizons that make our selves. In
121
Emek Ergun
that sense, translation is an attempt to negotiate diferences claimed by borders – both material
and symbolic, external and internal. The consequences of that negotiation largely depend on
how the border navigation is done in the course of translating and reading translation. Therefore,
a decolonial feminist ethics of translation frst compels us to ask: does the act contain or con-
taminate colonial borders; does it challenge or confrm our deep-seated colonial and gendered
meaning-making habits? This frst calls attention to the question of text choice. Text choice
has been a thorny subject of feminist translation as it, once again, brings up the ethical question
of fdelity: should feminist translators only translate feminist texts or should they also translate
patriarchal texts?9
The underlying (false) logic of this question first assumes that “ideological interventions”
take place in translation only when there is no ideological alignment between the translator and
the author. Second, it wrongly assumes that feminism is one and the same across the world, so
all feminists share the same ideological perspective. Third, the assumption naively conceives the
world as free of power and ignores intersectionality and transnationality, which in reality situate
authors, translators, publishers, and readers in unequal webs of relations and create unique local
and global conditions of production, circulation, and reception based on the directionality of
the textual flow. A decolonial feminist ethics of translation would invite translators to exercise
text selection with a complex and comprehensive political agenda of resistant solidarity and
ethical vision of cross-border connectivity. This is the step where decolonial feminists question
the promise that the translation holds (Alvarez 2014, 8–9; Mignolo and Schiwy 2002). So a
decolonial feminist ethics of translation begins with a planetary vision – a hopeful, perhaps even
a utopic one – of a text that not only crosses divisive borders and connects across against all odds,
but also destabilizes the very borders it crosses. Of course, practicing this ethics would require
both enabling material conditions (can the translator truly afford it?) and intellectual and political
acuteness to navigate the borders and terrains that the text is traveling through.10
Once text selection is made, the decolonial feminist translator translates it in ways that she
believes will bring differently assembled and situated feminist texts and subjects together across
borders without perpetuating the symbolic violence of colonial and gendered meaning-making
economies. While each translation project would demand its own set of particular strategies,
depending on the geopolitics of the textual flow (e.g. in which direction is the text traveling?),
adding politically framed supplemental texts (e.g. footnotes, prefaces, afterwards, interviews,
etc.) and directly engaging with target readers seem to encourage them to experience more
ethical encounters with the text (Ergun 2015). These supplements can inform readers about the
potential risks of colonial readings, particularly if such readings are culturally and institutionally
promoted (e.g. in Anglo-American contexts), and introduce alternative solidarity-based reading
mechanisms (Gayatri Spivak’s translation of Devi’s Imaginary Maps and Richa Nagar’s translation
of Sangtin Writers’ Playing with Fire are two examples) (Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2006). That
is, paratextual materials can help devise an “ethics of responsibly receiving stories” that travel
through translation (Nagar 2019, 40). Other than these more practical suggestions, what ethical
principles could help translators in their interpretive decision-making practices?
One such principle is “loving perception,” as theorized by Lugones (1987, 2003). Transla-
tional encounters necessarily involve some degree of domestication, or rather familiarization,
but they also contain an element of surprise that can shake up the familiar ground of gendered
colonial borders and worlds. (The reader should not be fooled by the apparent familiarity in
translation, for translation itself is living proof of difference.) Translation is where the familiar
and the unfamiliar, difference and commonality, coexist. The ethical imperative, then, is to
balance that coexistence without sacrificing the other’s voice (as is commonly done in English
translations of Third World women’s texts) or the possibility of a mutual – loving and playful
122
– dialogue between different subjectivities. This is “a relationality embedded in radical vulner-

ability [which] strives to internalize that our self is intensely co-constituted and entangled with
the other” (Nagar 2019, 31).
In Lugones’s (2003) theory, embracing surprise – being playful (“loving playfulness”) – is a
key part of practicing “loving perception.” Translation is a text, in the broadest sense, that has
traveled from another “world,” which is not what we think it is, and it can take us to that “world”
if we are willing to go there playfully, not arrogantly; if we are willing to embrace “openness
to being a fool, openness to self-construction or reconstruction and to construction and recon-
struction of the ‘worlds’ we inhabit playfully” (96). This world traveling can be full of surprises
as a result of which subjectivities, including ours, are transformed and give birth to new forms of
intersubjectivity. As feminist philosopher Judith Butler, whose groundbreaking work on gender
performativity and queer theory has deeply challenged gender-essentialist feminist discourses,
notes (in Olson and Worsham 2000);
Taking for granted one’s own linguistic horizon as the ultimate linguistic horizon leads to
an enormous parochialism and keeps us from being open to radical diference and from
undergoing the discomfort and the anxiety of realizing that the scheme of intelligibility on
which we rely fundamentally is not adequate, is not common, and closes us of from the
possibility of understanding others and ourselves in a more fundamentally capacious way.
(765)
Then, the border-space that translation forges between worlds is a space of uncertainty that we
need to inhabit creatively, playfully, and bravely. Attending to the invitation of the other in such
an active and open-minded way is a work of “wonder,” “the passion that allows us to encounter,
to perceive, what is un-usual and extra-ordinary, new to our previous experience” (Heinämaa
2017, 214). Loss may be inevitable in this process of crossing borders, but not all loss is impairing
or depraving. Indeed, some loss is necessary in the process of learning how to engage in “loving
playfulness” because that process also involves unlearning our well-entrenched “arrogant percep-
tions.” As renown Chicana feminist – and one of the founding names of the fourishing feld of
border studies – Gloria Anzaldúa (2015, 150) says,
[w]hen you relate to others, not as parts, problems, or useful commodities, but from a con-
nectionist view, compassion triggers transformation. This shift occurs when you give up
investment in your point of view and recognize the real situation free of projections – not
filtered through your habitual defensive preoccupations.
A decolonial feminist ethics of translation, thus, invites subjects of translation, particularly those
acculturated in Anglo-American (feminist or not) traditions of knowing, theorizing, and expe-
riencing the world in arrogance (a cultural superiority complex, if you will), to relate to others
diferently and re-conceptualize, re-know, re-theorize, and re-experience the world to accom-
modate planetary polyphony:
Seeing feminist theorizing through the eyes of the “other,” from the “other place,” through
the “other” worldview has the capacity to defamiliarize feminist theory as we know it and
assist it not only in interrogating, understanding, and explaining the unfamiliar but also in
refamiliarizing the familiar in more productive and enriching ways. . . . It is by accommo-
dating “other” feminisms that feminism can survive and grow in a truly polyversal form.
(Nnaemeka 2015, 528)
123
Emek Ergun
The second ethical principle of decolonial feminist translation, which could be called “vulner-
able hospitality,” is closely tied to the frst one as it is the enabling condition of “loving per-
ception.” In Muddying the Waters Richa Nagar (2014, 46) writes that translation is “an act that
contains the possibility of becoming radically vulnerable. It is impossible to ‘know’ where the
sharing might lead us without having taken the risk of exposing that intimate fragment that can
only be translated inadequately.” That is, unless the subjects of translation relate to the traveling
text in ways that turns themselves vulnerable – exposing their selves to the text and all that it
brings, familiar or unfamiliar – translation’s indeterminate potential to connect across borders
and transform in ways that are unpredictable in advance will be threatened. This is an exercise
of mutual vulnerability since the displaced text is already vulnerable, particularly if its route and
“destination” are organized by colonial mechanisms that vilify, appropriate, fetishize, or com-
modify “the foreign” in a self-serving manner (that is, for self-preservation). Without exercising
vulnerability, the subject of translation will miss the (ethical) opportunity to stretch and grow
beyond their known horizons. As Butler (2004, 228) writes;
[I]t is only through existing in the mode of translation, constant translation, that we stand
a chance of producing a multicultural understanding of women, or indeed, of society.
The unitary subject is the one who knows already what it is, who enters the conversation
the same ways as it exits, who fails to put its own epistemological certainties at risk in the
encounter with the other, and so stays in place, and becomes and emblem for property and
territory, refusing self-transformation, ironically, in the name of the subject.
(emphasis original)11
What the ethical principle of vulnerable hospitality calls for, then, is to reciprocate the vulner-
ability of the traveling text/subject with “generosity and hospitality” (Ahmed 2000, 150). Sara
Ahmed calls this a “strange encounter” – an encounter between the self and the other that is a
case neither of assimilationist othering nor of rejectionist othering. Yet, to achieve such an ethi-
cal encounter, vulnerability should be accompanied by hospitality.
Translation as vulnerable hospitality is precisely what Paul Ricœur’s (2006) notion of “lin-
guistic hospitality” highlights: “the act of inhabiting the word of the Other paralleled by the act
of receiving the word of the Other into one’s own home, one’s own dwelling” (xvi). In transla-
tion, the translator invites the other into another world of language and then invites the reader
to join in the dialogue. This mediation between subjects that are positioned as selves and others
needs to be done with utmost care since the border economy that pits those subjects against
each other is geohistorically ridden with hostility and violence.12 As AnaLouise Keating (2013,
51–52) writes;
[w]hen we examine the world through this binary lens, we assume that the diferences
between our views and those of others are too diferent – too other, as it were – to have any-
thing (of importance) in common. This assumption of negative diference traps us within
our existing ideas and beliefs, for it prevents us from developing new forms of knowledge
and new alliances. After all, if we’re so busy defending our own views, where is the room
for complexity, compromise, and exchange?
(emphasis original)
This is why the ethics of vulnerable hospitality also requires a mental shift in the way we conceive
of the self and the other as distinctly separate (and opposite) and mutually exclusive singular
entities. What if the boundaries between the self and the other are not as solid and secure as we
124
assume them to be? What if otherness and selfhood are constitutive of each other? What if, as
Ricœur (1992) writes in Oneself as Another, “the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an
intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other”? (3) This shift would require
us to rid our selves of our deep-seated fear of the other (often conceived as a threatening force
of corruption and deterioration) – thus, our deep-seated fear of translation – and replace it with
a sense of multiplicitious, porous, codependent self that does not give in to the anxiety caused
by an encounter with another.
This reconceptualization of the oppositional self/other binary as relational selves brings us to
the third ethical principle of decolonial feminist translation, “radical interconnectivity,” which is
the enabling condition of the previous principles. Inspired by indigenous feminisms, particularly
Anzaldúa’s theory of nepantleras (“those who facilitate passages between worlds”), the principle
of radical interconnectivity sees all life forms on this planet as deeply interrelated, and with that
vision comes the recognition that we have an ethical responsibility toward each other (and the
planet) because our actions always have an impact on others’ lives (2002a, 2002b, 1). As Keating
(2013) explains;
[t]o borrow Rosario Morales’s analogy, we are all in the same boat, foating on the same
water, tossed about by the same waves, battered by the same storms: We all rise or sink
together. . . . Defning and perceiving ourselves as radically interrelated, we react thought-
fully as we engage with others; we learn to pause and self-refect. We practice a relational
ethics that demands a new level of mindfulness: we must carefully think through the impli-
cations of our words and deeds before we speak or act.
(49)
The task of the decolonial feminist translator – a nepantlera – is, then, to translate in ways that
would help reveal our radical interconnectedness by inviting readers to stop championing walls
(both material and symbolic) and begin re-envisioning (and re-experiencing) ourselves in sym-
biotic relationships with other selves who are already of us. This is not an easy task. Yet, transla-
tion, as a practice of world traveling, is essential to planetary justice, which can only be achieved
in polyphony and, thus, in translation.
5 Conclusion
This chapter first discussed the historical trajectory of the praxis and ethics of feminist transla-
tion, largely within the geopolitical context of the second wave feminism in North America.
In this context, achieving gender equality and visibility (of women in general and women
translators in particular) in the world of literature was the main ethical concern of second wave
feminist translation scholars. I, then, explored some potential expansions of the feminist transla-
tion ethics by drawing on the critical insights of the third wave feminisms, particularly black
and women of color feminist theories, postcolonial and Third World feminist theories, trans-
national feminism, indigenous feminism, postmodern feminism, and queer theory. Together,
these theories emphasize the urgency of developing an intersectional, transnational, decolonial,
and interconnectionist ethical framework of feminist translation with a revised conceptualiza-
tion of borders, inter/subjectivity, and solidarity. That is, third wave feminist translation scholars
have claimed a broader political and ethical agenda of social justice on a transnational platform.
Based on this expanded political agenda, the last section described three broad ethical principles
that could guide translators and readers of translation in devising decolonial feminist meaning-
making mechanisms and engage in non-othering translational encounters: (1) loving perception,
125
Emek Ergun
(2) vulnerable hospitality, and (3) radical interconnectivity. All these principles highlight the
necessity of experiencing translation as “mutual stretching” across differences, which for Audre
Lorde ([1988] 2017) is essential to “mutual surviving” (10–11). As Anzaldúa (1999) notes,
the borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched
habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity
means death. Only by remaining fexible is she able to stretch the psyche horizontally and
vertically.
(101)
Yet, it should be remembered that, depending on the kinds of intersectional lives we live and the
geopolitical locations we inhabit, some of us are more experienced with stretching than others
are (indeed, for some, stretching is more than a “hobby”; it is a matter of survival). Hence, the
application of any ethical principles that pursue mutual stretching requires different kinds of
decolonizing work from different communities of feminists.
Before I end the chapter, I should also note that the ethical framework offered here is a
partial one, for I am constrained by my own geopolitical and inter/disciplinary situatedness.
For instance, all the theories I have drawn on exist in English and this poses a major limitation
of vision. Moreover, I would like to emphasize the scarcity of scholarship on the queer ethics
of translation, feminist ethics of interpreting,13 and the ethical implications of machine transla-
tion, which, when expanded, will add crucial insights to the ever-evolving configuration of a
decolonial feminist ethics of translation. Therefore, I present this partial chapter to you as an
invitation to extend the geopolitical and interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary scope of feminist
translation ethics from your own situatedness so that it is nourished by voices, experiences, and
theories that have not been heard in English, yet. In Donna Haraway’s (1988) words, “We seek
those ruled by partial sight and limited voice – not partiality for its own sake but, rather, for the
sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible. Situated
knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals” (590).
Related topics in the volume

The ethics of linguistic hospitality and untranslatability in Derrida and Ricœur; the ethics of
postcolonial translation; Venuti and the ethics of difference; ethics of activist translation and
interpreting; translating and interpreting in conflict and crisis; accessibility and linguistic rights.
Notes
1 I use “heteropatriarchal” to describe sociopolitical systems of male domination and heteronormativity,
which, together, elevate the binary categorizations of gender and sexuality (men vs. women/hetero-
sexuality vs. homosexuality), at the expense of human plurality, and create a toxic (discriminatory,
dangerous, and degrading) environment for women, trans people, gender-queer people, asexuals,
LGBTQI people, etc. That is, the term recognises the interlocking nature of two separate systems of
oppression.
2 I use “scare quotes” the first time I refer to the “wave” terminology in the essay because it is important
to note that the waves metaphor, which has been the dominant periodization tool in conceptualizing
the historical trajectory of US feminisms, has been criticised heavily for privileging the political experi-
ences of white heterosexual upper-class women, reinscribing hierarchies and omissions in US women’s
history, obscuring plurality among feminist activists and activisms, failing to capture the historical com-
plexities of US feminist politics, and misrepresenting US feminisms as a homogeneous movement. For
an overview of the debate, see Laughlin et al. (2010) and Nicholson (2010). Also see Rowley (2013)
126
on the problematics of using the US waves metaphor transatlantically to describe other local feminist
genealogies.
3 Gender essentialism here refers to the idea that there is a biologically fixed, universal, intrinsic, and
innate essence to women and men. Gender essentialism claims that women and men are intrinsically
different from each other (“sex differences”) due to biologically determining factors and ignores socially
determining factors that seek to condition (and discipline) humans into two separate gender categories.
4 It is not a coincidence that Patricia Hill Collins wrote the preface to Feminist Translation Studies (Castro
and Ergun 2017), which is the first book published in feminist translation studies that has explicitly
claimed an intersectional and transnational agenda for the field. Also, for a discussion on the transla-
tional travels of Collins’s Black Feminist Thought and the concept of “intersectionality” to South Korea,
see Choo (2012).
5 A selective list of monographs, edited collections, and special journal issues that discuss feminist transla-
tion in intersectional, transnational, and queer perspectives includes Alvarez et al. (2014), Amireh and
Majaj (2000), Baer and Kaindl (2018), Castro and Ergun (2017), Davis (2007), Davis and Evans (2011),
Doerr (2018), Epstein and Gillett (2017), Flotow and Farahzad (2017), Kaza (2017), Nagar (2014),
Pinazo and Garcia (2013), Ruvalcaba (2016), Spurlin (2014), and Thayer (2010).
6 No date. Accessed on August 29, 2019, at https://queertranslationcollective.org/manifesto/
7 While Mignolo and Schiwy (2002) prefer the term “transculturation,” Alvarez (2014) uses “transloca-
tion” to refer to translational flows, contacts, and formations across borders.
8 For more on the enabling role of translation in colonialism, see Cheyfitz (1991), Niranjana (1992), and
Rafael (1988).
9 For a brief discussion of this question, see Flotow (1997, 24–30).
10 Some might interpret this text selection ethics as “political censorship,” an accusation feminist transla-
tors are not fully unfamiliar with, although it could just as well be framed as “positive discrimination.”
11 For an interesting discussion of the transnational feminist politics of translation, see the collective chap-
ter in Feminist Translation Studies (Castro and Ergun 2017), in which Butler is a participant along with
Richa Nagar, Kathy Davis, AnaLouise Keating, Claudia de Lima Costa, Sonia E. Alvarez, and Ayşegül
Altınay.
12 This border economy situates epistemic subjects in oppositional frameworks (“us” versus “them”) and
regulates, even dictates, the ways in which those subjects relate to each other and hear each other – or
not hear at all. It is this colonial border economy that tells us, for instance, to cherish the voices of
the so-called French feminists as legitimate theories that can expand our horizons while designating
theories produced in and of Africa, South America, Middle East, indigenous lands, etc. as illegible or
unqualified. Then, these theories either do not cross borders to engage with audiences located in other
geographies, or when they are allowed to cross borders, they end up serving colonial motives because
they are translated and/or read with an agenda of othering, which is an operation of containing one’s
horizons rather than expanding them.
13 Although it does not claim the title “feminist translation,” Nicole Doerr’s recent book (2018) on the
intersectional politics of interpreting offers a great introduction to questions on the ethics of interpreting.
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in the Post-Coloniality. New York: Routledge.
Alvarez, Sonia E. 2014. “Introduction to the Project and the Volume: Enacting a Translocal Feminist Poli-
tics of Translation.” In Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/A Américas,
edited by Sonia E. Alvarez, Claudia de Lima Costa, Verónica Feliu, Rebecca J. Hester, Norma Klahn,
and Millie Thayer, 1–18. Durham: Duke University Press.
Alvarez, Sonia, Claudia de Lima Costa, Verónica Feliu, Rebecca J. Hester, Norma Klahn, and Millie
Thayer, eds. 2014. Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/A Américas.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Amireh, Amal, and Lisa Suhair Majaj, eds. 2000. Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World
Women Writers. New York: Garland.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1999. Borderlands/La Frontera, 2nd edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2002a. “Now Let Us Shift . . . the Path of Conocimiento . . . Inner Work, Public
Acts.” In This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, edited by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and
AnaLouise Keating, 540–78. New York: Routledge.
127
Emek Ergun
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2002b. “Preface: (Un)natural Bridges, (Un)safe Spaces.” In This Bridge We Call Home:
Radical Visions for Transformation, edited by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and AnaLouise Keating, 1–5. New
York: Routledge.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2015. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Edited by
AnaLouise Keating. Durham: Duke University Press.
Arrojo, Rosemary. 1994. “Fidelity and the Gendered Translation.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction
7, no. 2: 147–63.
Arrojo, Rosemary. 1995. “Feminist, ‘Orgasmic’ Theories of Translation and Their Contradictions.” Trad-
term 2: 67–75.
Baer, Brian James, and Klaus Kaindl, eds. 2018. Queering Translation, Translating the Queer. New York:
Routledge.
Bogic, Anna. 2010. “The Story of the First English Translation of Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe and Why
It still Matters.” Simone de Beauvoir Studies 26: 81–93.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.
Castro, Olga, and Emek Ergun. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies. New York: Routledge.
Castro, Olga, and Emek Ergun. 2018. “Translation and Feminism.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation
and Politics, edited by Fruela Fernández, and Jonathan Evans, 125–43. New York: Routledge.
Chamberlain, Lori. 1988. “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation.” Signs 13, no. 3: 454–72.
Cheyfitz, Eric. 1991. The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from the Tempest to Tarzan. Lon-
don: Oxford University Press.
Choo, Hae Yeon. 2012. “The Translational Journey of Intersectionality.” Gender & Society 26, no. 1:
40–5.
Costa, Claudia de Lima. 2006. “Lost (and Found?) in Translation: Feminisms in Hemispheric Dialogue.”
Latino Studies 4: 62–78.
Costa, Claudia de Lima, and Sonia E. Alvarez. 2014. “Dislocating the Sign: Toward a Translocal Feminist
Politics of Translation.” Signs 39, no. 3: 557–63.
Davis, Kathy. 2007. The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Davis, Kathy, and Mary Evans, eds. 2011. Transatlantic Conversations: Feminism as Travelling Theory. Farnham:
Ashgate.
Devi, Mahasweta. 1995. Imaginary Maps. Translation and Introduction by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Doerr, Nicole. 2018. Political Translation: How Social Movement Democracies Survive. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Epstein, B.J., and Robert Gillett, eds. 2017. Queer in Translation. New York: Routledge.
Ergun, Emek. 2015. “Doing Feminist Translation as Local and Transnational Activism: The Turkish Trans-
lation of Virgin: The Untouched History and Its Reception.” PhD diss., University of Maryland,
Baltimore.
Flotow, Luise von. 1991. “Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories.” TTR: Traduction, Ter-
minologie, Rédaction 4, no. 2: 69–84.
Flotow, Luise von. 1997. Translation and Gender. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Flotow, Luise von, and Farzanah Farahzad, eds. 2017. Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons.
Guillaumin, Colette. 1995. Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology. New York: Routledge.
Godard, Barbara. 1990. “Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation.” In Translation, History, Culture,
edited by Susan Bassnett, and Andrew Lefevere, 87–96. New York: Pinter.
Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan, eds. 1994. Scattered Hegemonies. Minnesota: University of Minnesota
Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of
Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3: 575–99.
Harvey, Keith. 1998. “Translating Camp Talk: Gay Identities and Cultural Transfer.” The Translator 4, no.
2: 295–320.
Heinämaa, Sara. 2017. “Wonder as the Primary Passion: A Phenomenological Perspective on Irigaray’s Eth-
ics of Difference.” In Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters, edited by Luna Dolezal,
and Danielle Petherbridge, 209–36. New York: SUNY Press.
Hill Collins, Patricia. 2000. Black Feminist Thought, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge.
Kaza, Madhu H., ed. 2017. Kitchen Table Translation. Pittsburgh: Blue Sketch Press.
128
Keating, AnaLouise. 2013. Transformation Now! Toward A Post-Oppositional Politics of Change. Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press.
Laughlin, Kathleen A., Julie Gallagher, Dorothy Sue Cobble, Eileen Boris, Premilla Nadasen, Stephanie
Gilmore, and Leandra Zarnow. 2010. “Is It Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Meta-
phor.” Feminist Formations 22, no. 1: 76–135.
Levine, Suzanne Jill. 1991. The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. Minnesota: Graywolf.
Lorde, Audre. [1988] 2017. A Burst of Light: And Other Essays. Mineola, NY: Ixia Press.
Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne de. 1991. Re-belle et infidèle: La traduction comme pratique de réécriture au femi-
nine/The Body Bilingual: Translation as a Re-Writing in the Feminine. Montreal: Women’s Press.
Lugones, María. 1987. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” Hypatia 2, no. 2: 3–19.
Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. New York:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Lugones, María. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22, no. 1:
186–209.
Lugones, María. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25, no. 4: 742–59.
Mani, Lata. 1990. “Multiple Mediation: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception.”
Feminist Review 35 (Summer): 24–41.
Martín Ruano, M. Rosario. 2005. “Gender(ing) Theory: Rethinking the Targets of Translation Studies in
Parallel with Recent Developments in Feminism.” In Gender, Sex and Translation, edited by José Santae-
milia, 27–37. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Mignolo, Walter D., and Freya Schiwy. 2002. “Beyond Dichotomies: Translation/Transculturation and the
Colonial Difference.” In Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globaliza-
tion, edited by Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, 251–86. New York: SUNY Press.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism without Borders. Durham: Duke University Press.
Moi, Toril. 2002. “While We Wait: The English Translation of ‘The Second Sex’.” Signs 27, no. 4:
1005–35.
Nagar, Richa. 2014. Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Nagar, Richa, in journeys with Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan, and Parakh Theatre. 2019. Hungry
Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Nicholson, Linda. 2010. “Feminism in ‘Waves’: Useful Metaphor or Not?” New Politics 12, no. 4: 34–9.
Nnaemeka, Obioma. 2015. “Captured in Translation: Africa and Feminisms in the Age of Globalization.”
In Provocations: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought, edited by Susan Bordo, M.
Cristina Alcalde, and Ellen Rosenman, 520–2. Oakland: University of California Press.
Olson, Gary A., and Lynn Worsham. 2000. “Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical
Resignification.” JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, & Politics 20, no. 4: 727–65.
Pinazo, Encarnacion Postigo, and Adela Martinez Garcia, eds. 2013. “Rethinking Women and Translation
in the Third Millennium.” Special issue of Women’s Studies International Forum 42.
Rafael, Vicente L. 1988. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under
Early Spanish Rule. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Rich, Adrienne. 1984. “Notes toward a Politics of Location.” In Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose,
1979–1985, 210–31. New York: Norton.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. 2006. On Translation. Translated by Eileen Brennan. New York: Routledge.
Rowley, Michelle V. 2013. “The Idea of Ancestry: Of Feminist Genealogies and Many Other Things.”
In Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, 3rd edition, edited by Carole R. McCann, and
Seung-kyung Kim, 77–82. New York: Routledge.
Ruvalcaba, Héctor Domínguez. 2016. Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations.
London: Zed Books.
Sangtin Writers, and Richa Nagar. 2006. Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives
in India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Santaemilia, José, ed. 2005. Gender, Sex and Translation: The Manipulation of Identities. Manchester: St.
Jerome Publishing.
Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation. New York: Routledge.
129
Emek Ergun
Simons, Margaret A. 1983. “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from the Second
Sex.” Women’s Studies International Forum 6, no. 5: 559–64.
Spivak, Gayatri. 1993. “The Politics of Translation.” In Outside the Teaching Machine, 179–200. New York:
Routledge.
Spurlin, William J., ed. 2014. “The Gender and Sexual Politics of Translation: Literary, Historical, and
Cultural Approaches.” Special issue of Comparative Literature Studies 51, no. 2.
Thayer, M. 2010. Making Transnational Feminism: Rural Women, NGO Activists, and Northern Donors in
Brazil. New York: Routledge.
Voldeng, E. 1985. “The Elusive Source Text.” Canadian Literature 105: 138–9.
Further reading
Alvarez, Sonia, Claudia de Lima Costa, Verónica Feliu, Rebecca J. Hester, Norma Klahn, and Millie
Thayer, eds. 2014. Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/A Américas.
Durham: Duke University Press.
This collection, composed of 20 chapters, explores the critical roles of translation and translators in
enabling hemispheric feminist dialogues within and across Latin American, Caribbean, and US-based
Latina feminisms. The volume represents the third wave of feminist translation studies although it has a
limited geopolitical scope and is framed around a broad definition of translation.
Amireh, Amal, and Lisa Suhair Majaj, eds. 2000. Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World
Women Writers. New York: Garland.
This collection, composed of 11 chapters, explores the reception of Third World women writers’ texts
as they travel from different locales across the globe into the Anglo US. The chapters not only highlight
postcolonial feminist politics of translation and reception, but also critique ethnocentric versions of US
feminism for appropriating Third World women’s voices and knowledges. The volume represents the third
wave of feminist translation studies with its focus on the geopolitics of both translation and reception.
Castro, Olga, and Emek Ergun, eds. 2017. Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives.
This collection is composed of 16 essays that explore translation as a form of local and transnational
feminist activism from different interdisciplinary perspectives, while at the same time seeking to geopo-
litically expand the Anglo-Eurocentric boundaries of the field. The volume represents the third wave of
feminist translation studies as it conceives feminist translation both as a transnational and intersectional
form of feminist action.
Doerr, Nicole. 2018. Political Translation: How Social Movement Democracies Survive. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
This book is based on Doerr’s fieldwork on participatory democracy conducted in several multilingual
political settings (e.g. World Social Forum) – settings that require politically engaged interpreting to
become truly democratic. Doerr challenges long-standing assumptions that monolingual settings are
more prone to democratic modes of communication by revealing that when facilitated by “political
translation” (translation and interpreting tuned to intersectional operations of power), multilingual set-
tings enable greater levels of democratic engagement and decision-making. The book represents the
third wave of feminist translation studies due to its intersectional approach to translation and interpret-
ing, although it does not claim “feminist” as an identifying marker.
Spurlin, William J., ed. 2014. “The Gender and Sexual Politics of Translation: Literary, Historical, and
Cultural Approaches.” Special Issue of Comparative Literature Studies 51, no. 2.
This special journal issue, composed of seven essays, discusses the gender and queer politics of translation
particularly within the critical framework of postcolonial studies. The articles explore key questions, such
as how to translate varying gender and sexuality terminologies, including “queer,” across different linguis-
tic and cultural landscapes when those very translation circuits are fraught with colonial forces and how
translation has triggered social change when subversive narratives of sexuality travel across borders and
enter into new cultural settings. The volume represents the third wave of feminist translation studies due
to its intersectional perspective on translation informed particularly by queer and postcolonial studies.
130
10
Venuti and the ethics
of difference
1 Introduction
Lawrence Venuti, a professor of English and a scholar of comparative literature at Temple Uni-
versity, USA, has been a household name in Translation Studies since the 1990s. He is most often
cited in the context of the term pair of foreignizing and domesticating, referring to translations
that are experienced as either foregrounding the foreignness of the translated text or aiming for
domesticating fluency, naturalness and easy readability (e.g. Paloposki 2011). These two can be
seen as opposing aesthetic choices, but one can also approach them from an ethical perspective
(see also Chapter 6 “Ethics in Berman and Meschonnic” in this volume). This ethical read-
ing is the one Venuti has himself repeatedly emphasized but, we argue, most commentators in
translation studies have largely overlooked. An extensive reading of Venuti’s 1990s publications
from the perspective of ethics can be found in Kaisa Koskinen’s Beyond Ambivalence (2000); a
substantive critical reading of Venuti’s ethical stance, again based on his 1990s publications, is in
Anthony Pym’s On Translator Ethics (2012, 32–35). This chapter aims to provide a full overview
of Venuti’s thinking of ethics and translation up to 2020.
Venuti’s career spans over several decades, and his theoretical thinking has evolved over time.
A concrete evidence of this is his best-known book, The Translator’s Invisibility, which has been
published three times (1995, 2008, 2017), each time with revisions and additions. In the new
introduction to the 2017 edition Venuti (2017, x) identifies ethics and politics as a blind spot
of contemporary translation studies. He summarizes the book’s foundational stance as follows:
In Translator’s Invisibility, however, following the theoretical discourses in literary and cul-
tural studies, ideology is conceived as an ensemble of values, beliefs, and representations
that are inscribed in language without the user’s awareness or control, and that maintain or
challenge the hierarchies in which social groups are positioned, thereby serving the interests
of specifc groups. Ideology is thus indistinguishable from value judgment; it is a quintes-
sentially political concept, and it turns the analysis of translated texts into a critique of their
politics made from a diferent, usually opposing ideological standpoint.
(Venuti 2017, ix–x)
131
From the inescapably ideological nature of any text it follows that there is no such thing as
value-free translation, that translation is always a political act, hence the necessity for the vis-
ibility of translation and hence the need to emphasize the ethical. As each translation event also
takes place within existing socio-cultural hierarchies, the asymmetries and inequities bring forth
ethical considerations (Venuti 1998, 4). Venuti has argued that not only practical translation but
also translation studies as a research feld ultimately needs to address an ethical task “of developing
methods of translation research and practice that describe, explain and take responsibility for the
diferences that translation inevitably makes” (Venuti 2013, 34; see also Chapter 24 “Research
ethics in translation and interpreting studies” in this volume).
Embracing the aforementioned understanding of the nature of texts in his theoretical writ-
ings, Venuti himself made a decisive move away from the descriptive research tradition prevalent
at the time of his early contributions in the 1990s (see also Venuti 2017, x). Indeed, he has been
vocal about his preferences. Focusing on issues such as the uneven global flows of literary influ-
ence (1998, 158–189), the invisibility of the translating agent (1995) and the ideological nature
of target texts (2017, xiv), Venuti has urged his Anglo-American and international readers to
cultivate attitudes hospitable towards foreign literary influences, with the overall calling to con-
tribute to more democratic cultural relations (1995, 20; 1998, 25; see also Koskinen 2000, 109).
This, according to Venuti, is best achieved by favouring the foreignizing end of the translation
spectrum – by making bold source text choices, by mobilizing the linguistic resources of the
target language to resist any homogenizing influences, and by giving the readers of the transla-
tion the possibility to experience moments of alienation and to recognize the translatorial inter-
ventions. What Venuti argues for as a translation scholar he has also put to practice as a literary
translator of Italian and Catalan poetry and fiction. This translation practice has also been made
visible via a number of essays detailing his own translation decisions (e.g. 2013, Ch. 3 and 4).
As Venuti’s theoretical contributions have gained prominence in translation studies, some of
the nuances of his thinking have perhaps been lost. Domesticating and foreignizing are often
understood as simply referring to literal versus free translation strategies, a technicality measur-
able by calculating the distances and degrees of equivalence between source text expressions and
their counterparts in the target text (see e.g. Van Poucke 2012; Penttilä and Muikku-Werner
2012). The more complex theoretical frameworks of poststructuralist thinking and hermeneutic
interpretation (Venuti 1992, 2019a) that are developed to account for translators’ decision-
making are seldom brought to bear on the analysis of the translated works under study by other
scholars adopting his terminology, and his other concepts pertaining to ethical issues, such as
resistant translation or the ethics of location, have received much less attention than domesticat-
ing and foreignizing. In this chapter we aim to both give prominence to the notion of ethics of
location and to discuss the ethical undercurrent that spans across Venuti’s theorizing, the ethics
of difference that has been central to his career.
In the 1990s, the budding discipline of translation studies found inspiration in a number of criti-
cal theories of the time, including post-structuralist, postcolonial and feminist theories (see also
Chapter 7 “The ethics of linguistic hospitality and untranslatability in Derrida and Ricœur,”
Chapter 8 “The ethics of postcolonial translation” and Chapter 9 “Feminist translation ethics”
in this volume). Lawrence Venuti’s edited volume Rethinking Translation. Discourse, Subjectivity,
Ideology (1992) was one of the new voices in the field, forwarding a “philosophical, but also
political” rethinking of what translation is and entails, and introducing in one book authors such
as Lori Chamberlain, Richard Jacquemond, Suzanne Jill Levine, Sherry Simon and many others
132
Venuti and the ethics of difference
whose work soon became widely known and appreciated in the field. The collection contains
many seeds of what later became dominant in Venuti’s theorization: the opening sentence of
the introduction (1992, 1) states that “translation continues to be an invisible practice,” eclipsing
its “linguistic, cultural, institutional and political” determinations and effects. Fluency is identi-
fied as a root problem (4), and deconstructive poststructuralism is identified as a groundwork
for a method of reading translations. The translation hermeneutic he proposed would consist of
(1) comparisons of the source and target texts to reveal the translator’s strategy and translation
effects, (2) examination of the internal discontinuities and supplementarities in the translation,
and (3) ideological and institutional determinations of the translation, situating it in its historical
and cultural context (10).
The three steps do not necessarily appear too radical, and indeed the descriptive translation
studies paradigm (see also Chapter 13 “Literary translator ethics” in this volume) followed a
fairly similar pattern. The difference lies in the postmodern philosophy that is particularly visible
in step 2: the vocabulary of “discontinuities” and “supplementarities” is quite Derridean, and
it is decisively non-negative in tone. The translator’s agency is emphasized, and fidelity is only
evoked in its abusive form. The term “abusive fidelity” had been introduced by Philip E. Lewis
(1985) in the context of the English translation of Derrida’s famous essay on translation “Des
Tours De Babel” (see also Chapter 7 “The ethics of linguistic hospitality and untranslatability in
Derrida and Ricœur” in this volume), and it hailed the reproductive power of “strong, forceful
translation that values experimentation, tampers with usage, seeks to match the polyvalencies
or plurivocities or expressive stresses of the original by producing its own” (41). In other words,
difference to the source text was not to be seen as a failure of translation. Instead, it was the
prerequisite of its success.
In the edited volume of 1992, Venuti used Lewis’s words to channel this kind of translation
practice; in the two monographs that appeared soon after the edited volume and within a short
time frame he embraced and promoted the same practice by developing his own argumentation.
The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995) is a lengthy exposé of the rise of fluency
(and its sidekick invisibility of translator) to its dominant position in Anglo-American translation
tradition and a rally for alternative strategies, both those found in the margins of history and
those developed through an engagement with critical theories. The last chapter is titled “Call to
Action,” and it pictures the dualist model Venuti has become known for in no uncertain terms:
The translator . . . may submit to or resist the forms, practices, and institutions that have
accrued the greatest prestige and power in the translating language, with either course of
action susceptible to ongoing redirection. Submission assumes an ethics of domestication
at work in the translation process, locating the same in a cultural other, pursuing a cultural
narcissism that is imperialistic abroad and conservative, even reactionary, in maintaining
cultural hierarchies in the receiving situation.
(Venuti 2008, 266, emphasis added)
It is noteworthy that the quotation, from the 2008 edition, explicitly talks about the ethics of
domestication, whereas the same segment in 1995 referred to “an ideology of assimilation”
(1995, 308; there are also some other revisions). In essence, the ethical undercurrent remains
the same, but in the frst edition it was not as clearly labelled as such. By calling translators to
action, Venuti calls for a choice of resistance over submission. Resistant translation, according
to Venuti, signals both cultural and linguistic diferences while unsettling the hierarchies of the
target context. Here, Venuti incorporates an “ethics of foreignization” (2008, 266), a term that
materializes in opposition to existing canons and marginalizing practices because they only
133
welcome those foreign texts that do not stir up any disturbances of the status quo. In this formu-
lation, the juxtaposition of submission and resistance, while sometimes interpreted as a naïvely
black-and-white approach, managed to catch the attention of the feld through the force of an
uncompromising, dichotomy-like demand.
The roots of Venuti’s approach can be tracked back to German Romanticism, and it bears
resemblance to Schleiermacher’s famous essay from year 1813 (Schleiermacher 1982) on the two
methods of translating and the Romantic understanding of the ethical task of translating that
have greatly influenced ethical thinking in translation. It is, however, important to notice that
Venuti’s theorizing is not a repetition of Schleiermacher’s thinking (see also Chapter 6 “Ethics
in Berman and Meschonnic” in this volume). In The Translator’s Invisibility (1995, Ch. 3), Venuti
offers his critical reading of Schleiermacher, noting the relevant similarities such as the praise
of non-fluent translation as well as the bipolar presentation of the two methods, but also the
more crucial differences such as the cultural role and political functions of translation (see also
Koskinen 2000, 48–52; Pym 2012, 32–35).
The Translator’s Invisibility has acquired a central role in Venuti’s oeuvre. It was published in
a revised version in 2008, was reprinted in Routledge classics edition in 2017 and has become
a standard reference in discussions about foreignization and domestication in translation stud-
ies. In his new introduction to the classics edition, Venuti comments on the fate of his ideas,
and his ambivalence is tangible: all interpretations of his ideas have not been in the direction
he foresaw. The second monograph, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference
(1998), forwards the same line of argument as The Translator’s Invisibility, but this time focuses
on the scandalous “others” of translation, looking at the publishing industry, copyright law, and
the teaching of literature, among other things, to find explanations of the translator’s plight. The
aim, again, is to promote a rethinking of translation as an intercultural collaborative process. The
book, however, also introduces a slight shift of the perspective, made visible by the introduction
of a new term, minoritizing, that further highlights the national and transnational hierarchies
within which the cultural differences play out (see also later). The ethics of difference is even
more prominent than in his previous works as it now features in the title. The fundamental ethi-
cal position remains unchanged and is again directed not only at translators but also at readers
and scholars: “The ethical stance I advocate urges that translations be written, read, and evalu-
ated with greater respect for linguistic and cultural differences” (Venuti 1998, 6; see also Venuti
2004). Among new concepts that fine-tune the argumentation are also the idea of the translation
releasing a foreignizing remainder and the notion of the ethics of location (see also later).
The three core publications of the 1990s, and in particular the two monographs (Venuti
1995 and 1998), put forward a programmatic argument for a particular translation approach in a
historical perspective and from a contemporary angle. In his later work, Venuti’s style changes.
Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (2013) records a less activist and therefore
maybe more compelling attitude. It is a collection of essays from the early 2000s, spanning from
2000 to 2012. The long time frame of his work covered in this volume provides a trajectory
to how Venuti’s thinking has evolved. According to his own subheadings in the introduction,
the trajectory has involved “abandoning instrumentalism,” “recovering history, textuality and
agency,” as well as “essaying a new approach.” Abandoning instrumentalism is no doubt a reac-
tion to the often “simplistic” reception of his previous monographs (see Venuti 2017, x–xi), but
it also evokes his desire to recalibrate his thinking, even if he has “no intention of abandoning the
pursuit of foreignizing effects” (2013, 2). The new direction is more attuned to seeing translation
as an interpretive “event,” a notion which Venuti (2013, 4; see also 2010, 79) introduces from
Alain Badiou’s work and phrases as a translation that brings about “a linguistic and cultural differ-
ence in the institution, initiating new ways of thinking inspired by an interpretation of the source
134
text.” This emphasis led him to develop a new approach in the form of a hermeneutic model.
Recovering history, textuality and agency is at first sight an unexpected emphasis, as these are
the themes that cut across Venuti’s entire career, but in the context of recent comparative litera-
ture cum translation research, he (2013, 5–8) argues, they have been left aside, as sociological
approaches have led to a presentist approach with limited sensitivity to historical trajectories
and changing contextualizations; world literature approaches have reverted to distant reading
strategies (Moretti 2000), and the vogue of habitus-related research, he argues, has not brought
much enlightenment to the agency of the translator. The new approach, then, presents the case
for the aforementioned hermeneutic model. Ethics is the topic of one chapter; throughout the
chapters it is present implicitly, although not extensively discussed in a manner similar to how
it was done in his earlier works from the 1990s. As a concrete evidence of its background role,
ethics is also not indexed in the book.
The latest publications, the book Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic (2019a) and the
pamphlet Theses on Translation: An Organon for the Current Moment (2019b), were both published
the same year, and their titles highlight the new urgency of Venuti’s writing. In the present
moment, Venuti seems to argue, the long-lived concept of translation that builds on an instru-
mentalist understanding of translating, and the related faith in the underlying invariant that can
and should be preserved in translation, are particularly misguided and harmful. Instrumental
translation that aims at transferring the invariant content, meaning or effect of the source text
needs to give way to a hermeneutic model of translation that acknowledges the transformative
power of translation:
Translation is imitative yet transformative. It can and routinely does establish a semantic cor-
respondence and a stylistic approximation to the source text. But these relations can never
give back that text intact. Any text is a complex cultural artifact, supporting meanings,
values, and functions that are indivisible from its originary language and culture. Transla-
tion interprets a source-text process of signifcation and reception by creating another such
process, supporting meanings, values, and functions that are indivisible from the translating
language and culture. Change is unavoidable.
(Venuti 2019b, 8)
The hermeneutic model, in other words, takes us back to the ethics of diference. Any transla-
tion process evokes, consciously or unconsciously, a number of interpretants, some of them
dominant in the target culture, others marginal. Dominant interpretants assimilate the transla-
tion; marginal interpretants construct certain images of the foreign (Venuti 2008, 19–20) into it.
Venuti argues that the ethics of diference dictates that promoting marginal interpretants is ethi-
cal as it questions the canonical and assimilationist interpretations, while promoting dominant
interpretants “can be” unethical as it may lead to supressing diference (15–16). The urgency of
recent publications comes from what Venuti perceives as a reinforced global tendency towards
fuent translation language in all genres (2019b, 16). Instead, translators should “show respect for
the source text by cultivating innovation in the translating language and culture” (17).

What most profoundly ties Venuti’s works to questions of translation ethics is the very starting
point of his approach, the view that translation is always imbalanced in some way: the inevitably
assimilationist nature of translation always exploits foreign texts for domestic purposes, and the
sites of translation are never neutral (Venuti 1998, 4, 11). This inherent inequality is manifested
135
in how the two sides of translation, the translating and the translated culture, differ from each
other both in terms of language and culture and their political and economic statuses, and how
these global positions affect both the motives for and opportunities in translation (158–159,
188). According to Venuti, the effects of translated texts have major ethical implications. This
is particularly evident in Venuti’s repeated stress on the importance of registering linguistic and
cultural differences and the history of suppressing those differences, most often through discuss-
ing Anglophone translation traditions. On a more global scale, the power of translation in con-
structing representations of foreign cultures (67) highlights the urgency of ethics in translation.
Venuti’s work revolves around the question of ethics through a number of concepts. Among
them, his first key term may be considered the one in the title of his first monograph (1995),
the invisibility of translators – and translations. The multifaceted nature of invisibility masks both
the work of the translator and the status of the translation as a foreign-origin text. It impedes
any recognition of differences by depriving them of visibility, and therefore turns translations
into something that merely appears from an imposed sameness (see Venuti 1998, 188), as if there
never was a foreign text that differed from those native to the target culture. Closely intertwined
with this type of invisibility, another term that carries through all Venuti’s major works is fluency,
which he criticizes because of the narrow sense in which it is typically understood (see Venuti
2013, 2). A fluent translation is made to appear as an original work, thus creating an illusion of
a text that has not been translated. Through techniques routinely expected of translators, such
as the current standard dialect, linear syntax and univocal meaning, the translator produces an
illusion of originality, of an invisible translation that “creates an easy readability that masks the
translator’s work, leading the reader to believe that the translation is actually the source text”
(Venuti 2017, iix). Fluency means familiarity, and fluency enables the target society to ignore
and suppress the differences. For Venuti, fluency and invisibility represent wide-ranging transla-
tion characteristics that favour the dominant and dismiss the marginal. They are key features
of domesticated translations, which maintain established hierarchies and institutionalize certain
values while suppressing others. Foreignization, on the contrary, opposes this understanding
of fluency that limits the translator’s choices to those defined by the current canon as standard
language use (Venuti 1998, 99; 2013, 2). It opposes easy, uncomplicated readability and is almost
forceful in attempting to make the translation visible in order to dispel the illusion of original-
ity and to expose the reader to the conditions in which translation takes place. The micro- and
macro-level strategies translators choose affect the cross-cultural relations to which their trans-
lations contribute. In Venuti’s thinking, translation wields enormous power. It indeed has the
dynamics to change everything.
As mechanisms affecting this potential for change, both fluency and invisibility play a central
part in the famous term duo domestication and foreignization. While the origins of this scale
with two opposing ends lie deeper than the 1990s (see earlier), Venuti is generally considered the
translation scholar whose critical writings gave these terms the prominent status they now enjoy
within translation studies. And while the critical nature of Venuti’s works is recognized in the
discipline, the applications of these terms in translation research do not necessarily reflect their
connection to the ethical implications of fluency and invisibility, which in Venuti’s argumenta-
tion are crucial for all pores of society. These implications entail translation’s potential to feature
in questions ranging from geopolitical conflicts and colonialism to confrontations between liter-
ary canons through which dominant and marginal cultural discourses may rival. Furthermore,
translation can maintain or revise the foundational frameworks of all fields by affecting the
formation and development of conceptual paradigms, research methodologies and clinical prac-
tices (Venuti 1995, 19). Due to these multifaceted effects, Venuti maintains that the concepts of
domestication and foreignization represent profoundly ethical attitudes (e.g. 2008, 19), which,
136
as very comprehensive approaches, echo all aspects of translation. In this view, domestication not
only makes a text more approachable and easier to read but also pursues a strategy that assimilates
a foreign text into the translating culture’s dominant values, thereby both suppressing the status
of the source culture and reinforcing that of the target culture and subduing more marginal val-
ues within the target culture itself. Accordingly, the objective of foreignizing translation is not
solely to maintain (or create) foreignness but to resist assimilation and suppression by deviating
from what is currently canonical in the target culture, unsettling the prevailing doxa. In other
words, foreignization aims to break dominant patterns in the receiving situation. Venuti’s foun-
dational stance is that these patterns need to be disrupted or replaced precisely because of their
dominance, to create a more democratic, more multivoiced society.
Venuti offers his readers little in terms of hands-on translation solutions that would fall
into categories such as fluent or domesticating, let alone visible or foreignizing translation. He
does exemplify the use of foreignization through textual choices such as transferring source-
text elements to the translation unchanged or as calque renderings (Venuti 1998, 16, 85) and
utilizing linguistic diversity by incorporating nonstandard items, including different dialects or
vocabulary typical of different time periods (126–127, 145). These minor linguistic variables
Venuti calls the remainder – a term he borrows from Jean-Jacques Lecercle – emphasizing their
resistance to the creation of any systematic rules (10; see also Lecercle 1990). The effects of these
choices are therefore not presented as generalizable, and a particular choice may contribute to a
domesticating effect in one context while promoting foreignization in another. Yet this lack of
ready-made classifications or typologies is by no means a sign of any inapplicability of Venuti’s
writing. Instead, this air of abstractness can be seen to emphasize the notion of ethical attitudes
and evaluations, as approaches like this are always situation-specific. In other words, rather than
resorting to static categorizations of particular techniques as foreignizing (e.g. calque) or domes-
ticating (e.g. locally sourced terminology), one needs to look at the context of production, the
cultural power relations involved and the affective climate of the reception before assessing what
is known and familiar and what is not (Koskinen 2012). Venuti emphasizes that “[t]he terms
‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignizing’ do not describe specific verbal choices or discursive strategies
used in translation, but rather the ethical effects of translated texts that depend for their force
and recognition on the receiving culture” (Venuti 2017, xiii). The 2017 introduction, while
clarifying many of the arguments from almost a quarter century ago, still avoids instrumentaliza-
tion and underlines an understanding of these terms that goes beyond the level of a single text.
For “domesticating” and “foreignizing” are ethical efects whereby translation establishes
a performative relation both to the source text and to the receiving situation. Domesti-
cating translation not only validates dominant resources and ideologies, but also extends
their dominance over a text written in a diferent language and culture, assimilating its
diferences to receiving materials. Thus domesticating translation maintains the status quo,
reafrming linguistic standards, literary canons, and authoritative interpretations, fostering
among readers who esteem such resources and ideologies a cultural narcissism that is sheer
self-satisfaction. In terms of an intercultural ethics, it is bad in reinforcing the asymmetry
between cultures that is inherent in translation.
(Venuti 2017, xiv)
Abstract as they may seem, domestication and foreignization are made more tangible by the
inclusion of contextual factors. While the abstract-appearing nature of how Venuti approaches
these terms may encourage translation scholars to concretize them in perhaps too simplistic
ways, the importance of contexts highlights the impossibility of easy-to-use simplifcations.
137
From an ethical perspective they are not abstract but dynamic, and hence contingent upon
complex hierarchies and imbalances that uncover the ethical underpinning of translation issues
(Venuti 2008, 19, 273; see also Laaksonen 2020). The term pair “should never be treated as labels
that are afxed to translations merely on the strength of the discursive strategies they implement,”
(Venuti 2017, xvi) as this would impede examinations of their ethical signifcance. For an ethics
of diference, “the key issue is not simply a discursive strategy (fuent or resistant), but always its
intention and efect as well” (Venuti 1998, 188), and these are things that cannot be studied from
source and target texts separated from source and target contexts.
How to recognize or evaluate, then, the Venutian versions of domestication and foreigniza-
tion? From a translation scholar it requires familiarity with both source and target contexts, the
latter of which is especially emphasized because the ethical layer is only visible to someone who
understands target-context interpretations. Moreover, these understandings need to be situated
in the specific context of each translation. What makes this a demanding task is that
[t]he contexts of production and reception may be riven with conficts and contradictions
that outstrip the translator’s conscious control and complicate the ethical efect of the trans-
lation. Still, these contexts need to be reconstructed in a nuanced form because they are the
key factors in any evaluation. What hangs in the balance is an understanding of the ethics
of an intercultural relation and its potential cultural and social consequences.
(Venuti 2008, 268)
The scholar thus needs to identify, with critical self-refection (see Venuti 2019b, 6–7), the
“dominant resources and ideologies, which because of their very dominance are likely to be
immediately accessible, familiar, possibly assuring” that defne domestication, as well as the
“marginal resources and ideologies, which because of their very marginality may be less readily
comprehensible, somewhat peculiar, and even estranging” that foreignizing translation draws on
(Venuti 2017, xiv–xvi). In terms of textual choices, domestication uses linguistic and cultural
material conventional in the dominant culture, referring to generally accepted values and using
predictable word choices along with idiomatic structures, whereas foreignizing translation seeks
ways to derive meanings from outside the prevailing canon and remind the reader of the text’s
foreign origin by deviating from the expected, fuent language use (Venuti 2008, 47; 2009, 165).
However, Venuti urges translators to consider their work beyond the discursive level in order
to engage in a consideration of intercultural ethics (Venuti 2008, 268; 2017, xiv), a term that
integrates the contrast between locations with an ethics of cultural diference. For instance, the
further away the source and target contexts are from each other in the cultural and linguistic
hierarchies, the more pressing are the ethical implications of translation.
In his second monograph, Venuti (1998) introduced the term “minoritizing,” a parallel
idea to foreignizing translation. While building on the same basis as foreignizing, minoritizing
appeared perhaps less strict in its applications and more ethical in its implications. The new word
also tilts the emphasis away from the foreign elements already to be found in the source text, and
more to the direction of what is minoritized in the target context. This shift is consistent with
the softening of attitude towards the extent of foreignization promoted. If The Translator’s Invis-
ibility (1995) was almost aggressive in urging translators to unsettle their readers, The Scandals of
Translation (1998) appeared more cautious not to turn the use of this translation approach against
itself. This change of tone is illustrated in how Venuti formulates his approach:
I want to suggest that insofar as foreignizing translation seeks to restrain the ethnocentric
violence of translation, it is highly desirable today, a strategic cultural intervention in the
138
current state of world afairs, pitched against the hegemonic English-language nations and
the unequal cultural exchanges in which they engage their global others.
(Venuti 1995, 20)
The goal [of minoritizing translation] is ultimately to alter reading patterns, compelling
a not unpleasurable recognition of translation among constituencies who, while possessing
diferent cultural values, nonetheless share a long-standing unwillingness to recognize it.
(Venuti 1998, 13, emphasis added)
Minoritizing still focuses on bold moves and experimental translations, but here Venuti suggests
what appears a more careful use of minority elements, both cultural and linguistic, to a strategic
extent that does not impede readability at the cost of losing the reader (1998, 12–15, 120–123).
Therefore, even minoritizing approaches need to adapt to a commercial reality, as they cannot
achieve their ethical objectives in case they repel the translation’s audience. The skill is to push
the readers towards favouring diference while not alienating them with too much of it. The core
ethical objective is emphasized by the term itself: in imbalanced settings where the dominant
impedes advancements of the marginal, we need to look out for the minority side. Foreignizing
and minoritizing ofer ways to contribute to an ethics of diference. The diferences that tend
to be repressed in translation are those that derive from minority situations, marginal elements
and a non-acknowledgement of the very source text should it originate in a minority context.
The ethical layer surpasses the discursive strategies. Domesticating choices aim to inscribe the
translated culture with the translating culture’s values by building on a continuity of pre-existing
practices in the receiving situation (Venuti 1998, 11; 2009, 157). A close adherence to the source
text will only be foreignizing if it resists this aim, and fuency will only act on domestication’s
behalf if it contributes to the goal of assimilation. For example, exoticizing translation strategies
may well faunt the foreign origin of the translation while frmly conforming to a pre-existing
schema of reception in the target culture (e.g. orientalism). The superfcial use of foreign refer-
ences, for example by sprinkling the text with loan words, does not produce a foreignizing efect
if it does not upset the target values; instead, it may even underpin a “shallow sense of the foreign”
if that is what the readers have learned to expect (Venuti 2008, 160).
A foreignizing strategy, in contrast,
can be called “resistancy,” not just because the strategy results in a translation that demands
greater and possibly unexpected cognitive processing from the reader, but also because it ques-
tions the dominant resources and ideologies that are put to work in domesticating translation.
(Venuti 2017, xv)
This “resistancy” is thus directed against those who use translation for majority interests and can-
onization (Venuti 2008, 266). It seeks to challenge cultural and social hierarchies in the target con-
text, stimulate new responses, instigate cultural shifts and “change or consolidate literary canons,
conceptual paradigms, research methodologies, clinical techniques, and commercial practices in the
domestic culture” (Venuti 1998, 68, 82; 2017, xiv). Most importantly, resistancy aims to unmask the
asymmetries that, if we accept the foundation of Venuti’s thinking, underlie all translation projects.
The opportunities of this approach lie in the idea that if translation is able to reinforce the dominant,
it also has the potential to disrupt the hierarchy and to bring forward the marginal (Venuti 1998, 158).
Although this cluster of concepts – invisibility, fluency, domestication and foreignization,
minoritization, resistancy – forms the best-known and most-cited part of Venutian terminology,
and it unquestionably builds one comprehensive approach as such, the ethical underpinning
139
may not always be unfolded in applications. The asymmetries, imbalances and hierarchies that
are built in and shaped by each translation context may be overlooked. Venuti emphasizes the
necessity of also focusing on the many case studies his books display. It is in the context of
individual cases, embedded in specific cultural situations at specific historical moments and
interwoven with textual analyses and archival evidence, that the dynamic nature of these con-
cepts comes to light (Venuti 2017, xi). What is foreignizing in one culture and language pair
today may not have a similar effect in the same text’s translation to a different context or at a
different time. A vital part of this ethical approach, then, is conducting not only comparisons
of source and target texts but also comprehensive evaluations of the social, cultural and political
contexts in which they are made. The ethical attitudes present in domesticating and foreigniz-
ing translation do not manifest themselves in the actual texts only: the significance of textual
choices “is deepened when they are situated in broader contexts, including other translations
from the source language, original compositions in the translating language, and global hier-
archies of languages and cultures” (Venuti 2019b, 21). An examination inspired by Venuti’s
concepts will closely look at the initial positions of the source and target culture, especially in
relation to each other, as well as the circumstances in which a text is chosen to be translated,
financed and published. This examination does not stop at the translation but continues to
see which attitudes are detectable in its reviews (e.g. Venuti 2008, 1). The acknowledgement
of these questions wraps domestication and foreignization in an ethical layer that reflects the
asymmetry of the setting: translation has dominant and subordinate constituents, and the ethics
of difference is not so much tied to a certain strategy but contingent upon the location of the
employer of the strategy.
Venuti’s main empirical thesis lies within the translation practices of Anglophone, especially
Anglo-American, cultural contexts. Through extensive examples (Venuti 1995, 1998), he dem-
onstrates the ways in which domesticating translation is used as a distributor of (major) Anglo-
phone cultural values and a suppressor of (minor) non-Anglophone cultures that do not get a
say in how they are represented in translations that aim to deliver all things familiar. On a more
general level, this can be seen as part of Venuti’s criticism towards the use of domestication for
maintaining linguistic and cultural hegemonies. Translation indeed tends to be harnessed as a
way to exploit foreign texts for the benefit of domestic cultural agendas and used as an opportu-
nity to neglect the value of foreign traditions (Venuti 1998, 4, 71–72, 130–131). However, the
examination of locations and contexts questions the simplification more or less explicitly pres-
ent in Venuti’s first monograph (1995) that “domestic” would always equal “major,” or that the
“foreign” in translation would automatically mean the “minor” constituent. Instead, as he later
fine-tuned this positioning, “minority situations redefine what constitutes the ‘domestic’ and the
‘foreign.’ These two categories are variable, always reconstructed in a translation project vis-à-vis
the local scene” (Venuti 1998, 187). In line with this, Venuti (2008, 19–20) has later drawn atten-
tion to the existence of hierarchies even within minority contexts: a shared subordinate position
in the global hierarchy of languages and cultures is by no means a guarantee of equality in such
context. The major constituent of a translation project, then, is the one in a position of power,
be it linguistic, cultural and/or economic. The major party, which typically is the translating
one in the applications and adaptations of Venuti’s work, holds a status that allows it to define
the conditions of a translation project. It may decide what it chooses to import into its culture
and how the source context is treated in this process, i.e. its preferred degrees of domestication
and foreignization.
Venuti’s positioning of his argument specifically within the Anglo-American cultural con-
text is often overlooked in critiques of his theorizing. The global dominance of the English
language and American culture create a particular hegemonic situation within which Venuti’s
140
argumentation is explicitly and implicitly situated, and it is against this set-up that his favouring
of foreignization needs to be assessed: it is because of this hierarchical imbalance, and because of
the reluctance of the Anglo-American sphere to open up to literary works in foreign languages
and cultures, that he encourages translators to make themselves visible and to produce unset-
tling and non-fluent translations. This kind of situatedness of the translator, the translation and
translational micro-decisions, and the ensuing ethical reasoning of best practice, is at the core of
Venuti’s ethical thinking. In the second monograph, he labels this the ethics of location (Venuti
1998, 186–189).
The ethics of location connects to a variety of motivations and rationales: the translator
into a minor language can stimulate its cultural development through an engagement with
major cultures, whereas the translator into a major language can interrogate its dominance
by admitting new languages and cultures to bear on it (Venuti 2019b, 20). The redefini-
tions instigated by majority and minority contexts also offer a way for minor constituents
to strengthen their positions, and this may well be performed via strategies often labelled as
domesticating (see Venuti 2013, 117). Hence, an ethical reading of Venuti appears as a bal-
ance between the empirical foundation of his approach, his often-uncompromising views on
domesticating effects and the ways in which he emphasizes the redefinitions of his terms in
different hierarchical situations:
[A]lthough my project focuses on Anglophone cultures and their translation histories, fu-
ency based on the current standard dialect is a discursive regime that dominates translation
worldwide, regardless of the translating language and its position in the global hierarchy
of symbolic and cultural capital. It is not only major languages like English and French,
then, that practice domesticating translation, fostering cultures that are ripe for foreigniz-
ing efects. Minor languages also erect hierarchies of cultural resources and ideologies that
can lead to domesticating translation, inviting the development of foreignizing projects that
both interrogate those hierarchies and build the translating language and culture through
innovative practices.
(Venuti 2017, xvi)
Ethics of location is the term that most explicitly ties together Venuti’s network of interlinked
terms and the often-overlooked foundational ethical layer of his work. Ethics of location is,
in diferent and sometimes rather implicit ways, present in both foreignizing and minoritizing
through their objective of balancing or reversing unequal and asymmetric situations. Minori-
tizing, in particular, re-steers the focus from questions of source versus target elements to the
question of who are minority and who majority, and what is dominant or marginal. Hence,
it reconstructs resistancy and assimilation, and re-emphasizes understanding domestication and
foreignization as ethical efects, not textual practices: translations that challenge the dominant
contribute to a foreignizing efect even if their resources inevitably originate in the domestic
context, and translations that reinforce the existing canon contribute to a domesticating efect
regardless of how many (superfcially) foreign-origin textual elements they employ.
Yet, translation is not an either-or phenomenon. It is not either domesticating or foreigniz-
ing, nor is it either assimilating or resistant. Venuti explicitly refuses the use of his term pairs as
“a neat binary opposition that can simply be superimposed on ‘fluent’ or ‘resistant’ discursive
strategies” (2008, 19). The interrelations of these term pairs are, in practice, continuums or
scales rather than dichotomies or completely separate boxes. They are illustrative in demonstrat-
ing the underlying ethical questions, given that their use succumbs to one presupposition: that
all translation is inherently domesticating (Venuti 1998, 5; 2017, xii–xiii) and “fundamentally
141
assimilationist” (Venuti 2019b, 6). Translation will always use domestic linguistic and cultural
materials for whatever it constructs:
[A]ny sense of foreignness in a translation can never be more than a construction overdeter-
mined by the receiving situation: it is not the foreignness of the source text itself, but rather
a foreignism that is, moreover, subject to variation, depending on the changing cultural
situations and historical moments of various interpreters and translators.
(Venuti 2017, xiii, emphasis original)
Foreignizing translation is thus always built from the resources of the receiving situation. In this
regard, Venuti has sometimes been perceived as eager to reduce the features of the source text
and manifestations of the source culture to a strategic tool (Paloposki and Oittinen 2000, 374)
that is used in an instrumentalist way, dismissing the intrinsic value of the translated culture in
case its characteristics are not capable of unsettling the target-culture readers. Hence, the source
text is always harnessed to support an agenda: domestication uses (and assimilates) what it needs
from the foreign text for its own purposes, whereas foreignization only picks out those qualities
that can be used in its quest for resistancy. While this aspect of Venuti’s writing clearly ofsets the
simplistic idea of foreignization as inherently ethical, it is also an invitation, or even a request, to
another ethical refection: by acknowledging that “foreign” is always only constructed as “not
familiar,” we acknowledge how the assimilationist nature of translation requires considering an
ethics of diference. What may be foreign is always only diferent if it deviates from what the
receiving situation expects and is accustomed to read, and what may be diferent is only ever
diferent if it survives a comparison with the standard, the canonical.
4 Emerging issues
In contrast to the previous section, where the core concepts of Venuti’s theorizing are fairly easy
to identify and have been developed across his career, the question of emerging issues is more
difficult to answer. While foreignization and domestication, in particular, have become stable
elements in the collective mental imagery of translation studies, readily employed by students to
explain their translation strategies and scholars to classify their translation data, recent develop-
ments in the form of critical reassessment or re-appropriation have been sparse. Venuti’s concepts
of domesticating and foreignizing have indeed been hugely successful in translation studies, and
they have begun to live their own life, and as has been discussed earlier, Venuti’s quite open-
ended notion of the two translation methods is at risk of being subsumed to fixed classifications.
The issue that would need to emerge is to whether and to what extent this tendency to resort
to fixed categorizations has had and will have consequences to how the ethical base of Venuti’s
approach is understood and applied.
Venuti’s own project is an evolving one. His most recent work (Venuti 2019a, 2019b) responds
to the more instrumentalist applications of his concepts by underlining the interpretive aspects
of translation and working towards a hermeneutic model that would allow translation and its
analysis to be fully “contingent on specific cultural situations at specific historical moments”
(Venuti 2019b, 26). This emphasis on interpretation also works as a counterargument to the
growing technologization and automation of translation work, bringing to the fore the human
element of assessment, evaluation and interpretation involved.
Ethics of location as a term is not the most commonly known one in Venuti’s vocabulary. In
the early 2000s it was briefly taken up by some scholars to discuss issues related to minor and
major languages and globalization (Koskinen 2000; Apter 2001) and to draw parallels to Antoine
142
Berman’s thinking (Bandia 2001; see also Chapter 6 “Ethics in Berman and Meschonnic” in this
volume), but its full potential has not perhaps been fully exploited yet, not by Venuti himself
or by other scholars. The term resonates with a number of contemporary issues, where new
understandings of minority along with new conceptualizations of location spark new discussions
of translation and ethics. For example, ethics of location might be fruitfully combined with the
third wave feminism and new postcolonial work where the question of location can be put to
play with the questions of position in society or voice of the marginalized. It also links to the
question of migration and hospitality, and the loaded roles of the host and the guest (see also
Chapter 7 “The ethics of linguistic hospitality and untranslatability in Derrida and Ricœur,”
Chapter 8 “The ethics of postcolonial translation” and Chapter 9 “Feminist translation ethics”
in this volume).
Venuti’s own turf is literary translation. Although he has recently (2019a) also engaged
with audio-visual translation, his approach is remarkably ageless, and he avoids taking issue
with the changing technological landscape or commenting on how and whether these
changes affect the hermeneutical process of translation. For others more eager to address
these questions, ethics of location might offer a relevant starting point to address the effects
of increasing virtuality on how translations are produced and consumed, and the new hier-
archies and positions that are being created through new technological affordances. Is the
geographic and cultural element of location losing relevance and are other aspects becoming
more focal? In particular, does the increasing virtuality of translation and its reception change
the playing field entirely, or do we only need to start paying more attention to the virtual
kinds of being located?
Minoritizing is a central concept in Venuti’s model. Within his Anglo-American focus it
functions as a tool for creating ripples of marginalization in a hegemonic culture. As has been
discussed earlier, the functions of the familiar and the foreign are context-dependent. In an
actual minority situation, the hegemonic culture and the language one is translating from may
well be more familiar than the minority culture struggling for existence through translating
into an endangered language. The number of publications dealing with minority languages
and translation is still fairly modest in translation studies, but there is a growing interest in this
field. The ethical base of minoritizing is coloured in a new light in contexts of revitalizing an
endangered language where extensive flaunting of the foreign elements is often a risky strategy,
and because of the sparsity of resources the stakes in each individual translation project are high
(see e.g. Kuusi, Kolehmainen, and Riionheimo 2017).
Finally, an emerging issue that may have wide repercussions to the entire field of translation
studies is the recent interest in translation issues in other fields. Scholars in international busi-
ness and management studies and accounting, for example, have recently started to react to the
multifaceted nature of translation, a practice earlier largely taken for granted as a technical task.
Along with a wider recognition of translation’s implications, questions of cultural imbalances,
translator’s agency and translation ethics have emerged in different contexts. Venuti’s terms have
found new resonance in these novel contexts as scholars have employed them, among other
translation studies approaches, to understand their particular research questions: they have been
utilized to add ethical nuances to issues of research methodology/settings (Chidlow, Plakoyian-
naki, and Welch 2014; Kamla and Komori 2018), and they have been built into frameworks that
give new, critical insights into non-literary translation projects (Laaksonen 2020; Lessig 2019;
Piekkari, Tietze, and Koskinen 2019). The promise of this interdisciplinary activity is that it tes-
tifies to a maturity of the discipline of translation studies in that it can productively lend theories
and concepts to other fields. The risk lies in that the widespread instrumentalization of Venuti’s
concepts may easily be transferred to these other fields, for the sake of simplicity, and the more
143
destabilizing ethical, political and interpretive aspects of Venuti’s thinking that would enrich the
analysis may go undetected.
5 Conclusion
Undeniably, “Venuti has been a pioneer in opening up the field of translation studies to ques-
tions of cultural identity, the marketing of bestsellers, the status of minority languages, and the
impact of globalization” (Apter 2001, 6). In current discussions, Venuti is much more sidelined
than at the turn of the millennium. The rapid industrialization of the translation field has moved
attention to translation technology, and literary translation, which is the domain most associate
Venuti’s work with, has lost much of its earlier prominence. Still, Venuti was the first to raise
many issues that are at the heart of current ethical dilemmas in the society and for those involved
in translatorial activities, and his recent work continues to go to the heart of what human transla-
tion is (see Venuti 2019a, 2019b).
Venuti’s major – and most-cited – terms have stood the test of time and resonate with a num-
ber of contemporary issues, which is no wonder given that already in 1995 Venuti founded his
statement on the accelerating globalization that necessitated a different look on translation. At
the turn of the decade into the 2020s, understandings of domestic and foreign may be subject
to constant change while impressions of fluent or resistant succumb to situations where mutual
familiarity can reach across the globe in a heartbeat. Yet, conceptualizations of translation as
domesticating or foreignizing remain appealing and undeniably relevant, as inevitable redefini-
tions of location and situatedness gain ground. The accelerated global communication has by no
means diminished Venuti’s foundation: translation both produces and reveals imbalances, asym-
metries and inequalities. Differences have not disappeared, majorities and minorities still need to
negotiate their status and democratization of cultural relations is still a worthwhile aim to pursue.
Ethics of location takes us back to the 1998 monograph, where Venuti first allocated signifi-
cant attention to the term. The subtitle of the book, however, informs us of the aiming towards
an ethics of difference. A way to understand these two terms is to see the ethics of difference as a
label that catches the foundation of Venuti’s overall project; ethics of location redirects the focus
to situatedness in particular. It reconstructs the domestic and the foreign from the perspective of
minority and power positions. The ethical layer of Venuti’s work is perhaps the one that is the
least applied in translation studies and yet it is the one Venuti repeatedly emphasizes. However,
turning the focus to the ethical questions deeply entangled in Venuti’s writing does not imply
an abandonment of his widely circulated terms, such as the duo of domesticating and foreigniz-
ing translation. Instead, it instigates a more ethical use of these terms and their implications in
different contexts. It pushes translation scholars to engage in holistic, hermeneutic evaluations
of translation events. Moreover, it urges translators into context-specific and dynamic consider-
ations of any hierarchies that different choices and practices in translation may sustain or unsettle
and challenges readers into self-critical reflections on how they react to translations. The con-
tinued relevance of Venuti’s seminal work lies in our ability and willingness to deepen our use
of terms like domestication and foreignization by integrating them with the ethical questions of
difference and location.

Ethics in Berman and Meschonnic; the ethics of postcolonial translation; feminist translation
ethics; the ethics of linguistic hospitality and untranslatability in Derrida and Ricœur.
144
References
Apter, Emily. 2001. “On Translation in a Global Market.” Public Culture 13, no. 1: 1–12.
Bandia, Paul. 2001. “Le concept bermanien de l’‘Étranger’ dans le prisme de la traduction postcoloniale.”
TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction 14, no. 2: 123–39.
Chidlow, Agnieszka, Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki, and Catherine Welch. 2014. “Translation in Cross-Lan-
guage International Business Research: Beyond Equivalence.” Journal of International Business Studies 45,
no. 5: 562–82.
Kamla, Rania, and Naoko Komori. 2018. “Diagnosing the Translation Gap: The Politics of Translation and
the Hidden Contradiction in Interdisciplinary Accounting Research.” Accounting, Auditing & Account-
ability Journal 31, no. 7: 1874–903.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2000. “Beyond Ambivalence: Postmodernity and the Ethics of Translation.” PhD diss.,
University of Tampere, Tampere.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2012. “Domestication, Foreignization and the Modulation of Affect.” In Domestication and
Foreignization in Translation Studies, edited by Hannu Kemppanen, Marja Jänis, and Alexandra Belikova,
13–32. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Kuusi, Päivi, Leena Kolehmainen, and Helka Riionheimo. 2017. “Introduction: Multiple Roles of
Translation in the Context of Minority Languages and Revitalisation.” trans-kom: Zeitschrift für Transla-
tionswissenschaft und Fachkommunikation 10, no. 2: 138–63.
Laaksonen, Jenni. 2020. “Harmonization versus Assimilation: A Critical Perspective on IFRS Trans-
lation from the English-Language Original Into Local Languages.” Paper presented at the Joint
Seminar in Interdisciplinary Accounting Research, University of Turku, April. www.utu.fi/fi/yliopisto/
turun-kauppakorkeakoulu/laskentatoimi-ja-rahoitus/tutkimus/jointseminar/2020.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. 1990. Violence of Language. London, New York: Routledge.
Lessig, Lawrence. 2019. Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1, January–February: 54–68.
Paloposki, Outi. 2011. “Domestication and Foreignization.” In Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 2, edited
by Yves Gambier, and Luc van Doorslaer, 40–2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Paloposki, Outi, and Riitta Oittinen. 2000. “The Domesticated Foreign.” In Translation in Context: Selected
Contributions from the EST Congress, Granada 1998, edited by Andrew Chesterman, Natividad San Sal-
vador, and Yves Gambier, 373–90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Penttilä, Esa, and Pirkko Muikku-Werner. 2012. “Domestication and Foreignization in Figurative Idiom
Translation.” In Domestication and Foreignization in Translation Studies, edited by Hannu Kemppanen,
Marja Jänis, and Alexandra Belikova, 121–38. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Piekkari, Rebecca, Susanne Tietze, and Kaisa Koskinen. 2019. “Metaphorical and Interlingual Trans-
lation in Moving Organizational Practices across Language.” Organization Studies. https://doi.
org/10.1177/0170840619885415
Pym, Anthony. 2012. On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation between Cultures. Amsterdam: John Ben-
jamins Publishing Company.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. [1813] 1982. “On the Different Methods of Translation.” Translated by André
Lefevere. In German Romantic Criticism, edited by A. Leslie Willson, 1–30. New York: Continuum.
Van Poucke, Piet. 2012. “Measuring Foreignization in Literary Translation: An Attempt to Operational-
ize the Concept of Foreignization.” In Domestication and Foreignization in Translation Studies, edited by
Hannu Kemppanen, Marja Jänis, and Alexandra Belikova, 139–58. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Venuti, Lawrence, ed. 1992. Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. London, New York:
Routledge.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London, New York: Routledge.
Routledge.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2004. “How to Read a Translation.” Words without Borders, July. www.wordswithoutbor-
ders.org/article/how-to-read-a-translation
Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, revised edition. London, New
York: Routledge.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2009. “Translation, Intertextuality, Interpretation.” Romance Studies 27, no. 3: 157–73.
145
Venuti, Lawrence. 2010. “Translation, Empiricism, Ethics.” Profession 2010: 72–81.

Venuti, Lawrence. 2013. Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice. London, New York: Routledge.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2017. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Routledge Translation Classics
edition. London, New York: Routledge.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2019a. Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2019b. “Theses on Translation: An Organon for the Current Moment.” Flugschriften 5,
September. https://flugschriften.com/2019/09/15/thesis-on-translation/
Further reading
Venuti, Lawrence. 2017. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Routledge Translation Classics
While it is recommended to read all three editions, if you really want to engage with the development
of Venuti’s argumentation, or if you only read one of the three, we suggest the latest edition. It contains
a new introduction, helping the readers to put the ideas forwarded in a broader perspective and spelling
out many core arguments in a clear and concise manner.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2013. “Introduction.” In Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice. London,
This collection of articles is worthwhile reading in its entirety, but the Introduction in particular is a
fairly accessible way to acquaint yourself with Venuti’s main theses. It also provides a demonstrative
presentation of the development and new turns of his arguments after the two major works of the 1990s.
Routledge.
Although Venuti has since developed, reformulated and fine-tuned his positioning, many foundational
elements of his ethical argumentation are first discussed at length in this 1998 monograph. They are
recommended for (re-)reading as the past two decades have brought about new aspects of global “dif-
ferences” and “locations,” the two key ethical notions in this book. Many topics such as copyright issues
and institutional and cultural hegemonies have lost none of their relevance, although our social, cultural
and technological context has changed dramatically over the past decades.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2019. “Theses on Translation: An Organon for the Current Moment.” Flugschriften 5,
September. https://flugschriften.com/2019/09/15/thesis-on-translation/
A short programmatic text available online, providing an accessible gateway to Venuti’s recent thinking.
Due to the polemical style of the publication, many central tenets of his ethical thinking are strongly
formulated.
146
11
Translator ethics
Anthony Pym
1 Introduction: a space for people

The term “translator ethics” focuses primarily on human translators (or indeed interpreters,
here and throughout) rather than other things in the scene of translation (or interpreting): lan-
guages, cultures, texts, and external causes involving those things, all of which are considered
of lesser priority. The approach thus seeks an ethics not of translations as things but of the
people who make decisions concerning translations, bearing in mind that the lone translator is
rarely the only person involved. The general task of this approach is to find reasons why some
of those decisions might be ethically better than others. The difficulty of the enterprise is that
the reasons should derive from interpersonal relations in the scene of translation itself, rather than
from suppositions about relations to linguistic objects. Principles such as simple faithfulness
to a text, or loyalty to the one-sided development of a language or culture, or a commitment
to the righting of wider social wrongs are therefore not addressed directly in translator ethics,
although principles based on translator decisions may certainly provide orientation a posteriori
for many of those considerations.
As such, translator ethics is also to be distinguished from approaches that start from an
assumed general professional best practice, the laws of the land, or a person’s responsibilities as a
world citizen. It might go without saying that any translator, as a person, should subscribe to the
norms of professional conduct, not break the law, and act altruistically and ecologically. Those
considerations, however, do not strictly concern the person’s status as a translator; they should
apply to any activity whatsoever.
Defenders of a restricted translator ethics seek only to discuss the translator as a professional
identity. The few that overtly do so (Pym 1997, 2012; perhaps Chesterman 2001, but also the
voices behind parts of most professional codes of ethics) accept the restriction as an intellectual
challenge and a constraint on hard thought. Around that narrow approach, there are neverthe-
less issues of visibility, intervention, trust, loyalty, agency, and long-term effects that necessarily
inform several other kinds of translator ethics as well. Detractors of the narrow view, of whom
there could be quite a few (Tymoczko 2000, 2007; Cronin 2003; Hermans 2009; Baker 2011,
for starters), decry it in terms such as “neo-tribalism” (Koskinen 2000, 78), often in the name
147
Anthony Pym
of a wider ethics that would seek direct critique of iniquities rather than the formulation of
guidelines suited to just one professional identity.
As a space of inquiry and debate, translator ethics is where those arguments entangle.
The development of translator ethics can be seen as part of a general shift of attention from texts
to translators, indeed to “translator studies” (Chesterman 2009), roughly from the mid-1990s.
Prior to that shift, the linguistic analyses that compared languages and sought rules for equiva-
lence effectively configured the translator as the idealized subject of those rules, an anonymous
language operator. Reacting against that reduction, says Chesterman (2009, 15–16), translator
studies adopts approaches where “texts are secondary, the translators themselves are primary; this
priority leads to quite different kinds of research questions.” Some of those questions directly
concerned ethical practice in the 1990s, especially in a Europe of political corruption and anti-
globalization (cf. Pym 2001). The shift of attention also gained much from incipient work on
public-service interpreting (e.g. Mason 1999), where communication participants are visible
to each other and traditional text-based ethics do not adequately address the purposes of their
interactions (see also Chapter 15 “Ethics in public service interpreting” in this volume). Impor-
tant precursors of the shift can be found in Skopos theory, based on actions rather than texts, and
indeed in the wider shifts within linguistics, where pragmatics drew attention to speech acts as
interpersonal actions.
Once that space had been carved out, translator ethics began to draw retrospectively on sev-
eral previous areas of ethical inquiry: one strand led through the philosophy of dialogue, another
drew on the initially feminist discourse on visibility, and a third found inspiration in neo-classical
negotiation theory.
2.1 Buber, Levinas, and the philosophy of dialogue

The Austrian-born Jewish philosopher and translator Martin Buber (1923) distinguished two
basic modes of interpersonal address: Ich-Du (I-Thou) is the “primary word” and works in con-
junction with Ich-Es (I-It), for which it provides the foundational ethical relationship. Buber’s
concern was not directly with translation (although he did translate parts of the Hebrew Bible
into German): his Ich-Du word initially referred to prayer as intimate dialogue. His distinction has
nevertheless been applied to translation in the work of Arnaud Laygues (2004, 2006), who pro-
poses that ethical translating operates the question “What do you mean?” seeking dialogue with
the other, rather than the question “What does this mean?” which interacts with the text as object.
This idea finds inspiration in a predominantly Francophone “philosophy of dialogue.” Follow-
ing Buber, Gabriel Marcel (1935) situated the foundational ethical relationship in the subject’s
openness to the freedom of the other. That position was radicalized in the work of Emmanuel
Levinas (1961, 1991), who distinguished between the other (autre) that is like the self (a neigh-
bour or community member) and the “completely Other” (Autrui absolument autre) who is not,
“even if they are my son or daughter” (260). To recognize the other as a completely Other,
rather than as an understandable object, is to resist the totalitarian desire to impose one’s own
sense: the other as Other should be recognized as existing beyond the purposes and construals
of the self. These basic terms reappear in Antoine Berman’s (1999) critique of domestication as
“ethnocentric translation” and his call for close attention to the letter of the foreign text when
translating: “the ethical act consists in recognizing and receiving the Other as Other” (74). For
148
Translator ethics
Berman (1999, 46), an ethical translation is thus the welcoming of alterity or otherness (cf.
Melby 1995, 120–122, Le Blanc 2009, 30, Tymoczko 2007, 323), couched in interpersonal
rather than linguistic terms. The same philosophical tradition that Laygues uses to seek an ethi-
cal way of translating, based on construing intention, can thus be enlisted by Berman to legislate
an ethical kind of translation, based for the most part on respect for the integrity of the other’s
linguistic product. Both approaches concern translator ethics for as long as they are talking about
what translators should do as people.
In between the classical binarisms of self and other, domestication and foreignization, there
have been several attempts to envisage a middle path for the translator’s actions. The French poet
and translator Henri Meschonnic (1999), in particular, defended capturing the rhythm of the start
text, since the thing to be translated is “what a way of thinking [une pensée] does to language”
(23). That “way of thinking” is held to reside in the rhythms on all levels of the text, evading
binary distinctions between form and meaning. As such, Meschonnic’s ethics may superficially
seem to meet up with Berman’s priority to the “letter” of the start text, and thus potentially to
a form of dialogue with the rhythms of the other (see also Chapter 6 “Ethics in Berman and
Meschonnic” in this volume). Meschonnic’s main field of concern, however, is the Hebrew
Bible as an authoritative and perhaps incantatory text. In assuming the authority of that text, he
effectively turns openness to rhythm into a particularly virulent form of admonition directed
at all alternative ethical or aesthetic criteria, repeatedly formulating “police actions against the
hapless victims of his exegetical wrath” (Sieburth 2000, 323) – an unexpected underground ally
might actually be Newmark (1988, 204), who more overtly pronounced that the translator has
“no right to improve an authoritative text.” The only ultimately laudable translator becomes the
self-authorizing theorist, as rhythm replaces people.
In the theories that eschew that kind of authority, the philosophy of dialogue can retrospec-
tively be seen as a fundamentally pessimistic view of communication. It positions the speaking
subject as an other that is being painfully and always imperfectly revealed, and the receiver as
seeking and failing to interpret that imperfection. The human individual thus ontologically
precedes construction of the social, even when interaction with the other is recognized as an
escapable condition for the development of social categories (notably the category of time, for
Levinas). Despite the term “dialogue,” the approach has little concern for communication as
an act where people are actually doing something together in a coordinated way (see House
2003, 27); it does not envisage substantial subjectivity being constituted as a result of that
interaction. The philosophy of dialogue, particularly in the later Levinas’s authoritarian pro-
nouncements against the category of totality, was formulated from the pessimism of a Europe
that had suffered totalitarian fascism – the social was feared. That critique was understandable
enough, particularly among its Jewish exponents, although its continuation beyond the second
half of the twentieth century might fairly be seen as a failure to adapt to new challenges. The
ethics of dialogue has not, for example, led into any overt ethical positioning with respect to
problematics like the role of immigration in producing culturally hybrid societies, where the
“completely other” now effectively shares the political space of the self. The strangeness in
translation that was formerly configured as respect for a distant culture can now be used to
mark out unacceptable cultural exclusion from social dialogue, an effective denial of inclusiv-
ity. In historical terms, it becomes a case of overkill, artificially prolonging a hermeneutic and
aesthetic discourse that was nobly developed for other purposes in another age. The thrust
of the critique has thus mostly dwindled into soft intellectual platitude, without necessary
recourse to action beyond the text.
Those reservations notwithstanding, a literalist ethics of otherness has remained strong in
Francophone texts, feeding into Derrida (where the ethics of difference remains, along with
149
Anthony Pym
Derrida’s assumption of authority in correcting previous translators) and, in English, meeting

up with a more overtly politicized discourse on visibility. The deeper Buberian considerations,
on the other hand, have found less resonance in the literature, although one occasionally finds
allusions such as Oittinen’s (1993) “I am me, I am other” in her work on children’s translation,
or Díaz-Diocaretz’s (1985, 5) call for a mode of feminist translation where “the ‘you’ and ‘I’ are
overtly women.” That, however, is from a different discourse.
2.2 Critiques of invisibility

The critique of invisibility has been a mainstay of feminism since the 1970s, when the apparent
absence of notable women in many cultural and scientific fields was attributed to them having
been made invisible by patriarchal social structures. Powerlessness and silence made invisibility
“a dangerous and painful condition” (Rich 1986, 198), a wrong to be righted by making the
invisible visible.
Work has indeed been done to make women translators more prominent in translation his-
tory (Delisle 2002; Agorni 2002; von Flotow 2011, for example) and to focus on women trans-
lating women’s texts (Wolf 2006, for another example). The ethical import is nevertheless more
pronounced in theorists such as Godard (1989), who uses the notion of visibility to criticize the
dominant translation form itself, arguing that all translators, like women, have been cast into
secondary discursive roles and have thus been made invisible. This argument draws on a long
Western tradition of gendered metaphors for translation, where secondariness does indeed tend
to be feminine. For Godard, translating is just as creative as authoring, and translators should
thus be treated as authors. The claim has been picked up by many since then (for example,
Delisle 1993; Simon 1996; von Flotow 1997), although the binary distinctions operative in
early feminist discourse have been criticized from the perspective of the “woman interrogated”
(Maier 1985), deconstruction (Arrojo 1994), and the LGBTQ spectrum (Santaemilia 2005; Baer
and Massardier-Kenny 2016). Despite the critiques, the underlying shared claim would be that
translators, like women and now like all sexualities, should be made visible, as an ethical act of
emancipation (see also Chapter 9 “Feminist translation ethics” in this volume).
The analogy between women and translators was taken one small step further in Chamber-
lain (1992), where the distinction between author and translator was seen as a function of the
more general social distinction between productive and reproductive work, with women being
relegated to the latter. To challenge the separation embedded in the Western translation form,
or at least in its metaphors, was thus implicitly to challenge the underlying patriarchal organiza-
tion of society.
That particular critique can be worked on in two ways. For some (perhaps a small tradi-
tion leading from Chamberlain 1992 through to Apter 2006 and beyond), translation itself is a
subversive form that undermines binary distinctions between subject positions – it is enough
to make the translator visible, to thereby reveal the hybrid nature of translation, often taken as
a metaphor itself, in order to release its potential for ethical critique of all binary oppositions.
Others have been variously inspired by Foucault’s (1979) analysis of the “author function,”
where the author is seen not as the substantial human creator of a text but as an image produced
by a discourse, working as an institutional constraint on unbridled fictionality. By analogy, the
“translator function” is the discursive construction of the translator’s position and voice, created
in interaction between writer and reader, then institutionalized socially (Díaz-Diocaretz 1985;
Hermans 1996; Pulido 2016; cf. Hermans 2007, 84). This translator function would control the
risk of translation becoming just any old kind of representation – the analogy with the “author
function” indeed suggests that translation operates as a kind of fiction. For Duarte (2012, 34),
150
Translator ethics
for example, part of this control is not just the normative invisibility of the translator but also
the millennial binarisms with which translation has been conceptualized: “binary oppositions
are the stock in trade of the discourse of the expert,” in keeping with the nature of the “expert
systems” in which we are obliged to trust (Giddens 1990). On this second view, the position
of the translator may in itself not be at all subversive or destabilizing but would tend instead to
be ideologically driven by normalization – as indeed is claimed by the law of “growing stan-
dardization” (Toury 2012, 303–306), which sees translations as having less variation than their
corresponding start texts, perhaps because translators might be risk-averse (Pym 2015). In the
same vein, Díaz-Diocaretz (1985, 3) laments the way in which some translations can effectively
neutralize feminist constructs.
When engaging in such debates, theorists throw around countless presuppositions about who
translators are and how ideally active or passive their roles should be. The ethical postulates are
reasonably clear and well intentioned, and as such need no empirical grounding in actual prac-
tice (which may be considered reprehensible and not worth looking at in detail). The arguments
nevertheless largely proceed through conceptually tenuous universal homologies (“translators
are like women,” “translations are like fictions”) for which few data are presented, and on equally
facile universalist assumptions of translatorial inferiority (for example in Simeoni 1998, where
all translators are assumed to adopt a habitus of subordination). The absence of historical or
cross-cultural awareness is sometimes quite astonishing: before assuming invisibility, one should
take a good long look.
If there are only two sides of the coin, casual flipping allows for any number of speculative
revolutions.
2.3 Neo-classical cooperation and trust theory

A third panel in this background would be an approach that focuses on the sought outcome of
mediated communication, indeed of any communication at all. Working from Grice (1975), it
is assumed that the mutually desired outcome of a conversation is “cooperation,” which neo-
classical economic theory analyzes as the attainment of mutual benefits (after Smith [1776] 2000;
Axelrod 1997, and much else). A non-ethical interaction would then be where one side wins
and the other loses (a “zero-sum game”); a minimally ethical interaction would be one where
both sides win, advancing their interests more than they would if interacting with someone else
(i.e. more than their “opportunity costs”). Altruism can also be laudably ethical, as when one
allows the other side to win at one’s own cost, but the neo-classical theory of cooperation does
not require such a subject: the normalizing assumption is usually that all subjects are rational
egoists, increasing their own benefits while ensuring that the other also advances. If there is self-
abnegating altruism, so much the better, but this approach is more demanding than any simple
praise of do-gooders or honest brokers. The approach does not assume any symmetry or equality
of the communication participants; it does not require any pre-established community of pur-
pose: as long as both sides benefit, no matter how unequally, then the interaction is considered
cooperative and thus ethically good.
This basic economic analysis can be applied to value created at any level: social, symbolic,
and cultural as well as financial (to borrow from Bourdieu’s analysis of capitals, which further
includes exchanges between the different kinds of capitals). In all these possible modes, the
theory posits that cooperation is ethically virtuous, since it provides the building blocks of social
relations and can theoretically do so without hegemony (Keohane 1984).
When translation is built into this communication model, it is first as a “transaction cost”
(Pym 1995), since someone has to pay for the work of the translator. This allows for the
151
Anthony Pym
surprising claim that it is ethically laudable to produce cheap translations, since the savings thus
made allow more scope for cooperation between the main communication partners, and thereby
more future work for the translator. Such propositions are gleefully anathemic to approaches that
would seek to maximize the translator’s investment in dialoguing with the other; they wilfully
affront the elitism of any foreignizing ethics that produces difficult translations accounting for
no more than the relation with the author; they do unfortunately little to favour aspirations to a
professionalism based on the idea that translators are generally undervalued and underpaid. One
should thus not be surprised to find quite negative reactions to cooperation theory, often with
the reproach that it concerns no more than codes of practice (deontology) rather than any ethics
in the nobler philosophical senses of dialogue and visibility. And cooperation theory certainly
does not address the morality of the translator as an independent person engaged in understand-
ing someone else in any depth.
The casting of the translator as Homo economicus is nevertheless only one of the possible ways
in which the theory of cooperation can be applied. As soon as one adds to the model the risk of
communicative failure (or of “communicative suffering,” for Chesterman 1997, 2001), the role
of the translator becomes a major factor in the calculation of that risk. The translator becomes
not only another communication participant but also a participant who could be a traitor, taking
all benefits for the other side and/or for themselves. This presents a special kind of risk, particu-
larly acute when one does not know what is happening in another language. Ascertaining and
maintaining the translator’s trustworthiness thus becomes a major element of risk management,
requiring expenditure of communicative resources and other forms of capital. That is, although
simple transaction-cost analysis suggests that cheap translators can be a laudable option for many
communicative purposes (as indeed we are now seeing with the widespread use of machine
translation, postediting, and crowdsourcing), risk analysis also shows that there are situations
in which translators should be the object of very significant attention and investment (see also
Chapter 19 “Translation and posthumanism” in this volume). As a rule of thumb, the greater
the risks involved in the communication act, the higher the permissible transaction costs and the
more resources should be invested in establishing the trustworthiness of the translator. Translator
ethics thus becomes a question of trust.
This approach has thus seen a conceptual development from cooperation to risk to trust,
with numerous hypotheses and studies along the way, and with just as many misunderstand-
ings from outside these frames of reference. The key role of trust has nevertheless gained some
general acceptance on the basis of two normalizing assumptions. First, it is assumed that the
other participants do not know the languages that the translator knows and are thus condemned
to situations of asymmetric information: buying a translation is something like buying a used
car, based on the social signalling of trustworthiness (Chan 2009). Second, given the translator’s
knowledge of both sides, there is the basic risk that they are acting in the interests of the other
side (activating a personalist version of the adage traduttore, traditore – the translator is a potential
traitor). These two concerns can certainly exist without any developed theory of cooperation
(a client might, for example, simply trust that the translator is a good person who will defend
nothing but that client’s one-sided interests), although one then has to go back to the reasons
why communication is being entered into in the first place. Within the cooperative frame, suc-
cessful communication produces benefits for all (including the translator), and so the translator
is primarily trusted to seek those benefits. Without the cooperative frame, the translator can
merely be trusted to act as a mercenary.
Risk management and trust open up broad avenues for inquiry into ethics. The probabilistic
and situationally adjustable concepts of risk management (credibility risk, uncertainty risk, com-
municative risk, for starters) have the potential to replace fidelity and equivalence as the yardsticks
152
Translator ethics
for assessing translators’ actions, and can do so on all levels from process analysis through to social
relations (Pym 2015). And trust analysis, which develops the concept of credibility risk, has been
proposed as a general framework for translation history (Rizzi, Lang, and Pym 2019). These
approaches might hope to avoid some of the universalisms of other kinds of translator ethics. At
the same time, though, risk management comes with its own general presuppositions. When
Chesterman (1997) claims that translators, “in order to survive as translators, must be trusted by
all parties involved” (182), he adds a significant rider: “Without this trust, the profession would
collapse, and so would its practice” (182). The ethics of cooperation and trust do indeed assume
that the aim is to maintain and develop a profession (as “thin” trust), providing a conceptual
basis for improved codes of deontology (see also Chapter 20 “Ethics codes for interpreters and
translators” in this volume). Indeed, it assumes that this is itself one of the historical missions to
which ethical research should contribute. That, however, is the “neo-tribalism” that has been
criticized from the perspective of wider brands of ethics.
3 Core issues
The prolonged focus on the figure of the translator has been accompanied by several debates
about quite fundamental ethical principles.
3.1 Trust as professional promise?

A move to place the translator at the centre of ethics was made by Christiane Nord (1991) from
within Skopos theory: alongside being faithful to the text, Nord’s translator must be loyal not
just to the author, but also to the client and the end user of the translation. In Chesterman’s
terms (1997, 182), one might say the translator must merit the trust invested “by all parties
involved.” Nord has little to say about how to proceed when different loyalties clash, although
she does recommend signalling discrepancies in paratexts, arguing points with clients, and in
some cases refusing to translate (1997, 226; 2001, 200). Those are things translators can do as
modes of enhanced visibility; the concept of loyalty does not say when or why translators might
act in these ways, in whose interests, or with what kind of agency. Yet the call to multidirec-
tional loyalty is of interest in itself, since it creates something that might look like neutrality
but can be full of intervention (see also Chapter 5 “Functional translation theories and ethics”
in this volume).
Nord’s position might only superficially be opposed to that of Newmark (1994), whose fidel-
ity to authoritative texts also questioned one-sided allegiance: “the days of ‘my employer right
or wrong’ should be as dead as those of ‘my country or my cause right or wrong’” (70). One
might similarly point to any of the calls for cross-cultural dialogue, or to the anti-nationalism
of Berman or Venuti, or indeed to any of the critics of Eurocentrism who see the fundamental
purposes of translation itself as being to question one-sided loyalty.
Those positions can be opposed to ethics where the translator’s prime duty is to a particu-
lar kind of truth. When the Soviet translation scholar Fedorov (1953, 98) lists “truthfulness”
as his first principle of translation quality, the reference is to truth as seen in Marxist-Leninist
principles; when the East German Kade defends “partiality in interpreting,” he notes that assess-
ment of “what is important and unimportant” is from the “point of view of the working class,
on the basis of the Marxist-Leninist worldview” (1963, 15, cited in Pöchhacker 2006, 200; see
also Chapter 4 “Ethics in socialist translation theories” in this volume). More recently, a Chi-
nese approach to ethics, based on a view where the well-being of the community is the only
guarantee of individual rights, can give ethical priority to defending the client and maintaining
153
Anthony Pym
national interests rather than any individualized multilateralism (Feng 2014). This becomes a
reasoned critique of the individualism that underlies most Western approaches to ethics, seen as
being based on the notion of initial wrong-doing (from the Judeo-Christian myth of original
sin) rather than collective well-being.
Such differences point to fundamental divergences in the very nature of the translator’s
social identity. Nord’s plea for multilateral loyalty assumes a space from which that loyalty can
be distributed as a series of visible actions. Translators can certainly be loyal to themselves and
they can rightly expect that their loyalty to others will be reciprocated (these points are clear
in Prunc 1997, 2000), but there is no ethical need envisaged here for them to take on purely
individual interventions beyond the space of those multilateral relations: translators can do any
good deeds they like, as altruistically as they like, but they need not be doing so as loyal transla-
tors. That space is thus neither one side nor the other; it can have its own virtues and values
(loyalty, yes, but also virtues such as those proposed by Chesterman 2001, open to modification
in each translation regime; see also Chapter 2 “Virtue ethics in translation” in this volume).
The great misunderstanding of that space is that it would somehow situate the translator as a
neutral figure, an “honest broker,” someone whose intercultural position is marked by “actively
created neutrality” (Koskinen 2000, 71; cf. Lambert 2018). That seems not to be necessary for
Nord’s loyalty, which calls for visible intervention but makes no particular claim to neutrality.
Nor is it in any way implied by theories of cooperation, where the sides are assumed to be
initially unequal and the rewards are also normally unequal: non-cooperation is bordered by
unacceptable loss, not by neutrality. Nor indeed is neutrality a necessary feature of intercul-
tural professions, which mark out the borders between cultures but rarely do so as uninvolved
bystanders (cf. the historical studies in Pym 2000, where the translator’s self-interest is always
part of the deal).
What is at stake here is not neutrality but a particular kind of trust invested in the transla-
tor in certain situations. Tymoczko (1999, 110) calls translation a “commissive act,” glossed by
Chesterman (2001, 149) as a kind of promise: “I hereby promise that this text represents the
original in some relevant way.” That implicit promise is the basis for the variable trust invested
in the translator. The promise is not made in all translation regimes: it remains prevalent in
much of Western translation since the Renaissance but is only fleetingly operative in pre-
Modern translation practice in most parts of the world. Other kinds of commissive acts may
come into play, such as an undertaking to entertain, to instruct, or to support a particular com-
munity. Those different kinds of trust are building blocks in the different institutionalizations
of translation.
The viability of mutual trust relationships has been questioned. For Abdallah (2011, 140),
trust can only properly operate when “the perspectives and interests of each stakeholder are
addressed, knowledge is shared, and information is clear.” This paints trust into an unreasonably
idealized corner: if everything is already known to everyone, then there will be no reason for
trust. On the contrary, it is precisely because information is scarce, asymmetrically distributed,
and typically hard to understand when foreign languages are involved that the promise is neces-
sary and trust needs to be invested. That is why Giddens (1990, 33) notes that trust is always
“in a certain sense blind trust”; it involves a pact with “something unknown” (Froeliger 2004,
52). That is why “the institution of promising” survives whether or not “individual promises are
broken or kept” (Duarte 2012, 25).
The trust in representation (“in some relevant way”) is the cornerstone of a particular Western
institutionalization of translation and perhaps provides a reason for multilateral loyalty. Remove
154
Translator ethics
it, for example by insisting that translators are only trusted just like any other author, and the
whole artifice can tumble down.
3.2 An ethics of disruption?

Perhaps the most radical critique of the “loyal” or “trustworthy” translator comes from a ques-
tioning of how translation works within globalization. This in part stems from theorizations of
translation as an institution (from Hermans 1997) or as an “expert system” (Duarte 2012) where
power relations are such that translators work to favour hegemonic classes or world cultural
centres. Evidence is gleaned from statistics on translation flows between languages (Heilbron
2000) and from claims that there are many translations from English but very few translations into
the central lingua franca (Pym and Chrupała 2005). Contemporary translation practices might
thus become part and parcel of a system where only the voices of the powerful are heard. The
consequences of this imbalance for researchers are forcefully drawn out by Cronin (2002) in the
field of interpreting, but could be applied across the board:
The role of interpreters throughout history has been crucially determined by the prevailing
hierarchical constitution of power and the position of interpreters in it. In this respect, if
you or your people are seriously disadvantaged by the hierarchy, the most ethical position
can be to be utterly “unfaithful” in interpreting in the name of another fdelity, a fdelity
of resistance.
(58–59)
This would be a translator ethics to the extent that it calls for translators to act. If the system
does not work to your advantage, then break (with) the system: “non-participation” (nicht mit-
machen) had been espoused by Adorno ([1942] 2017) when warning of the cultural machinations
of capitalism, and the call is faintly echoed in Venuti’s term for non-domesticating, non-fuent
renditions: “resistant” translation (Venuti 1995), drawing in part on the concept of “abusive
fdelity” (Lewis 1985, 42): “fdelity to much more than semantic substance, fdelity also to the
modalities of expression and to rhetorical strategies.”
Cronin, though, seems to be talking about rather more than translation strategies. His resistance
would involve disruption of the entire hegemonic system, and his fidelity is to . . . to what exactly?
Lewis and Venuti, along with Berman, can claim to be working within what is required by most
translation norms: they remain faithful to the text, to the letter of the text, although Lewis there-
after adds an appeal to “originality.” Their resistance is rather like strikes based on zeal or working
to minimal requirements – no one can complain that their translators are not being “faithful.” It
is something quite different to recognize situations where the translator can be “utterly unfaithful.”
That could mean surreptitiously deceiving communication partners and thereby undoing the entire
system of trust. A radically new image of the translator emerges. Yet Cronin, like many of those who
call for action across all fields of communication, has so far had little to say about the exact values and
principles to which that new translator should be faithful. The trick is that, like authoritarian figures
from struggling countries, the cause gains adepts because of what it is nobly against, while no one is
really sure about the new world it is working for. At no point is there any careful analysis of precisely
which part of the system needs to be changed, and in which way. Is there any guarantee that the
translator’s promise might really be the root of evil? At least classical Marxism offered analysis. Now
we are simply asked to trust that our local translation theorist knows the way forward.
155
Anthony Pym
4 Emerging issues
Relatively current issues in translator ethics tend to continue the aforementioned debates, albeit
within slightly new frames. The question of whether the translator acts as an individual or a
professional becomes slightly more acute as translation emerges as an institution with its own
priorities, entering into conflict with other social systems. And the great underlying change is
the development of free online machine translation, which threatens to separate the translator
from translation.
4.1 The translator or the whole person?

Perhaps the most contentious aspect of translator ethics is its wilful acceptance of limitations, in
the sense that it only purports to address what the translator does in the scene of translation. The
approach thereby does not enter into debates about serving noble or ignoble causes on a wider
plane. That position can be found in Leonardo Bruni: “I did not say he was a bad man, only a
bad translator. I might easily say the same of Plato if he wanted to be the navigator of a ship but
had no knowledge of navigation” ([1424–1426] 2014, 57–58). For a more recent example, one
might professionally applaud the Nazi interpreter Eugen Dollmann for enabling cooperation
between Hitler and Mussolini, while at the same time vigorously condemning the wider causes
for which he worked and in which he fundamentally believed (Dollmann 2017; cf. Pöchhacker
2006 for further case histories). Literary critics have been doing this forever, rescuing great
poetry from the political opinions of an Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot. For most translator ethics, it is
similarly tempting to draw a line between the translator’s professional identity and their personal
identity as a family member, law-abiding (or law-breaking) citizen, or maker of political choices.
Making that separation is not always a simple matter, but it can help address otherwise intrac-
table problems. A case in point is that of Marina Gross, the US State Department interpreter
who worked at a private meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian President
Vladimir Putin on July 16, 2018. Gross was called to tell the US Senate Foreign Relations
Committee what the two leaders said. Should she give testimony? As a US citizen, she should
probably not keep vital information from her government; as a government employee she would
have further obligations to disclose information; but as a professional interpreter she is at the
same time bound by the principle of client confidentiality, which appears in almost all the codes
of ethics (see, for example, AIIC 2018). A profession-based ethics enables us to draw parentheses
around what should be done as a citizen, government employer, or good person, and then seek
an answer on the basis of what Gross’s role as a professional translator should be. If that particular
aim is to favour long-term cooperation between cultures, then one can argue that confidential
exchanges between leaders help build interpersonal trust, hence greater possibilities for long-
term cooperation. The professional principle of confidentiality can thus be defended.
That way of addressing ethical problems is quite different from recognizing a professional
identity and then blindly applying the current codes of ethics – such was the level of debate sur-
rounding the case of Gross. Ethical thought should be able to seek answers and reasons that go
beyond allegiance to established norms and principles. Indeed, it should provide a conceptual
framework able to support or question the current codes of ethics.
That same logic can be enlisted against most calls for the translator to act as an individual
rather than a professional. Chesterman (2001, 147) thus sees an ethics of commitment to social
causes, despite its moral value, as standing outside the professional realm: “[p]rofessional ethics . . .
govern a translator’s activities qua translator, not qua political activist or life-saver.” One can
of course counter that translators are free to act in extra-professional capacities, and that such
156
Translator ethics
activities serve to raise awareness about translation and ultimately assist the profession’s public
image (cf. Cronin 2010; McDonough Dolmaya 2011; Yoo and Jeong 2017). At that point, how-
ever, the issue overlaps with how awareness of translation travels across social networks, which
these days concerns how translators interact with technologies.
4.2 What happens when everyone can translate?

The availability of free online machine translation means that the vast majority of the translating
being done in the world is not done by paid translators. When every user of a computer can
potentially produce some kind of translation, what role is left to professional translators? And
what does this mean for their ethics?
Gone are the days when translators could tell themselves that machine translation would
never rival the quality of fully human translation. Gone, too, is the time when translators could
happily benefit from using translation memories and other electronic aids, enhancing productiv-
ity without compromising employment. There were ethical problems with the use of translation
memories, notably in the ownership of databases and the separation of translations from com-
municative events (Pym 2004; Stupiello 2014; see also Chapter 18 “Translation technology and
ethics” in this volume). But to pretend that machine translation merely extends those problems
is now to live in serious denial. Some analysis is necessary.
The great bulk of machine translation is done for tasks that previously either would not have
been undertaken or would not have gone to a paid translator. This means the technology has
laudably increased the amount of translating that is happening, including the amount of volun-
teer translating that is done for good causes that have little to do with translator ethics as such.
So far there is little evidence that technology has actually reduced the number of employed
professionals (the current indicators still show growth). The challenge lies in the nature of
the employment. As the correction of machine translation (“postediting”) becomes akin to
copyediting, the productive applications of the trained translator’s skills move toward the more
high-risk value-added tasks: the translator is also becoming an adapter, an editor, a journalist, a
marketing expert, a public-relations professional, a curator of databases, and so on, with many
new names for such mixes. And as that happens, the technology is moving the translator beyond
the commissive promise to “represent the original.”
We now begin to appreciate why that particular kind of promise depended on the long age
of print and the concomitant promises of modernity. Different kinds of promises might now
be called for, associated with new names for new occupations, and with them different kinds
of ethical causes. Restrictive codes of ethics that apply only to professional translators in the
Western tradition might not survive. Yet appeals to cooperation, which is a principle applicable
to all cross-cultural communication (indeed all communication), might yet ride out the storm.
5 Conclusion: things still missing

The basic issues of translator ethics began life as arguments and models: they were about the
nature of translation, the fallacies of simple thought, or the profundities of basic paradoxes.
Over time, with the shifts toward cooperation, risk management, and trust, those issues have
become fields for empirical research, as we discover the logics by which translation regimes have
developed different ethical principles, in history and across cultures. That move to empirical
historical inquiry is at once a recognition of relativism and a potential debilitation of activism:
once you know that your cause is not for all time and all places, you tend to fight for it with a
little less enthusiasm.
157
Anthony Pym
There has also been a change in the direction of our attentions. A translator ethics based on
dialogue was forever looking backwards at the start text or author. Ideas like visibility, coopera-
tion, risk, and trust then nudged concerns towards the future, to the translation situation, the
translator, the client, and the purpose of the translation. That new view has opened up a range
of new questions, ultimately concerning the extent and desirability of a separate translation
profession, with its own ethics and discursive personas. The shift has not, however, engaged
significantly with the actual reception of translations, with the effects that different translator
interventions really have on the lives of people and the configurations of cultures. Once again,
numerous ethical principles have made sweeping assumptions about the consequences of trans-
lations (including the attainment of cooperation), while identification of actual effects requires
careful empirical study.
Similarly, translator ethics has tacitly assumed there is just one translator involved. Scant atten-
tion has been paid to collaborative translation as shared agency, potentially with ethical principles
shared across a range of different professions. That is another direction is which research and
thought must address the nature of cross-cultural communication as a whole, over and above
the specificities of the translator.
Finally, given the moves towards research and a wider range of professions, it seems strange
not to see greater manifestation of the researcher’s positionality. The translation scholar works
on cross-cultural communication just as much as any translator (see also Chapter 24 “Research
ethics in translation and interpreting studies” in this volume). There is no reason why the ethics
of what we study should not also be the ethics of how we study.

The ethics of linguistic hospitality and untranslatability in Derrida and Ricœur; ethics in Berman
and Meschonnic; feminist translation ethics; functional translation theories and ethics; profes-
sional translator ethics; ethics in socialist translation theories; translation technology and ethics.
References
Abdallah, Kristiina. 2011. “Towards Empowerment: Students’ Ethical Reflections on Translating in Pro-
duction Networks.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1: 129–54.
Adorno, Theodore W. [1942] 2017. “Notizen zur neuen Anthropologie.” In Mensch und Gesellschaft
zwischen Natur und Geschichte, edited by Thomas Ebke, Sebastian Edinger, Frank Müller, and Roman
Yos, 261–72. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Agorni, Mirella. 2002. Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century. London, New York: Routledge.
AIIC (Association Internationale des Interprètes de Conférence). 2018. The Principle of Confidentiality for
Professional Interpreters: Statement by the Executive Committee of AIIC. https://aiic.net/page/8618
Apter, Emily. 2006. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton
University Press.
Arrojo, Rosemary. 1994. “Fidelity and the Gendered Translation.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction
7, no. 2: 147–63.
Axelrod, Robert. 1997. The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Baer, Brian James, and Françoise Massardier-Kenny. 2016. “Gender and Sexuality.” In Researching Transla-
tion and Interpreting, edited by Claudia V. Angelelli, and Brian James Baer, 83–96. London, New York:
Routledge.
Berman, Antoine. 1999. La traduction et la lettre, ou l’auberge du lointain. Paris: Seuil.
158
Translator ethics
Bruni, Leonardo. [c.1424–1426] 2014. “De interpretatione recta.” In Western Translation Theory from Herodo-
tus to Nietzsche, translated by James Hankins, edited by Douglas Robinson, 57–60. London, New York:
Routledge.
Buber, Martin. 1923. Ich und du. Leipzig: Insel.
Chamberlain, Lori. 1992. “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation.” In Rethinking Translation, edited
by Lawrence Venuti, 57–75. London, New York: Routledge.
Chan, Andy Lung Jan. 2009. “Effectiveness of Translator Certification as a Signaling Device: Views from
the Translator Recruiters.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 4, no. 2: 155–71.
Chesterman, Andrew. 1997. Memes of Translation. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Chesterman, Andrew. 2009. “The Name and Nature of Translator Studies.” Hermes 42: 13–22.
Cronin, Michael. 2002. “The Empire Talks Back.” In Translation and Power, edited by Maria Tymoczko, and
Edwin Gentzler, 45–62. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Cronin, Michael. 2003. Translation and Globalization. London, New York: Routledge.
Cronin, Michael. 2010. “The Translation Crowd.” Tradumàtica 8: 1–7.
Delisle, Jean. 1993. “Traducteurs médiévaux, traductrices féministes: une même éthique de la traduction?”
TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 6, no. 1: 203–30.
Delisle, Jean, ed. 2002. Portraits de traductrices. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
Díaz-Diocaretz, Myriam. 1985. Translating Poetic Discourse: Questions on Feminist Strategies in Adrienne Rich.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Dollmann, Eugen. 2017. With Hitler and Mussolini: Memoirs of a Nazi Interpreter. New York: Skyhorse.
Duarte, João Ferreira. 2012. “Trusting Translation.” Anglo Saxonica Series 3, no. 3: 19–37.
Fedorov, Andrei V. 1953. Vvedenie b teoriu perevoda. Moscow: Literaturi na inostrannix iazikax.
Feng, Man. 2014. “Cross-Cultural Comparison of Codes of Ethics for Interpreters.” US-China Foreign
Language 12, no. 1: 83–92.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. “What Is an Author?” In Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism,
edited by Josué V. Harari, 141–60. London: Methuen.
Froeliger, Nicholas. 2004. “Les mécanismes de la confiance en traduction – aspects relationnels.” Journal of
Specialised Translation 2004, no. 2: 50–62.
Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Godard, Barbara. 1989. “Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation.” Tessera, April 1. https://goo.gl/
qZCf1N
Grice, H. Paul. 1975. “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3, edited by P. Cole, and J.L.
Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.
Heilbron, Johan. 2000. “Translation as a Cultural World System.” Perspectives 8, no. 1: 9–26.
Hermans, Theo. 1996. “The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative.” Target 8, no. 1: 23–48.
Hermans, Theo. 1997. “Translation as Institution.” In Translation as Intercultural Communication, edited
by Mary Snell-Hornby, Zuzana Jettmarová, and Klaus Kaindl, 3–20. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Hermans, Theo. 2007. “Literary Translation.” In A Companion to Translation Studies, edited by Piotr Kuhl-
wczak, and Karin Littau, 77–91. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Hermans, Theo. 2009. “Translation, Ethics, Politics.” In The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies,
edited by Jeremy Munday, 93–105. London, New York: Routledge.
House, Juliane. 2003. “Misunderstanding in Intercultural University Encounters.” In Misunderstanding in
Social Life: Discourse Approaches to Problematic Talk, edited by Juliane House, Gabriele Kasper, and Steven
Ross, 22–56. Harlow: Pearson Education.
Kade, Otto. 1963. “Der Dolmetschvorgang und die Notation.” Fremdsprachen 7, no. 1: 12–20.
Keohane, Robert O. 1984. After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy. Princeton,
of Tampere.
Lambert, Joseph. 2018. “How Ethical Are Codes of Ethics? Using Illusions of Neutrality to Sell Transla-
tions.” Journal of Specialised Translation 30: 269–90.
Laygues, Arnaud. 2004. “Le traducteur semeur d’éthique. Pour une application de la pensée d’Emmanuel
Lévinas a la traduction.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 17, no. 2: 45–56.
Laygues, Arnaud. 2006 “Pour une réaffirmation de l’‘être-ensemble’ par la traduction.” Meta 51: 838–47.
159
Anthony Pym
Le Blanc, Charles. 2009. Le Complexe d’Hermès. Regards philosophiques sur la traduction. Ottawa: University
of Ottawa Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1961. Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité. The Hague: Nijhoff.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Entre nous, essais sur le penser-à-l’autre. Paris: Grasset.
Lewis, Philip. 1985. “The Measure of Translation Effects.” In Difference in Translation, edited by Joseph F.
Maier, Carol. 1985. “A Woman in Translation, Reflecting.” Translation Review 17: 4–8.
Marcel, Gabriel. 1935. Journal métaphysique. Paris: Gallimard.
Mason, Ian, ed. 1999. “Dialogue Interpreting.” Special issue of The Translator 5, no. 2.
McDonough Dolmaya, Julie. 2011. “The Ethics of Crowdsourcing.” Linguistica Antverpiensia 10: 97–110.
Melby, Alan. 1995. The Possibility of Language: A Discussion of the Nature of Language, with Implications for
Human and Machine Translation. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Meschonnic, Henri. 1999. Poétique du traduire. Paris: Verdier.
Newmark, Peter. 1988. A Textbook of Translation. London: Prentice Hall.
Newmark, Peter. 1994. “The Ethics of Translation.” In Quality-Assurance, Management and Control: Proceed-
ings ITI Conference 7, edited by Catriona Picken, 70–1. London: Institute of Translation & Interpreting.
Nord, Christiane. 1997. Translating as a Purposeful Activity. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Nord, Christiane. 1991. “Scopos, Loyalty and Translational Conventions.” Target 3, no. 1: 91–109.
Nord, Christiane. 2001. “Loyalty Revisited: Bible Translation as a Case in Point.” The Translator 7, no. 2:
185–202.
Oittinen, Riitta. 1993. I Am Me: I Am Other: On the Dialogics of Translating for Children. Tampere: University
of Tampere.
Pöchhacker, Franz. 2006. “Interpreters and Ideology: From ‘between’ to ‘within’.” Across Languages and
Cultures 7, no. 2: 191–207.
Prunc, Erich. 1997. “Translationskultur (Versuch einer konstruktiven Kritik des translatorischen Handelns).”
Textcontext Neue Folge 1: 99–127.
Prunc, Erich. 2000. “Vom Translationsbiedermeier zur Cyber-Translation.” Textcontext Neue Folge 4:
3–74.
Pulido, Martha. 2016. “What Is a Translator?” Cadernos de Tradução 36, no. 2: 237–52.
Pym, Anthony. 1995. “Translation as a Transaction Cost.” Meta 40, no. 4: 594–605.
Pym, Anthony. 1997. Pour une éthique du traducteur. Arras: Artois Presses Université, Ottawa: Presses de
l’Université d’Ottawa.
Pym, Anthony. 2000. Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History. Manchester: St.
Jerome Publishing.
Pym, Anthony. 2004. “Translational Ethics and Electronic Technologies.” A Profissionalização do Tradutor,
121–6. Lisbon: Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia/Uniao Latina.
Pym, Anthony. 2012. On Translator Ethics: Principles for Cross-Cultural Communication. Amsterdam, Philadel-
phia: John Benjamins (reworked version of Pour une éthique du traducteur).
Pym, Anthony. 2015. “Translating as Risk Management.” Journal of Pragmatics 85: 67–80.
Pym, Anthony, and Grzegorz Chrupała. 2005. “The Quantitative Analysis of Translation Flows in the Age
of an International Language.” In Less Translated Languages, edited by Albert Branchadell and Lovell
Margaret West, 27–38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rich, Adrienne. 1986. “Invisibility in Academe.” In Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985,
198–201. New York: Norton.
Rizzi, Andrea, Birgit Lang, and Anthony Pym. 2019. What Is Translation History? A Trust-Based Approach.
Santaemilia, José, ed. 2005. Gender, Sex and Translation: The Manipulation of Identities. Manchester: St.
Jerome Publishing.
Sieburth, Richard. 2000. “Review of Antoine Berman, Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne.” The
Translator 6, no. 2: 321–7.
Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London, New
York: Routledge.
Smith, Adam. [1776] 2000. The Wealth of Nations. New York: Random House.
Stupiello, Érika Nogueira de Andrade. 2014. Ética profissional na tradução assistida por sistemas de memorias.
São Paulo: UNESP.
160
Translator ethics
Toury, Gideon. 2012. Descriptive Translation Studies -and beyond. Revised Edition. Amsterdam, Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Tymoczko, Maria. 2000. “Translation and Political Engagement.” The Translator 6, no. 1: 23–47.
Tymoczko, Maria. 2007. Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. London, New York: Routledge.
von Flotow, Luise. 1997. Translation and Gender. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
von Flotow, Luise, ed. 2011. Translating Women. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
Wolf, Michaela. 2006. “The Female State of the Art: Women in the ‘Translation Field’.” In Sociocultural
Aspects of Translation and Interpreting, edited by Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger, and Zuzana Jettma-
rová, 129–41. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Yoo, Taetoung, and Cheik Ja Jeong. 2017. “Consolidating the Professional Identity of Translators.” Target
29, no. 3: 361–87.
Further reading
Drugan, Joanna, and Rebecca Tipton, eds. 2017. “Translation, Ethics and Social Responsibility.” Special
issue of The Translator 23, no. 2.
This special issue can instructively be compared with the special issue on “The Return to Ethics” that
appeared in the same journal in 2001. The appeal to “social responsibility” concurs with the need for
downstream analysis. Key articles are McDonough Dolmaya on Wikipedia and Hlavac on interpret-
ers’ footing. As in the previous special issue, the most challenging arguments come from interpreting.
Laygues, Arnaud. 2004. “Le traducteur semeur d’éthique. Pour une application de la pensée d’Emmanuel
Lévinas a la traduction.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 17, no. 2: 45–56.
Laygues, Arnaud. 2006. “Pour une réaffirmation de l’“être-ensemble” par la traduction.” Meta 51: 838–47.
These two articles, available free online, provide a succinct statement of how a philosophy of dialogue
can be applied to translation processes.
Pym, Anthony. 2012. On Translator Ethics: Principles for Cross-Cultural Communication. Amsterdam, Phila-
delphia: John Benjamins.
This is a reworked version of Pour une éthique du traducteur (1997), where the use of economic principles
to challenge binary and engaged philosophies becomes even more pronounced. The description of
mutual benefits as the translator’s ethical aim provides the basis for later work on the translator’s man-
agement of risk and trust.
161
Part II
12
Professional translator ethics
Joseph Lambert
1 Introduction
This chapter examines the various and overlapping ethical questions facing the professional
translator. I first outline who these professional translators are and then survey the range of ethi-
cal challenges they must contemplate, supported by a discussion of the way literature to date
has accounted for and informed (or failed to inform) these considerations. The chapter offers
a scholarship-based overview of the way professional translator ethics has been perceived in
Translation Studies and, while this topic necessitates overlap with some broader discussions in
the discipline, the focus remains squarely on the specific issues facing the professional translator.
Furthermore, though translators and interpreters face some shared ethical issues, this chapter
speaks only of translators (working with the written word) and not interpreters (who work with
the spoken word; see also Chapter 14 “Conference interpreter ethics” and Chapter 15 “Ethics
in public service interpreting” in this volume).
Unfortunately, research on professional translator ethics is marked by distinct gaps, and there
is often a lack of unity between the sparse contributions. As such, beyond examining what has
been said within Translation Studies, the fragmented discussions available necessitate a partly
“non-academic” focus, and therefore material produced by practising translators represents a
key source in this overview. My overarching illustration of areas of concern for the professional
translator is further informed by codes of ethics and examples of professional practice drawn
from resources including blog entries, translation forum posts, surveys, and social media discus-
sions. These resources widen our scope, contextualise problems, and – for the professionals
themselves – mitigate a sense of isolation. By offering insight into how professionals perceive
certain topics and the issues they hold as important, these sources provide a window into the
profession and illustrate the ethical tensions that exist between theoretical literature, industry
documentation, and actual professional practice. Uniting these practice-based resources with the
accumulation of academic knowledge in the field, I explore the broad range of ethical concerns
facing the professional translator.
165
Joseph Lambert
2 Defining the professional translator

Kaisa Koskinen and Helle V. Dam (2016, 258) comment on the range of conceptualisations
available for the status of “professional” in translation (see Chapter 16 “Ethics of volunteering
in translation and interpreting” in this volume for discussions of non-professional translators)
and raise a number of important questions in seeking to define this group, which is a crucial yet
challenging task. For example, does making a living through translation or belonging to a profes-
sional network or association make someone a professional? Must a professional translator have
certain qualifications, years of experience, or staff status? Must they adhere to a code of ethics?
Or is it more about the fact that they do something? In the unregulated translation profession,
the latter is perhaps the nearest fit.
Schaffner (2019, 64) understands professional translation “as a paid occupation which requires
a formal qualification,” yet even this seemingly expansive definition precludes a large number of
translators who work as paid professionals without formal qualifications. The European Com-
mission’s 2012 report, “The Status of the Translation Profession in the European Union,” states
that the general title of translator is virtually unprotected, with none of the countries surveyed
requiring any kind of formal qualification from people seeking to call themselves translators
(Pym, Grin, Sfreddo, and Chan 2012, 20). There are some exceptions, however, with the
authors noting that official, protected translator status does exist in Denmark, Norway, Slova-
kia, and Sweden (Pym et al. 2012). There is also the more generalised exception of translators
working on legal or otherwise “official” documents, whose work may be “certified,” “sworn,”
or “authorised” depending on the country and context. In each of these cases, the requisite
qualified individual or institution attests to the translators’ status (see Pym et al. 2012 for a full
discussion of the status of translators of official documents). On a wider level, in most European
countries there are no overarching requirements in terms of training, experience, continuing
professional development, membership to professional institutions or communities, or levels of
certification or status. For the most part, anyone can call themselves a professional translator.
That said, some translation agencies do require their translators to have certain qualifications
or experience, while academic and professional qualifications (for instance, MAs and BAs or
certification provided by professional associations), professional memberships, and demonstrable
working experience all serve as guarantees to potential clients and employers and thus indirectly
correlate to perceived professionalism. Indeed, Pym et al. (2016) consider these to be “tradi-
tional signals of professional status,” while other signalling mechanisms have emerged alongside
electronic communication (34).
The professional translator can work in a wide range of settings, on an eclectic range of
materials, and across a plethora of subject domains, all while using a variety of tools to aid their
practice. As such, to avoid descending into circuitous discussions of status and professional-
ism, I limit my working definition of the professional translator to the first half of Schaffner’s
definition – simply translators getting paid for translation, where the payment they receive
represents their main income. This excludes those who are employed, for example, as teachers
or editors, but occasionally produce translations – a distinct mode of working known as “para-
professional translation,” somewhat falling between work as a professional translator as defined
here and hobby or volunteer work (Piekkari, Tietze, and Koskinen 2019). Furthermore, I adopt
Dam and Zethsen’s (2010) incisive image of the settings in which these professionals work:
in-house company translators, in-house agency translators, freelance translators, and staff transla-
tors working in the EU institutions. This covers a wide and representative swathe of professionals
as, while a majority are self-employed freelancers working with agencies or direct clients, some
translators are full-time in-house members of staff. Though I do not include literary translators
166
in my discussions, that is not to say that they are not professionals, but rather that the challenges
and context within which they work are sufficiently distinct to warrant focused discussion else-
where (see Chapter 13 “Literary translator ethics” in this volume). There is no definitive answer
to the question of how many professional translators are practising worldwide, with estimates
ranging from 200,000 to 700,000. Regardless, this is a significant number of people working in a
considerable range of contexts – indeed, professional translation is arguably the biggest sector of
translation and interpreting. Though the notion of a professional translator is fuzzy, there remains
a belief that this notion does in fact exist and moves towards professionalisation are seen as a good
thing. As we will see later, translators are bound by a profound sense of professional ethics and
integrity in spite of this unregulated status in the vast majority of countries in which they work.
3.1 The basis of professional translator ethics

Translation Studies has long cast variously named conceptions of professional translation – rang-
ing from “specialised” to “business” translation, or even the “non-literary” domain – as inferior
to, or perhaps even conflicting with, literary translation (Rogers 2015). Though the idea of
professional translation as a less problematic and thus less interesting sub-species of the translation
world has been emphatically overturned in the twenty-first century, with a widespread desire
to research areas tied to the profession (see Angelone, Ehrensberger-Dow, and Massey 2019),
there remains a relative lack of research specifically focusing on ethical issues pertaining to the
professional translator.
In Ben Van Wyke’s entry on “Translation and Ethics” in the Routledge Handbook of Transla-
tion Studies (2013), for instance, the professional translator is entirely neglected. This is not an
oversight from the author, but rather is indicative of the discipline’s focus. Nor has practice-based
research used ethics as the main lens through which to regulate this practice. Instead, discus-
sions of quality (both in academic and professional circles) and the creation of standards have
provided the regulatory framework for adequate translation service provision and its control.
However, there is an imperative for work on translation ethics to apply to, or at least refer to,
the professional translator. In this section, I outline the traditional basis of ethical concerns for
the professional translator. Examining translation codes of ethics and Andrew Chesterman’s
profession-oriented ethics provides our basis for subsequent discussion and, when used in con-
junction with professionals’ own concerns emanating from the area, enables us to move beyond
initial sketches.
The origin of a professional translator’s ethics lies in codes of ethics, which continue to shape
ethical decision-making to this day (see Chapter 20 “Ethics codes for interpreters and transla-
tors” in this volume for a more detailed discussion of codes). Though codes of ethics have a long
history, they emerged as a key tool in professional contexts in the 1990s, offering prescriptive
guidelines on how a professional should act. In the context of professional translation, codes
function as the working translator’s primary point of contact with ethics and represent both a
key tool in defining ethical translation and informing ethical decision-making. As Christina
Schaffner puts it, “codes lay down principles and guidelines for exercising the profession and for
the behaviour towards clients, colleagues and other professionals” (Schaffner 2019, 65).
The UK-based Institute of Translation and Interpreting’s (ITI) 2016 Code of Conduct offers
a representative image of the areas pertinent to a professional translator’s ethics. The code is
divided according to four key principles: (a) honesty and integrity, (b) professional competence,
167
Joseph Lambert
(c) client confidentiality and trust, and (d) relationships with other members, and outlines eight
professional values. Though these provide some useful general guidelines and signal an array
of areas of consideration that scholars and professional translators have sought to explain, they
are far from perfect. The first value, for instance – an overarching call for members to “convey
the meaning between people and cultures faithfully, accurately and impartially” (ITI 2016, 5) –
echoes now-outdated conceptions of translation as straightforward meaning transfer. Indeed,
this is among an array of limitations have been noted by scholars (Baker 2011; Drugan 2011;
Lambert 2018; McDonough-Dolmaya 2011) and, as a result of these limitations, it is clear that
translators do not or cannot always adhere to codes in their practice. Though a possibility, this
is not necessarily due to a lack of willingness from the translator, but rather difficulties in inter-
pretation and application.
This limited applicability is also perceived within the profession, and yet codes have a clear
impact on received notions of ethics among professional translators. There is an almost universal
acceptance within the industry that they can be a positive force and serve as a badge of honour.
For instance, the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL), the leading UK-based membership
body for language professionals, advises translators to join professional associations as a way to
stand out as a professional and lists their code as a key benefit of membership (CIOL 2018).
From this perspective, the codes’ mere existence seems to provide ethical status to the translator,
suggesting that if a professional is bound to a code, through association membership for example,
then they are automatically an ethical translator. This is unfortunately not the case. Furthermore,
many blog articles from translators and translation companies draw their ethical principles for
translators from codes. For instance, in their “Brief Guide to Ethics for Interpreters and Transla-
tors,” translation company Ulatus offers the following principles for a professional translator to
follow, all drawn from the International Medical Interpreters Association Code of Ethics: main-
tain confidentiality, be accurate, be sensitive to cultural misunderstandings, maintain impartiality,
be professional, stay up-to-date, and pursue professional development (Ulatus 2016).
With these overarching foundations in mind, we move to the discipline of Translation Stud-
ies. Though a number of theoretical discussions of ethics do not refer to the actual practice of
translation, several scholars have attempted to shift focus to this issue. In his 2001 paper “Pro-
posal for a Hieronymic Oath,” Chesterman attempts to draw up a professional code of ethics for
translators that would surpass many of the codes used in the profession. Chesterman productively
divides ethics into four key areas (truth, loyalty, understanding, and trust) before critiquing each
of these areas individually and eventually drawing up his ultimate “oath.”
His first key area outlines an ethics of representation that deals with fidelity, accuracy, truth,
and how to select and transmit a good, or the best, interpretation of a source text. This is a cen-
tral issue in several leading theories of ethics in Translation Studies (comprehensively covered in
Part I in this volume), though in many cases we find a disconnect between much of this literature
and actual professional practice. Indeed, a brief glance at working practices among professional
translators provides an initial counterpoint to a number of the theoretical discussions. Anthony
Pym (2012) draws attention to the way ethics has traditionally been perceived as an either-or
situation. We favour either “the source language-culture-text-speaker or the target language-
culture-text-speaker” (5). This calls to mind the ethical concerns voiced by Antoine Berman
(1999; see also Chapter 6 “Ethics in Berman and Meschonnic” in this volume) or Lawrence
Venuti (1995; see also Chapter 10 “Venuti and the ethics of difference” in this volume), with
both scholars eloquently outlining the potential perils of target-based renderings. Yet despite the
allure of these ideas and their increased relevance in other contexts, such as literary translation,
it is extremely difficult to reconcile the use of resistant strategies with the practice of the pro-
fessional translator. Day-to-day practice for professional translators revolves around producing
168
translated texts that read like original pieces of target language writing and move away from the
source language style and structure to display no hint of having been translated. NAJIT – the
US-based National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators – for instance, advocate
for this practice in a document outlining translators’ responsibilities: “[t]he finished document
should read as if it had originally been written in the target language for the target audience”
(NAJIT 2017), reaffirming the important role that translation associations hold in setting ethical
agendas for professional translators.
In many professional context, edits are made freely, sections are cut down and moved around,
lexical elements and even entire sections can be deleted if they are deemed to be problematic or
unsuitable for the context of publication. Of course, Berman and Venuti’s primary focus was lit-
erary translation, but this is nevertheless indicative of the gap that exists between wider literature
on ethics in Translation Studies and the reality of professional practice. While raising invaluable
and intriguing questions, views centred around textual fidelity, disruption, or marginalisation
alone do not provide the full picture when it comes to the various considerations facing the
professional translator. Unless we are to accuse the entire global body of translators of unethical
practice, we must look elsewhere for our theoretical underpinnings.
3.2 Moving beyond the text

In order to move beyond this traditional idea of textual fidelity, and to better represent the
realities of professional practice, Chesterman, among others, considers the embedded nature of
the translator within the professional context of translation. The second of his four key areas,
an ethics of service, embodies this shift and falls in line with functional models of translation.
Here, discussions revolve around providing a service whereby the “translator is deemed to act
ethically if the translation complies with the instructions set by the client and fulfils the aim
of the translation as set by the client and accepted or negotiated by the translator” (Chester-
man 2001, 140). In line with Christiane Nord’s ethics of loyalty (Nord 2001; see also Chapter 5
“Functional translation theories and ethics” in this volume), this second model places ethics
much more firmly within the domain of the professional translator, considering the wider con-
text in which the interaction takes place, and Chesterman extends this thread further still in his
third model focusing on communication. This third model of ethics deals not with respect for
the Other in terms of a textual respect (which is covered in the first form), but rather with the
question of communicating with other people, with the translator viewed as a mediator seeking
to achieve cross-cultural communication (Chesterman 2001, 141). This form of ethics is most
amply explored by Anthony Pym via his conception of cooperation, discussed further later.
Chesterman’s (2001) fourth model, meanwhile, is a norm-based ethics. These norms are rep-
resentative of ethical values at work in a particular place and time and thus equates ethical behav-
iour with socially sanctioned expectations (141). Though Chesterman considered norms within
the context of Gideon Toury’s work in Descriptive Translation Studies, primarily focusing on
textual norms and expectations of what a translation should look like, subsequent discussions
in this chapter demonstrate how ethical decision-making is partly governed by norms shaped
by professional practice, as attested by translators in blogs, on social media, and on translation
forums, which accumulate and consolidate these norms.
While these four models of ethics have offered a basis for subsequent (and some contempo-
raneous) discussions of ethics, they are not without their problems. The main issue lies in rec-
onciling their differing ethical values. Indeed, the model of truth is likely to conflict with each
of the other values due to the tension that exists between the various demands placed upon the
translator: how can we be “truthful” or “faithful” in terms of the content if our client asks us to
169
Joseph Lambert
deviate from that content, for instance? This is something that Chesterman unfortunately does
not address. Instead, he accepts that these models are provisional, partial, and cannot be broken
down into a suitable hierarchy, a stumbling block that accompanies many models of ethics.
Turning to Chesterman’s code, his nine-point “Hieronymic Oath” addresses some invalu-
able general professional issues. For example, point six deftly handles confidentiality, calling for
the translator to respect clients’ professional secrets and “not to exploit client’s information for
personal gain” (Chesterman 2001, 153), while point seven, regarding competence, states: “I will
be honest about my own qualifications and limitations; I will not accept work that is outside my
competence” (153). Yet cause for concern arises at multiple points. Chesterman’s third point
of “I will use my expertise to maximise communication and minimise misunderstanding across
language barriers” (153), for instance, leaves the key question of precisely how to do this unan-
swered. Despite adding a few paragraphs on the subjects of accuracy, loyalty, etc., the question
of how the translator should communicate remains to be answered, a topic that is explored in
more detail in Pym’s cooperation-based ethics. Furthermore, Chesterman’s fourth guideline,
which states that translators will not “represent their source texts in unfair ways” (153), suggests
a neutral, detached view of translation – or a deference to the “original” content no matter what.
Subsequent discussions of impartiality and translating questionable content will shed further
light on the possibility of such an aim.
Ultimately, Chesterman’s article clearly identified the complexity involved in developing an
ethics for the professional translator and accessibly introduced a range of key terms and concepts.
It is representative of a wider move from conceptions of fidelity to considerations of translation
in context, although his narrowed focus on the professional side of ethics – placing personal and
socio-cultural concerns and activist roles beyond the domain of ethics – requires further explo-
ration. Though his first model has limitations in terms of practical application, the other three
can function perfectly well within the professional translator’s work; we can certainly abide by
our client’s wishes, communicate with other agents, or follow norms, but these do not answer
all of the questions that translators are acutely concerned with. Indeed, a number of areas that
are deemed important by professional translators are not mentioned in Chesterman’s overview.
Julie McDonough-Dolmaya (2011) offers a detailed image of these areas by studying topics dis-
cussed within the TranslatorsCafe.com forum – a sub-section of a popular profession-oriented
website within which translators can ask questions and enter into dialogue with colleagues and
peers. In her study, McDonough-Dolmaya listed forum threads on TranslatorsCafe according to
the number of posts related to each topic. Top of the list, with 245 posts (out of a total 1,600),
were discussions of rates – how much are or should translators be getting paid – immediately
drawing our attention to the contrast in focus between codes (only a relatively small percentage
of codes actually include stipulations on rates), theoretical literature, and the issues pertinent to
professionals.1 Areas of concern highlighted in this paragraph are explored further in the fol-
lowing sections.
4 Core issues
4.1 Cooperation and responsibility

A key unanswered question is that of a professional translator’s overall responsibility, with poten-
tial areas to consider including responsibility towards the flourishing of the profession, wider
social causes, and the translators’ own wellbeing. While I have noted an initial move beyond
textual views based around fidelity, Anthony Pym (2012) seeks to consolidate the move beyond
this realm while drawing up a clearly delineated hierarchy of ethical responsibility. Rather than
170
seeking to address the question of ethics within the act of translation – how we translate – Pym
instead considers the bigger question of why we are translating. Indeed, he suggests, “if we know
why we translate, then we can deduce how we should translate and perhaps even what we should
translate in each situation” (12).
Pym’s major work on ethics, Pour une éthique du traducteur (1997), which was translated and
updated in English as On Translator Ethics in 2012, paints ethics as having two levels. As with
many theories of ethics, Pym (2012) states that it contains “collective, professional aspects as well
as the translator’s individual morality” (15), yet his professional translator’s ethics is largely based
on an idea of what the profession should be striving towards while the personal element takes
on more of a marginal role. Within this context, Pym creates a social ethics that seeks to pro-
mote the process of translators’ professionalisation. This acts as a guiding principle to contribute
to intercultural cooperation, a central concept in Pym’s ideas that he describes as “abstract but
situational, since the nature of cooperation depends on numerous factors specific to each case”
(2012, 9), a signal of the importance of contextual factors within ethics. Pym goes on to produce
a number of overarching principles: the translator’s first loyalty is to their profession and then
they are responsible for the decision to translate, the probable effects of their translations (9), and
subsequently to the matter (the text), the client, and other translators. These domains overlap to
a degree with Chesterman’s ethics of representation and ethics of service, but paint a more clear-
cut picture in terms of the hierarchy that is drawn and the range and extent of responsibilities.
Yet the issue of responsibility is far from settled. In addition to discussions of personal agency
later, the question of responsibility beyond the profession persists. Though Pym (2012) states,
“there is no need for translators to claim (or to be attributed with) any commitment to the con-
tent of what they are translating” (67) (and, drawing from the aforementioned principles, they
are not fully responsible for the consequences of translating that content), other scholars have
suggested that translators should be committed to the ideologies behind that content generally
in order to give voice to non-hegemonic thinking (activist ethics is covered in detail in Chapter 17
“Ethics of activist translation and interpreting,” albeit in a more general context). As Haidee
Kruger and Elizabeth Crots (2014) explain when discussing the general nature of professional
translator ethics, “there is a responsibility to resist situations of injustice or unfairness founded
on responsibility towards society at large” (149). However, the economically driven context
of professional translation, with a number of asymmetrical power relations at work, has meant
that this element of responsibility has not yet been successfully incorporated into discussions of
professional translation. As Pym puts it (2012, 87–88), “[a]sking a translator to save the world is
sometimes like asking an infant to read.”
4.2 Neutrality and personal ethics

Aside from notions of cooperation, Pym’s principal postulate is that translators are primarily
intercultural agents located in the intersections of cultures and not within one single culture
(2012, 9). In this middle ground, translators are “dominated by the ethics of cooperation,”
“primarily responsible not to the source text writer, the client or their readers but to their fel-
low translators” (Koskinen 2000, 80). Though Pym (2012) accepts that translators may have
to choose between two sides at certain points, the fundamental core of his ethics is “strictly
intercultural” (167). However, this change in understanding is carried out in order to argue that
translators are somehow detached from national interests, benevolent but impartial helpers, in a
move aimed to raise the profile of translation. While Pym acknowledges that “[w]e know full
well that professional subjectivity never suppresses individual subjectivity in the intimate space of
doubt” (2012, 80), his ideas do not fully incorporate this individual subjectivity, perhaps because
171
Joseph Lambert
illuminating the professional translator’s subjective nature would be problematic in terms of the
position he carves out in the interculture.
The idea of translators as neutral characters in between cultures has been criticised by a
number of scholars. Lieven Tack (2001), for instance, states that “[i]nformation does not flow
freely, not even in intercultures; it is inevitably anchored, situated, appropriated and inscribed in
complex ideological contexts” (301). This objection is vital, as it not only problematises some
of Pym’s ethical underpinnings, but also articulates a much wider point in terms of professional
translator ethics. Despite the fact that it features in both professional documentation and schol-
arly thought, it is widely accepted that total neutrality or impartiality on the part of the profes-
sional translator is an illusion (see, for instance, Baker 2006).
Interculturality is certainly a feature of the translator’s existence, but the translator is not value-
free. Kristiina Adballah (2011) eloquently encapsulates a generalised view of non-neutrality in
the conclusion to her paper on training student translators in relation to ethical issues in the
profession, stating, “in the end it is the moral agent herself who decides which course of action
to take in resolving an ethical dilemma, based on her own moral values” (148). From an ethical
perspective, we must question the personal and examine what it is that these active agents are
interested in and concerned about.
Linked to this question of neutrality is the issue of the divide between personal and pro-
fessional ethics. Though the literature on the ethics of the professional translator is scarce, a
handful of articles consider personal agency as a relevant dimension of professional translator
ethics. Indeed, this is something that Kruger and Crots’ (2014) work partly addresses. Linking
the theoretical and professional sides of translation and offering a rare attempt to explore ethical
decision-making in a quantitative and empirical manner, Kruger and Crots tested how a group
of professional translators (that this group is deemed to be representative of the South African
population of professional translators is the only detail that is given) actually handle problem-
atic ethical dilemmas in practice. They selected a corpus of nine texts from a range of contexts
including novels, blog entries, and song lyrics, and distributed them to thirty-one South African
translators, with each of the texts containing elements that could be seen as ethically problematic
(racist or sexist language, for instance). The translators were then asked what their translation
methodology would be if they were presented with the texts as professional translators. They
found that respondents selected strategies based on personal and professional reasoning at almost
the same rate (professional ethics 51% of the time, personal 49%). The scholars suggest, “[i]
t therefore seems as if personal ethics does play a substantial role in the decisions made when
translating a text, and professional status does not suppress the tendency to articulate ethical
motivations from a personal, rather than a professional, subject position and frame of reference”
(Kruger and Crots 2014, 165). In other words, professional translator ethics must acknowledge
this personal dimension.
Placing this in the context of what has come before, professional translator ethics should not
only consider professional responsibility to the client, the text, and the profession (built upon
Pym’s ethics), but also a personal ethics “founded on loyalty towards the translator’s own system
of beliefs” (Kruger and Crots 2014, 149). There is a complex interplay between these systems
in the translator’s decision-making processes and, while there remains a distinction between
personal and professional ethics, Kruger and Crots afford it a more central role in ethics overall,
acknowledging that “[t]ranslators are humans, and like all humans, they have a system of beliefs
that inform how they choose to live their lives” (2014, 149). By contrast, Pym’s move to the
question of “Why translate?” which is answered with the call to promote cooperation, limits
a translator’s responsibilities and sidesteps the issue of personal engagement. For him, the ethi-
cal translator may sometimes decide that it is better not to translate at all. Unfortunately, this is
172
not fully representative of the way that professional translators work, in part due to the precise
asymmetrical power relations that Pym notes elsewhere. Cooperation is not the professional
translator’s only consideration, and the decision to translate is often taken based upon their own
sense of what is or is not acceptable, or necessary, not simply whether their input will benefit
the profession as a whole. For instance, using the example of morally questionable content in a
text, in a 2020 survey of 1,264 freelance translators, UK-based professional translation agency
Inbox Translation asked translators whether they had ever refused, or would refuse, to work on
texts relating to a wide range of traditionally taboo subjects. Only 17% of respondents said that
they would not refuse work in any subject area, reaffirming the inescapably personal nature of
decisions on what is and is not acceptable (personal correspondence with managing director of
Inbox Translation, April 2020). Considering the human agent involved and their personal beliefs
and moral viewpoints represents another step forward in the development of the field.
4.3 Consolidating professionals’ ethical concerns

With the translator’s role increasingly viewed as that of an active mediator, in ethical terms they
must therefore be able to assume responsibility for their work. This stands in contrast with Pym’s
and Chesterman’s belief that the professional translator is not responsible for potential future
socio-cultural or political effects, nor for the content that they are translating (Kruger and Crots
2014, 152–153). However, though the translator is now portrayed as an independent being in
research, in some circumstances professionals’ own views remain rooted in perhaps outdated
images of what is ethical. Further responses to Kruger and Crots’s aforementioned study allude
to the fact that considerations such as accuracy and fidelity are still central to professional transla-
tors’ image of the “ethical translator.” They found that literal translation was the most common
strategy when dealing with their ethically problematic texts – 68% of the respondents followed
the methodology – and this was something that they equated with traditional ideas of fidelity
to the text being viewed as an ethical obligation. Omission, meanwhile, was the least common
strategy, with translators clearly showing an unwillingness to make radical alterations, while neu-
tralising, adaptation, and refusal to translate were selected considerably less often than “literal”
methodologies. Furthermore, though factors such as age, the nature of the ethical problem, and
years of experience were shown to influence decision-making, these impacts never overruled
the overall preference for faithful translation (2014, 177). This underscores the gaps and tensions
that exist between professional understandings of ethics and areas of academic study.
Given these tensions, can this widened focus on personal stakes feed into more practical
discussions such as those relating to rates of pay? Or are discussions of rates also based primarily
on recourse to rather outdated and unsophisticated notions of ethics? As noted earlier, rates are
seen as an overwhelmingly pertinent ethical issue by professional translators. Leading freelance
translation-oriented website ProZ.com does not have a specific “Ethics” sub-forum but rather
many forum entries on ethical issues can be found within their “Money Matters,” “Business
Issues,” “Being Independent,” and “Scams” sections, hinting towards the fluid nature of the
boundaries between ethical and economic concerns in the professional domain. Of course, the
issue of rates is not a pressing one for all translators. Certainly, it is less of an issue for salaried,
in-house employees but is clearly at the forefront of the minds of those who negotiate fees with
agents and clients, often on a project-by-project basis.
Within Translation Studies, there is relatively little comment on the question of rates of pay
as an ethical object of enquiry. Indeed, Abdallah is alone in giving serious consideration to
specifically economic concerns in her work on ethics. She notes that as micro-entrepreneurs,
translators have the right to make a profit according to the basic tenets of business ethics (2011,
173
Joseph Lambert
131) and draws our attention to the tensions that this dual role often entails, with translators
struggling to reconcile the calls of codes of conduct (their “deontological ethics”) and traditional
notions of the “ethical” with these utilitarian guidelines of business ethics. This desire to situ-
ate the translator in a wider and more representative contextual setting – taking into account
translation as it happens in the profession – is a valuable part of Abdallah’s work and reiterates
the pertinence of finances within ethical discussions (see Abdallah 2012 for a fascinating discus-
sion of the professional translator’s production networks and their agency within that complex
framework), but focus is placed at a more overarching level.
Meanwhile, Pym’s (2012) fourth ethical principle does mention an economic calculation of
sorts, but it is prescribed in a rather abstract manner and does not simply refer to monetary cost.
He states, “[t]ransaction costs should not exceed the total benefits ensuing from the correspond-
ing cooperative interaction” (167). This principle concisely suggests that translators ensure that
the work is worth it, and Pym quite rightly draws our attention to the potential, long-term
negative effects of adopting low rates as a translator. While, as he puts it, “[l]ow-cost translations
can be virtuous; they can widen the range of cooperative situations,” by considering the long-
term flourishing of the profession, the practice of driving down colleagues’/competitors’ rates
in order to secure jobs from clients in the short-term can be viewed as contributing to an overall
devaluation of the profession(al) and a resultant cycle of diminishing rates in the longer term.
Following McDonough-Dolmaya’s allusion to the value of exploring further profession-
oriented networks, professional translator’s own considerations can once again inform discus-
sions. While she limits her suggestions to exploring other forums and carrying out surveys of
translators, social media is a valuable tool that certainly falls into this category. Given the often
isolated nature of the translator’s role, social media represents a key resource in professional net-
working and marketing, as well as providing another highly populated forum for exchange and
the formation of discrete groups of practice. There are sizeable communities of translators on
Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, with a number of groups hosting thousands of members, and
the platforms provide a wide range of contexts in which translators can interact, from language-
specific communities discussing specialised texts to more informal groups sharing light-hearted,
work-related posts.
The range of topics covered and the variety of responses received from practising professionals
also make these sites a potentially valuable resource for researchers. Though relatively few studies
have been conducted in this area to date, Samuel Läubli and David Orrego-Carmona (2017)
successfully demonstrated the potential of posts on the sites mentioned earlier when investigating
translator’s perceptions of machine translation, and this approach could productively be applied
to ethical issues. Unsurprisingly, discussions of rates feature on a somewhat regular basis within
numerous groups, and even a cursory glance at posts can offer some insight. This ostensibly
economic issue is embedded within a network of personal interests, often considering the trans-
lator’s (and client’s) status and financial situation. While members often reach a loose consensus
on matters, it is never simply a case of formulating or referring to clear-cut advice in terms of
detached professional guidelines.
Overall, these discussions allude to the personal and variable nature of opinions on the topic
while reaffirming the way in which peers can and do act as moral and professional guides. The
rate you accept or request as a translator is a personal, subjective matter, and though there are
some professional norms that can guide decisions, in this area these are primarily drawn from
informal sources. For an issue such as confidentiality, meanwhile, there are more concrete pro-
fessional guidelines – such as Chesterman’s call to respect secrets – but this does not mute that
inescapable personal voice. What if you are asked to translate material that contains potentially
dangerous information? Can you then justify breaching confidentiality?
174
5 Emerging issues: agency and expanded responsibility

in professional translator ethics
Any future professional translator ethics that seeks to represent the way these professionals work
should embrace both professional and personal, subjective elements, and at least acknowledge
the limitations of current codes and ethical provision, with professional translators’ working
methodologies inextricably bound to their personal stances. Solutions and methodologies always
return to the individual – there are no definitive, overarching answers – and further studies could
shed more light on this. In the case of Kruger and Crots’s work, they remind us that their find-
ings serve as explanatory hypotheses, which must be tested more rigorously in a wider range of
contexts. Future research must not only re-affirm their conclusions and consider other ethical
issues, but also seek to extend these methods to a wider community. Elsewhere, forums and
other sources examining the profession, such as empirical studies, can provide valuable insight
into this fuzzy domain, exploring the ways in which translators call upon problematic notions of
ethics or virtual, informal, and unregulated networks to concretise their ethical decision-making.
The issue of socially desirable response bias is another important question to consider – all transla-
tors presumably want to come across as good, “moral” professionals, and this may impact upon
results. Finally, Kruger and Crots’s study raises the question of where ethics comes into transla-
tion. Rather than all translation being an ethical question, does ethics emerge (or is it perhaps
most pertinent) when the text deals with sexism, racism, or swearing, for instance?
There is little research suggesting that the current marginal focus on ethics for the professional
translator is going to increase, and there are seemingly no new professional documents such as
codes or other insights that will suddenly inform the way a translator engages with ethical con-
cerns, despite space for such developments. That said, there is certainly an increasing interest in
this human, agentic side of the translator in an ethics-specific context. Though subjectivity in
translation is not an emerging issue, the application of this notion to ethical debates in particular
is an ongoing current of thought, widening our object of enquiry. Take Andrew Chesterman’s
(2017) concept of telos, for instance (368). This intriguing concept (which sits alongside Skopos)
describes the personal goal of the translator in a specific context. Thinking back to a number of
examples of the way in which professional translators work, the potential value of this concept
is immediately clear. Rather than simply aiming to produce a text that fulfils a client’s transla-
tion brief (as a service-based ethics may aim to do), detaching ourselves from the personal stakes
involved, a telos allows us to acknowledge a number of personal factors involved in translational
decisions. For instance, the desire to forward your own career in translation, to be paid, and to
satisfy the commissioners of the work to ensure that you continue to be paid. Given the need
to make ethical decisions based on our own moral values, this framework could productively
be shifted to professional translator ethics. Chesterman’s recognition that translators do indeed
translate to stay alive and that translating just for the money is an acceptable telos is intriguing,
and yet this concept has received little attention on a wider scale and has not been applied to
this specific context.
Of course, this focus on the individual translator could potentially risk losing sight of other
streams of thought such as activism and wider responsibility. In this respect, one emerging line
of enquiry that extends our thinking beyond the narrow professional sphere is Joanna Drugan’s
(2017) work on ethics. Building upon themes of responsibility and the link to activist ethics,
Drugan’s take on professional ethics is rooted in social responsibility, understood as a “responsi-
bility to the broader social context beyond the immediate translated encounter” (128). Drugan
begins from the assumption that the translation profession is not only a concrete entity, but also
one that can be considered alongside the likes of fields such as law and medicine. She explains
175
Joseph Lambert
how doctors or social workers, for example, “must complete formal education in ethics and
subscribe to publicly available and contractually enforced Codes of Conduct” (126) and how
they have access to support and guidance (supervision, mentors, and refresher training) when
struggling with ethical issues – something that is clearly lacking in the case of professional trans-
lation. While Drugan does acknowledge that these professions are not directly comparable to
translation – indeed the extent to which developments from other professions can successfully
be mapped onto the unregulated and heterogeneous domain of professional translation requires
further exploration – there is a certain contextual overlap and a case for the ethical infrastruc-
ture on offer to serve as a model for advancements in the translation profession. As Drugan sees
it, the tradition of social responsibility within “caring” professions makes them a more positive
exemplar than corporate sectors, which form the basis of current codes of ethics for professional
translators. More widely, the prevalence of issues including confidentiality, fair rates, and the
requirement to turn down assignments you are not qualified to undertake in these professions
is indicative of the possibility of drawing insights that are relevant to the professional translator
from other domains. Indeed, perhaps the answers available elsewhere are more sophisticated or
satisfactory than those accumulated with the professional translator as the central focus.
6 Conclusion
In recent decades, Translation Studies has moved away from narrow conceptions of accuracy
and fidelity (see Pym 2001) and continues to question issues of responsibility, agency, and
the nature of the ethical. The discussions in this chapter illuminate the intersection between
personal and professional ethics in light of the realities of translation practice, supporting
the notion that the two cannot be separated. The professional translator’s ethics is in part
guided by institutional documentation and in part by interactions with peers and colleagues
to concretise their ethical decision-making. Professional and personal stakes intersect and are
interdependent. We must take into account professional norms, the impact of associations,
and documentation such as codes, but must also recognise that it is ultimately the individual
who decides where their interests lie, which resources they want to draw upon, and how to
act when those resources reveal certain limitations. The research shows that the “ethical”
professional translator is an independent, idiosyncratic, and inherently subjectivised decision-
making agent, eschewing notions of neutrality. The professional’s ethics is undoubtedly con-
text-dependent, with interactions involving a range of participants, interests, and beliefs, often
conflicting or diverging.
On a wider level, how can we elicit positive change? How can we help translators develop
an awareness of pertinent issues and potential courses of action? A heavy focus is placed on
translator training (see Chapter 22 “Ethics in translator and interpreter education” and Chapter
23 “Ethics of translator and interpreter education” in this volume) and teaching translators to
critically consider the ethical decisions that they have to take. Pym’s 1992 monograph con-
cludes in calling for teaching translation to open up possibilities for action, and for embracing
the plurality and idiosyncrasy of method that is inherent to translation. This is something that is
echoed by a number of scholars (for instance Abdallah 2012; Baker 2011; Drugan and Megone
2011), who call for a focus on teaching and instilling students with critical awareness. The fact
that the reflective translation commentary is a valuable and hugely popular method of assess-
ment in the academic study of translation (Shih 2018) suggests that these considerations have
been successfully integrated into the training setting. Nevertheless, it is important to remember
that the same critical awareness is not naturally enforced in the profession, where professional
translators do not necessarily have access to any formal training. Drugan’s (2017) links to social
176
responsibility and other professions perhaps open up the possibility for change outside of the
confines of education, and there remains a clear gap for the reshaping of professional ethical
underpinnings.
Ultimately, there is no consensus about ethical translator behaviour in this context. While
some general guidelines such as rejecting work that falls outside of your linguistic and cultural
expertise or not divulging clients’ private information are wide reaching and regularly observed
by professional translators, exceptions can easily be found for even the most deeply engrained
practices. Do we conclude that what is required is more policing in the profession and more
stringent measures to enforce regulations, or perhaps accept that the hugely fluid nature of the
translation profession also necessitates a more fluid understanding of ethics for the professional
translator? As with many of the areas discussed in this chapter, the jury is still out. Professional
translator ethics involves a complex interaction of competing personal and professional inter-
ests and concerns within a variable network with its own idiosyncratic power relations. Future
research in the field could fruitfully incorporate considerations of both internal and external
resources – internally the translator calls upon what they think and feel is right, something that
is unique to the individual and context-dependent, while external elements include institu-
tional documentation and interactions with peers and colleagues. This distinction between, and
combination of, internal and external dimensions of professional translator ethics may offer a
productive way to reinvigorate the domain.
List of related topics

Ethics Codes for Interpreters and Translators; Translator Ethics; Ethics in the Translation
Industry; Ethics of Activist Translation and Interpreting; Ethics of Translator and Interpreter
Education
Note
1 The other topics, in descending frequency (including the number of posts in brackets), were “professional
development” (222), conflict resolution (also included in “rates”) (85), professionalism (75), accuracy (74),
subcontracting (50), advertising (43), software/technology (33), working languages (25), terms/working
conditions (23), texts for illegal/immoral ends (17), competence (16), and copyright (11).
References
Abdallah, Kristiina. 2012. Translators in Production Networks: Reflections on Agency, Quality and Ethics. Joensuu:
University of Eastern Finland.
Angelone, Erik, Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow, and Gary Massey. 2019. The Bloomsbury Companion to Lan-
guage Industry Studies. New York: Bloomsbury.
Baker, Mona. 2006. Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. Abingdon: Routledge.
Baker, Mona. 2011. In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. London: Routledge.
Berman, Antoine. 1999. La traduction et la lettre. Paris: Seuil.
Chartered Institute of Linguists. 2018. “7 Ways to Stand Out as a Professional Translator.” Accessed April 29,
2020. www.ciol.org.uk/7-ways-stand-out-professional-translator
Chesterman, Andrew. 2017. Reflections on Translation Theory: Selected Papers 1993–2014. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing Company.
Dam, Helle V., and Karen K. Zethsen. 2010. “Translator Status: Helpers and Opponents in the Ongoing
Battle of an Emerging Profession.” Target 22, no. 2: 194–211.
177
Joseph Lambert
Drugan, Joanna. 2017. “Ethics and Social Responsibility in Practice: Interpreters and Translators Engaging
with and beyond the Professions.” The Translator 23, no. 2: 126–42.
Drugan, Joanna, and Chris Megone. 2011. “Bringing Ethics Into Translator Training: An Integrated, Inter-
Disciplinary Approach.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1: 183–211.
ITI. 2016. “Code of Professional Conduct.” Accessed May 13, 2020. www.iti.org.uk/attachments/
article/154/Code%20of%20Professional%20Conduct%2029%2010%202016.pdf
of Tampere.
Koskinen, Kaisa, and Helle V. Dam. 2016. “Academic Boundary Work and the Translation Profession:
Insiders, Outsiders and (Assumed) Boundaries.” Journal of Specialised Translation 25: 254–67.
Kruger, Haidee, and Elizabeth Crots. 2014. “Professional and Personal Ethics in Translation: A Survey
of South African Translators’ Strategies and Motivations.” Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 43: 147–81.
Läubli, Samuel, and David Orrego-Carmona. 2017. “When Google Translate Is Better Than Some Human
Colleagues, Those People Are No Longer Colleagues.” In Translating and the Computer 39, edited by João
Esteves-Ferreira et al., 59–69. Geneva: Editions Tradulex.
McDonough-Dolmaya, Julie. 2011. “Moral Ambiguity: Some Shortcomings of Professional Codes of Eth-
ics for Translators.” Journal of Specialised Translation 15: 28–49.
NAJIT. 2017. “T&I Descriptions.” Accessed April 29, 2020. https://najit.org/wp-content/uploads/
2017/03/TI-Descriptions.pdf
Nord, Christiane. 2001. “Loyalty Revisited.” The Translator 7, no. 2: 185–202.
Piekkari, Rebecca, Susanne Tietze, and Kaisa Koskinen. 2019. “Metaphorical and Interlingual Translation
in Moving Organizational Practices across Languages.” Organization Studies 40: 1–22.
Pym, Anthony. 1992. Translation and Text Transfer: An Essay of the Principles of Intercultural Communication.
Paris: Peter Lang.
Pym, Anthony. 1997. Pour une éthique du traducteur. Ottawa: Ottawa University Press; translated by Heike
Walker. 2012. On Translator Ethics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Pym, Anthony. 2001. “The Return to Ethics.” The Translator 7, no. 2: 129–38.
Pym, Anthony. 2012. On Translator Ethics. Translated by Heike Walker. Revised by the author. Amsterdam/
Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Pym, Anthony, François Grin, Claudio Sfreddo, and Andy L.J. Chan. 2012. The Status of the Translation
Profession in the European Union. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
Pym, Anthony, David Orrego-Carmona, and Esther Torres-Simón. 2016. “Status and Technology in the
Professionalisation of Translators: Market Disorder and the Return of Hierarchy.” Journal of Specialised
Translation 25: 33–53.
Rogers, Margaret. 2015. Specialised Translation: Shedding the “Non-Literary” Tag. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schaffner, Christina. 2019. “Translators’ Roles and Responsibilities.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Lan-
guage Industry Studies, edited by Erik Angelone, Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow, and Gary Massey, 63–90.
New York: Bloomsbury.
Shih, Claire Yi-yi. 2018. “Translation Commentary Re-Examined in the Eyes of Translator Educators at
British Universities.” Journal of Specialised Translation 30: 291–311.
Tack, Lieven. 2001. “Review of beyond Ambivalence.” The Translator 7, no. 2: 297–321.
Ulatus. 2016. “A Brief Guide to Ethics for Interpreters and Translators.” Accessed April 29, 2020. www.
ulatus.com/translation-blog/a-brief-guide-to-ethics-for-interpreters-and-translators/
Van Wyke, Ben. 2013. “Translation and Ethics.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by
Carmen Millán, and Francesca Bartrina, 566–78. Abingdon: Routledge.
Dam, Helle V., and Karen K. Zethsen. 2010. “Translator Status: Helpers and Opponents in the Ongoing
Battle of an Emerging Profession.” Target 22, no. 2: 194–211.
Further reading
A vital resource in the establishment of an ethics of the professional translator. Chesterman breaks down
a number of core ideas before developing his translator’s “oath.”
178
An insight into the concept of social responsibility and the potential for translation to draw upon other
domains, such as social work and health care.
A valuable study that examines a translator’s decision-making when faced with potentially ethically
questionable material.
ics for Translators.” Journal of Specialised Translation, 15, 28–49.
A rare examination of relevant ethical issues from the professional translator’s point of view. Demon-
strates the potential of studying practice-oriented networks in uncovering and exploring ethical issues
that arise during the practice of translation.
Pym, Anthony. 1997. Pour une éthique du traducteur. Ottawa: Ottawa University Press; translated by Heike
Walker. 2012. On Translator Ethics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
A sustained reflection on professional translator ethics, engaging with ideas on both a theoretical and
more practical level. One of very few efforts to explore professional translator ethics in real depth.
179
13
Literary translator ethics
Cecilia Alvstad
1 Introduction
Literary translators reformulate the texts of others, making them accessible to new audiences
in other languages, other cultural contexts, and other times. Together with the other agents
involved, literary translators decide what texts they translate, how they translate them, and how
they present these translations to the world. During this process, countless ethical dilemmas may
arise: should a racist or sexist expression be modified? May jokes, cultural allusions, and unintel-
ligible passages be explicated or even skipped entirely? Is it okay to use phrases from the source
language to signal a text’s foreign origins – or, conversely, is it okay to standardize a character’s
dialect, or turn poetry and rhymes into prose? May titles and plots be changed to boost sales?
Should obvious translation errors be corrected in later editions? Is it ethically acceptable to reuse
the words and phrasings of a previous translation of the same text?
The aim of this chapter is to review key texts on literary translation ethics from the last fifty
years to find tips that may be useful for practitioners and students when facing such ethical
dilemmas. None of these dilemmas have simple answers. What may be considered the ethically
best solution will largely depend on what is given priority, such as accountability towards the
author, truthfulness vis-à-vis the source text, the instructions from the publisher, or the conse-
quences for either the source or the target culture.
The scholars reviewed here differ in their perspectives on what ethical literary translation
entails. This is not surprising, considering the complexity of the many people, texts, and cul-
tures involved in literary translation. Some scholars even oppose the idea that translation studies
should dedicate time to discussing ethics. Others, for example Pym (2012, 166), do not doubt
that there is “good and bad in what translators do” and that ethical responsibility is not solely
a textual issue but also a social one. According to this view, translators are “responsible for the
capacity of their work to contribute to long-term stable, cross-cultural cooperation” (Pym 2012,
167; see also Chapter 11 “Translator ethics” in this volume).
In recent decades, some translation scholars have increasingly argued that the field should
examine translation in relation to global concerns more generally. Ethical issues related to migra-
tion is one such topic (see, for example, Polezzi 2012; Alvstad 2020). Environmental issues such
as climate change, biodiversity loss, eco-migration, and linguicide have also been put forward
180
as twenty-first-century concerns that both translation scholars and practitioners should address
(Cronin 2017, 13; see also Chapter 19 “Translation and posthumanism” in this volume).
Global challenges, such as climate change and the difficulty migrants face when establishing
themselves in new environments, may at first sight seem to exceed the immediate focus of the
translation dilemmas formulated earlier, and possibly also be considered less relevant for literary
translators than for translators and interpreters who translate and interpret “people” (Polezzi
2012, 347). Upon closer examination, however, it will become apparent that certain ways of
handling literary translation dilemmas may create wrong and stereotyped images of authors,
source books, source literatures, and source cultures, or to the exploitation of others’ intellectual
property (see Batchelor 2018; Washbourne 2018; Alvstad 2020). In turn, this is likely to impede
the type of long-term cross-cultural understanding advocated by Pym (2012, 167).
The most well-known works on literary translation ethics from the 1970s are text-oriented,
focusing either on poetics, as Meschonnic does, or on interpretation, as Steiner does. Both
Meschonnic and Steiner cherish rather clear – and indeed very different – ideals for what ethical
literary translation is.
Towards the end of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, a new research paradigm came into
being: Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS). DTS advocates the empirical study of translations
and their literary and cultural contexts. Unlike Meschonnic and Steiner, it refrains from pre-
scribing what characterizes ethical and unethical practices.
The 1990s saw an increased focus on power and translation. Lawrence Venuti launched his
ethics of differences, which advocates “visibility” and “foreignization” as an ethical translation
practice (see later and Chapter 10 “Venuti and the ethics of difference” in this volume). Feminist
and postcolonial approaches to translation were also developed (see later, and Chapter 8 “The
ethics of postcolonial translation” and Chapter 9 “Feminist translation ethics” in this volume).
These in turn were complemented by sociological approaches, such as Pym’s translator-oriented
work mentioned in the introduction (see Chapter 11 “Translator ethics” in this volume) and
Gouanvic’s sociological critique of strategy-oriented approaches of the kind advocated by Ber-
man (see also Chapter 6 “Ethics in Berman and Meschonnic” in this volume) and Venuti.
Over the last two decades, there has been an increase in studies on complex translation
contexts such as retranslation (i.e. new translations of the same text into the same language, see
Koskinen 2018) and indirect translation (i.e. a translation of a translation, see Assis Rosa, Pięta,
and Maia 2017). Retranslations and indirect translations are often based on, or at least influenced
by, more than one source text. Studies oriented toward complex translation situations typically
bring attention to ethical issues, which is not surprising since they involve more agents, texts,
and cultures that can be ethically wronged.
3.1 The poetic approach (Henri Meschonnic)

Meschonnic (2011, 173) was a text-oriented scholar primarily concerned with “what words
do.” His essays on poetics, ethics, and translation appeared in French from the 1970s and
onwards. His work has been lesser known in English, and the first book-length translation
of his work into English, Ethics and Politics of Translating, did not appear until 2011, two years
after his death.
181
Cecilia Alvstad
Meschonnic’s main interest is in the poetics of language, not least the relationship between
rhythm (broadly understood) and meaning. To Meschonnic, there are two types of unethical
translations: those that only render the meaning of the words, and those that only trans-
late formal features of texts. Meschonnic (2011, 172–173) calls such translation practices
“unwriting” since they destroy the way textual meaning is produced. By simply rendering
features as individual units, such practices overlook the interaction of features within the
text. Unethical translation thus ignores that there is just as much meaning in what words do
as in what they say.
Ethical translation requires translators to instead focus precisely on what words do and how
they do it. According to Meschonnic, a literary text will use unconventional formulations and
deliberate breaches of habitual ways of writing in order to produce meaning. An ethical literary
translation practice would then be to use the target language in similar ways, aiming to reproduce
“what the original text does to the source language” (Meschonnic 2011, 172). This demands
attention to how meaning is produced, that is to how the words and sounds are organized in
ways to “stand out and gain power of expression” (Meschonnic 2011, 172). Meschonnic’s word
for this ethical translation practice is “poem-translating.”
Meschonnic’s own work often dealt with Bible translations, but since his focus was on the
rhythm of the text, his work has a literary orientation. Even today he is still probably the trans-
lation scholar who has emphasized most strongly that translation practices which give priority
to content over form are unethical, since they destroy the literary rhythm by which meaning
is created. Thus, in Meschonnic’s framework, translators have an ethical obligation to respect
rhymes, meter, and dialect, as they are part of what the words do. Anything that is replaced
or explained – whether jokes, proper names, or cultural allusions – would signify a loss of the
“how” of the poetic force and thus an instrumentalization of the poetic.
3.2 The hermeneutic approach (George Steiner)

George Steiner published the highly influential After Babel in 1975, presenting an interpretative
approach to literary translation. Like Meschonnic, Steiner has a strong textual focus, bringing
hermeneutic philosophy to actual translation practice. A difference between the two would be
that while Meschonnic stresses the meaning-producing potential of poetic language (what the
text does to the reader), Steiner’s focus is on the interpretative act of the translator (what the
translator does to the text).
Building on ideas by thinkers as diverse as St Jerome, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Heidegger,
Steiner (1998, 312–319) envisions translation as a four-step hermeneutic motion. First, there
is the translator’s initial trust, which is depicted as a belief that there is something in the text to
be understood, something “worth translating” (Steiner 1998, 317). This first step is followed by
aggression, alternatively referred to as violence, appropriative penetration, and rapture, through
which the “translator invades, extracts and brings home” (Steiner 1998, 314); this is the step of
understanding the source text. The third step, incorporation, is also described as sacramental
intake, incarnation, and infection. Goodwin (2010), one of Steiner’s recent adherents, describes
this phase as follows, in rather sexualized terms:
In Steiner’s imagery, the warrior returns home having captured the beautiful slave girl. He
now has to make a place for her in his own world, where she will be a blessing and also a
problem. Is the captive going to be dressed in the manner of her new home, or left in her
own costume? To what extent is she to be taught the customs of her new home?
(32–33)
182
Steiner’s fourth and fnal step is restitution. It has to do with a balancing of the aggression and
incorporation of steps two and three. To Steiner, an ethical translation in this fourth step directs
the reader’s attention back to the original, restoring the balance.
Steiner does not oversimplify the translator’s responsibility to a simple either/or, that is a
responsibility to either the author or the reader (or alternatively, to either the source text or the
target text). His ethics involves accountability in both directions, towards the original author
(in the first and fourth steps) and to the target culture (in the second and third steps). Goodwin
(2010, 39) argues that Steiner’s model therefore offers a more complex ethics of translation than
that of Venuti (see also Chapter 6 “Ethics in Berman and Meschonnic” and Chapter 10 “Venuti
and the ethics of difference” in this volume, and the following section), which he dismisses as
“single-issues ethics,” only concerned with strangeness and foreignizing strategies.
Steiner’s conceptualization of translation as a hermeneutic process holds value when it comes
to understanding how translators work interpretively with texts. His meticulous description of
this process also shows the complexity and pivotal role of understanding in any ethical translation
practice. The idea is not to produce the one and only possible interpretation of the text, but to
produce one which is defensible also upon closer scrutiny. The idea of translation as violence
can moreover help visualize the process of translation as one that will inevitably change aspects
of the source text. It may be claimed, however, that the aggressive and sexualized metaphors
hamper rather than further Steiner’s and Goodwin’s arguments.
Though both Meschonnic and Steiner raise important ethical issues regarding literary transla-
tion, their respective frameworks are nevertheless of little practical help when a literary transla-
tor faces ethical questions such as those listed earlier. Mostly, this is because they are primarily
text-oriented and do not consider the larger linguistic, literary, and cultural contexts in which
literary translators operate. Such contexts were decisively drawn into the study of translation in
the 1980s and 1990s by the scholars of Descriptive Translation Studies.
3.3 Descriptive translation studies (DTS)

Translation studies in its current form was largely formed by a network of scholars working on
literary translation in the 1970s and onwards. Its leading practitioners founded some of the first
book series and journals in the field, such as the Benjamins Translation Library and Target, as
well as the academic association European Scholars for Translation Studies. The early works of
these scholars belong variously to the so-called manipulation school (Lefevere [1985] 2014, 241;
Hermans [1985] 2014, 11; Hermans [1999] 2020), DTS (Toury [1995] 2012; Hermans [1999]
2020) or the cultural turn (Lefevere and Bassnett 1990, 4; Snell-Hornby 2006, 47). Empirical
studies of translations as well as of their literary and cultural contexts became the main focus
of attention. In DTS, in particular, there was a strong focus on (descriptive) norms, that is on
regularities of behaviour shared by a specific community of translators (Toury [1995] 2012;
Chesterman [1997] 2016, 51–85).
The main contribution of DTS to translation ethics lies in how they widened the discussion
on translation to include issues that go far beyond the relationship between source and target
texts. DTS was concerned with finding out more about why texts change in translation and
how translations impact their target contexts. In their own words, they offered an alternative
to “painstaking comparisons between originals and translations” (Lefevere and Bassnett 1990,
4). Instead of making value judgments about translators’ solutions, defining whether they are
“good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong,” this tradition emphasizes the empirical research of transla-
tions in relation to their sociocultural contexts. The concept of manipulation was introduced to
refer to how, from the target point of view, “all translation implies a degree of manipulation of
183
Cecilia Alvstad
the source text for a certain purpose” (Hermans [1985] 2014, 11) and it was repeatedly under-
scored that “literary establishments manipulate originals” (Lefevere and Bassnett 1990, 13).
However, the reason these scholars called attention to translational manipulation in the first
place was not to claim it was “unethical.” They did not judge translators; neither did they tell
translators how to translate. Their ethical agenda was simply to find out and describe what was
going on, since readers as well as translators were entitled to know how translations manipulate
their originals. As a result, translations were to be studied in relation to the target culture rather
than the source culture, and the supremacy of the source text was questioned. The explanations
for why translations looked the way they looked were to be found in the target context and its
ideological as well as poetic constraints. Thus, this group of scholars changed the focus from lan-
guage to other constraints that they considered to be as important, if not more important, than
the linguistic constraints. Lefevere [1985] 2014, 227–229; 1992, 9–19) introduced the concept
of patronage to refer to those in power to tell translators what to do. Patrons may today be most
easily identifiable with publishers, art councils, and the like who provide support for translation,
but historically it may just as well have been a king or other well-situated person or institution
(see also Chapter 21 “Ethics in the translation industry” in this volume). DTS, moreover, fur-
thered the idea that some literary systems were more central than others were and that the role
played by translation within national literary traditions often went completely unacknowledged
by literary scholars. Although not using the term “visibility,” which was coined by Venuti a few
years later, they advocated for the need to see the huge role played by translations in the literary
and cultural sphere.
Instead of advocating a special ethics of translation, the ethics of Descriptive Translation
Studies was research-oriented and consisted in (1) uncovering the mechanisms behind literary
translation and (2) drawing attention to the influence of literary translations in national literary
histories and cultures at large. In this perspective, translation could “introduce new concepts,
new genres, new devices” but conversely also “repress innovation, distort and contain” (Bassnett
and Lefevere 1992, preface).
Although DTS scholars did not delve into what ethical translation involves, they did explic-
itly aspire to make literary translators aware of the constraints they were working within. In the
words of Lefevere (1992, 7), “A study of rewriting will not tell students what to do; it might
show them ways of not allowing other people to tell them what to do.” Although he did not
elaborate on this point, Lefevere here implicitly pinpoints a space in which translators are ethi-
cally responsible for what they do. In other words, although the work of translators is restricted
by diverse constraints such as language, patronage, poetics, and ideology, this does not make
translators unaccountable for their decisions.
DTS widened the field of literary translation studies to include cultural aspects and ques-
tions of power. The focus on power, ideology, and poetics laid the ground for many studies of
censorship (e.g. Thomson-Wohlgemuth 2009; Pokorn 2012; Vandaele 2015). By highlighting
the importance of cultural context, the influence of national literary systems on each other (e.g.
Even-Zohar 1990), and also the many agents involved, it furthermore helped develop a sociol-
ogy of translation.
The empirical studies of the manipulation school evidenced again and again that the work of
the literary translator was far from neutral. Instead, translation was shown as implying a “rewrit-
ing” that creates “images” of the source text, the author, and the source culture, images that
would always be at the service of someone (Lefevere 1992, 4). Ideological image-making, a phe-
nomenon closely related to censorship, may today be most visible in children’s literature, since
omissions of sexual, violent, and religious elements are quite common. Alfvén’s (2016) study of
Swedish young adult literature translated into French in the early 2000s shows that although the
184
motif of “unprovoked violence” was considerably toned down in translation, it was nonetheless
criticized by French reviewers as being unsuitable for young readers.
A less contemporary example would be the expurgation of religious elements from fairy tales
in sociocultural contexts as ideologically diverse as Victorian Britain (Malmkjær 2003), socialist
and post-socialist Slovenia (Pokorn 2012), and Francoist Spain (Martens 2016; see also discus-
sion on censorship and translation of children’s literature in Alvstad 2018). Because of these
bowdlerized versions, fairy tales thus seem inherently devoid of religiosity – and even today,
long after such Victorian, Francoist, and socialist censorship, these fairy tales are still often pub-
lished without the religious elements. This proves two points: first, that audiences may become
attached to the versions they already know, so that familiarity becomes more important than
“accuracy” (e.g. Bassnett and Lefevere 1992, 1–3, 13, about Proust’s grandmother reading The
Arabian Nights in French); and second, that there is little or no awareness of how censorship has
affected key literary texts in translation.
This second is borne out by Liljegren’s comparison of two translations into English of Strind-
berg’s Giftas (1884–1886), namely Married (1913) and Getting Married (1972). Although only the
1972 edition translates the work in full, it is still the 1913 translation – which omits certain pas-
sages about sex, procreation, and other naturalist ideas that were deemed unseemly in England
at the time – that is the most frequently reprinted one, and the one marketed as the “Scholar’s
Choice Edition” and “Primary Source Edition.” This may seem ironic since it omits the very
naturalist traits that made Strindberg such a progressive and “dangerous” author, thus making it
difficult to understand why he was so controversial (Liljegren 2018, 251–252). Choosing which
translation to read, include in school or university curricula, or even reprint thus becomes an
ethical issue, even if the people making the choice may be unaware that this is the case.
The contribution of DTS to translation studies is undeniable. Indeed, it has largely formed
the discipline. Nevertheless, it ought to be noted that the field’s strong emphasis on descriptiv-
ism and its unwillingness – even opposition – to give advice to practising translators on how to
handle either real translation dilemmas or the constraints of patrons, ideology, and poetics have
clearly also hindered discussions of literary translation ethics. DTS does not discuss what is right
and wrong to do under specific circumstances but has focused on the description of translators’
behaviour or, as in the work of Toury ([1995] 2012), on the regularities of the behaviour of
different translators, referred to as “norms,” while the values underlying the norms have been
left out of the discussion. Hence, although DTS provides no prescriptive advice on the ethical
advantages and disadvantages of different solutions, translators will find abundant information in
its descriptive studies on how other translators have solved similar problems.
3.4 An ethics of difference (Lawrence Venuti)

The hitherto most influential ethical approach to literary translation is Venuti’s ethics of differ-
ence (see Chapter 10 “Venuti and the ethics of difference” in this volume). According to Venuti
([1995] 2018), literary translators in Anglo-American translation contexts generally produce
fluent translations which domesticate all foreign elements. Drawing on the work of Berman and
Schleiermacher (see Chapter 6 “Ethics in Berman and Meschonnic” in this volume), Venuti
argues against domestication and in favour of foreignization for two reasons. First, if the text does
not contribute anything foreign, its added value in the target culture is seen as very limited. Sec-
ond, translators make themselves textually visible by using foreignizing strategies, which in turn
will enhance their own visibility in society; this is important, because such visibility gives recog-
nition to translators’ important work and strengthens their payment and intellectual rights to the
translated texts. Translators looking for guidance on ethical issues will find plenty of discussions
185
Cecilia Alvstad
in Venuti that argue in favour of foreignization as the ethically right choice. At the same time,
it is important to be aware that the strategies suggested are formulated with reference to the
Anglo-American translation context and that they may therefore not be universally applicable.
The most important difference between Venuti, on the one hand, and Meschonnic, Berman,
and Steiner, on the other hand, is that Venuti – like DTS – addresses translation as both a textual
and a societal matter, and not only a textual and literary one. This is crucial in regard to ethics,
since the societal perspective brings in a totally different set of concerns to consider when evalu-
ating the ethical outcomes of translators’ decision-making. Using Chesterman’s ([1997] 2016,
170) terminology, Venuti’s ethical approach can be described as a widening of the field from a
micro-ethical approach, primarily concerned with the relationship between the translator and
the text, to one that also includes macro-ethical matters, that is “broad social questions such as
the role and rights of translators in society, conditions of work, financial rewards and the client’s
profit motive.”
Venuti’s approach, as mentioned in section 3.2 on Steiner, is sometimes criticized for being a
“single-issue” ethics (Goodwin 2010, 39, see earlier). This critique of Venuti reveals a rather nar-
row understanding of Venuti’s programme. Venuti promotes the foreign not only as an aesthetic
value in itself but also as a potential cultural and sociological influence on the target culture, and
in this sense his ethics is actually much more far-reaching than Goodwin’s.
3.5 The power of translation to reinforce and subvert

hierarchies of power
In the 1990s, more or less at the same time as Venuti launched his highly influential ideas on
the translator’s invisibility, two other major frameworks emerged that are concerned with the
power of translators and the role of translations in society, namely postcolonial and feminist
translation studies. Postcolonial translation studies draws attention to power inequalities between
the Global South and the Global North, criticizing various kinds of exploitative translation
practices (see Chapter 8 “The ethics of postcolonial translation” in this volume). Whereas a
naive understanding would be that literary translation is intrinsically positive and always furthers
cultural understanding, postcolonial scholars such as Carbonell Cortés (1995) conclude that if
translators of oriental/exotic texts are unaware of the stereotypes about the source culture in the
target culture, their translations could actually underpin such stereotypes rather than break them
down. Carbonell Cortés (1998, 64–68) therefore argues, with reference to the work of Venuti
([1995] 2018), that what matters is not whether translators adopt foreignizing or domesticating
strategies but that they inform their readers about their chosen stance:
So, to conclude, the translator of oriental/exotic texts must above all be aware of the stereo-
types and representations that make up his/her target culture, try to relocate one worldview
into another in which diferent norms operate, lastly, be aware of the implications of his/
her choices. Invisibility or defamiliarization will depend always on what the context of
reception expects, and whether the translator chooses one or other strategy at any moment
in any given text, the reader has the right to know what the translator’s approach in the
source text has been.
(Carbonell Cortés 1998, 68)
Feminist translation studies have likewise shown how translations have reinforced gender ste-
reotypes and silenced perspectives at odds with the target culture’s patriarchal conceptions of
the world, for example by making strong female characters more subservient in the translation.
186
Many literary translators will conceive a need of remaining true to one’s own values. Femi-
nist translation studies (as in the work by Simon 1996 and von Flotow 1997) and other activist
approaches to translation have provided and theorized many examples of this and discussed
whether sexist and paternalistic language and storylines should be changed in the target text or
reproduced as is. Both strategies may be problematic for the activist translator. If emended, the
sexism would be hidden and thus the source text author may come across as non-sexist, while
merely reproducing the original would create a sexist translation and thus potentially reinforce
sexist values in the target context, and furthermore do so in the name of the (feminist) translator
(see also Chapter 9 “Feminist translation ethics” in this volume).
Like the work of Venuti, feminist and postcolonial approaches are sometimes taken to be
single-issues ethics, concerned “only” with feminism or the legacy of colonialism. This is a
reductive understanding of the implications of these approaches for translation and transla-
tion studies at large. The empirical data may be restricted to gender inequalities and the
postcolonial legacy, but the theoretical implications are much broader since they evince the
power literary translation holds to reinforce social injustice as well as to produce desired
societal change.
3.6 A critique from translation sociology (Jean-Marc Gouanvic)

Gouanvic (2001) criticizes ethical approaches to literary translation that are only concerned with
highbrow literature. Taking the work of Berman as a case in point, he argues with a comparison
of two lowbrow genres in translation into French, where detective novels are translated with
assimilative (domesticizing) strategies, while science fiction is translated with dissimilative (for-
eignizing) ones. One of the strategies cannot thus be claimed to be universally ethical whereas
the other would be unethical.
The reasons for choosing one strategy or the other would not have to do with universal
ethical values but with the conventions and the history of the two genres in French (Gouanvic
2001, 207). Instead of placing the questions of what is ethical and unethical at the level of the
strategy chosen, Gouanvic (2001, 211) argues that the distinction ethical-unethical is related to
the translator’s “intuitive analysis of the significance of the text to be translated.” In Gouanvic’s
view, a translation that respects this significance is an ethical translation since it would allow for
a “community of destinies” between the source and target texts. An unethical translation would
be one which takes the target text elsewhere, making it serve other purposes, like when John
Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was translated in occupied Belgium with omissions and changes that
furthered Nazi interests (Gouanvic 2001, 209).
3.7 Complex translation situations: unstable originals

A “complex translation situation” refers here to a translation process that differs from a proto-
typical, linear translation of a single, well-defined source text. In actual translation situations, a
translated text may in fact be based on or influenced by several texts, such as previous translations
or different versions of the original text, including fragmentary manuscripts and critical editions.
Such texts may influence the translation’s phrasing, its paratextual presentation, and indeed the
very decision to translate the text.
Books that have been censored, adapted, or just revised by the author generally exist in
several versions in the original language, printed in different places or at different points in
time. Famous examples of books that exist in several versions in the source language because of
censorship include Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (Tenngart 2010) and D. H. Lawrence’s
187
Cecilia Alvstad
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Looby 2015, 123). Translations may be based on uncensored versions,
censored versions, or a combination of different editions.
Nowadays, older texts that are perceived as racist and sexist are in many societies revised in
newer editions in the original language, especially in children’s literature. This will give rise to
several versions of the “original.” Famous examples include books by Astrid Lindgren, Roald
Dahl, and Mark Twain (Alvstad 2018, 162). For literary translators, publishers, and other agents,
there may be arguments both in favour of and against basing the translation on the first edition
rather than on a revised edition.
An argument for making such ideological changes to children’s literature is that society has
changed and that the author would not have used those words today. Others would claim that
the only way the translator can be loyal to the author is by being “loyal” to the child reader
(Oittinen 2000, 6, 37, 76; see also Chapter 5 “Functional translation theories and ethics” in this
volume). An argument used to support ideological changes of racist expressions is that children
have not yet developed the frames of reference that would allow them to situate the “original”
expression in its historical context (Alvstad 2018, 162).
3.8 Complex translation situations: retranslation

Another translation situation which complicates the linear idea of translation is retranslation. To
understand why, as mentioned earlier, the heavily censored 1913 translation of Strindberg’s Gif-
tas is the one being circulated in the Anglophone world of today rather than the unexpurgated
1972 translation, we would need to understand both the mechanism of retranslation and the
mechanisms behind the circulation of literary works. We will here concentrate on retranslation.
The actors and networks involved in retranslation are more or less the same as those involved
in first translations – such as the author, the source text, the two interacting cultures, the pub-
lisher, the prospective readers, and so forth (Koskinen 2018, 319) – but with one major addition,
namely the earlier translators. The fact that there is a predecessor whose works, and possibly
also feelings, need to be taken into account changes what the new translator can and cannot do.
Interestingly, a retranslation may be just as problematic if it strays too far away from the earlier
translation as if it is too close to it: if too close, the retranslator may be accused of plagiarism or
intellectual theft (Koskinen 2018, 320); if too far, the translator may have been too anxious of
being influenced, for example of being accused of plagiarism or dishonesty (for discussions of
“anxiety of influence” and retranslation, see Racz 2013; Koskinen and Paloposki 2015; Koski-
nen 2018, 320).
How can a retranslator handle these issues? An awareness of the legal and ethical issues in
play is essential in such a situation, as they will help determine how ethically acceptable it is
to recycle the work of a previous translator. Notably, the conception of intellectual ownership
has changed immensely over time, not only for translations but also for works considered to
be “original.” Much of what was considered original in early modern Europe would today be
understood as plagiarism since the limits of imitation are perceived completely differently (see,
for example, Bjørnstad 2008).
Koskinen (2018), partially basing her argument on Racz (2013), asserts that various positions
may all be ethically defensible and that the translator’s moral obligation to produce as good a
text as possible justifies looking to earlier translations for inspiration or solutions. Nevertheless,
the ethics of revising earlier translations – and the fuzzy line between revising and retranslating –
complicates matters further: one of the questions that arises would be how much a reviser can
change in the revised edition if the work is still to be regarded as the work of the first translator
and not a retranslation.
188
3.9 Complex translation situations: indirect translation

A third kind of complex translation situation is that of a translation based on a translation into
another language. This phenomenon is increasingly referred to as indirect translation (see Assis
Rosa et al. 2017). Indirect translation has often been stigmatized, which from an ethical point of
view is problematic, especially if it leads to non-translation or the indirectness not being explic-
itly accounted for on the title page (see Alvstad 2017, 152, for examples of overt and concealed
information about indirectness). More openness around the phenomenon of indirect translation
can lead to better strategies for overcoming problems connected to indirect translation, better
training for prospective indirect translators, and so forth.
The influence of previous translations into other languages may begin already with the deci-
sion to translate a text. When the source or target language is not a central language such as Eng-
lish or French, the existence of previous translations into one of these languages makes it more
likely that the work is selected for translation into for example Swedish or Turkish. Consecration
of the work in the centre thus makes it more likely to be circulated also in literary peripheries
(Casanova 2005). This is not only a question of the prestige associated with getting translated
into English or French, but when a work from a peripheral language exists in a central language,
it becomes linguistically available for publishers in the periphery, who then can make a more
informed selection of the work they commission than if based solely on the advice of others.
A positive aspect of this phenomenon is precisely that when a book from a minor language/
literature is available in English, it becomes available for translation via English into other minor
languages, also when there are few or no literary translators available who could translate them
directly, for example Tamil-Hungarian or Korean-Dutch. A negative aspect of the same phe-
nomenon would be that some publishers might prefer to translate from such an English or
French intermediary rather than from the original book even when there are translators avail-
able for the more unusual language pair. This phenomenon may be increasing: in a study of
Chinese-Spanish literary translations translated between 1978 and 2012, Marín-Lacarta (2012,
3–6) located a change regarding directness and indirectness around the year 2000, that is the year
when Gao Xingjian was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Until that point, most transla-
tions had been made directly from Chinese on the initiative of the translator, while afterwards
most of the translations were done indirectly after being commissioned by publishers who had
based their selections on what was available in English and French. This sea change was not due
to the sudden unavailability of Chinese-Spanish translators but rather to the publisher’s editorial
decisions (see also Alvstad 2017, 152–153).
Indirect translation may be ethically dubious, as the very indirectness entails a filtering
through a dominant culture. It is important to address the questions of what the consequences
are and why such indirect translation happens in the first place, for example whether it is because
publishers can then better “control” the translation process, save costs, or work with translators
they are familiar with, or perhaps because of the rights situation or even their own personal
preferences (given a presumed lack of awareness of how translation changes text).
In indirect translation, the translation may be based on a single text only or it may be based
on several translations into the same or different languages and/or oral translations by informants
who speak the languages of the original. To ensure greater accuracy, literary translators who
translate indirectly sometimes collaborate with informants who speak the language in which
the original was written (Alvstad 2017). Collaborating with speakers of the original languages,
who know the original book well and who are well versed in the literary tradition in which
it had come into being, could be a good strategy not only for dealing with inaccuracies but
also for overcoming the risks associated with “the stereotypes and representations that make up
189
Cecilia Alvstad
[the translator’s] target culture” that Carbonell Cortés (1998, 68) warns about when translating
“oriental/exotic texts.”
Contrary to what one would assume, such collaboration with local informants does not
guarantee non-stereotypical representations in the translated book. Analyzing a collection of
books translated indirectly from various regional Indian languages into Swedish, Alvstad (2017)
notes the strong exoticization of the Indian source cultures in the various books’ graphic design,
forewords, blurbs, titles, and so forth, despite the close collaboration between the Swedish
translators and local informants. India and its literature were, for example, repeatedly referred
to with orientalist clichés such as “colourful” and “spicy,” and titles were likewise changed in
this direction. Work of literary fiction, prose as well as poetry, were marketed as “windows to
Indian diversity” rather than for their aesthetic values. This exoticization was later reproduced
in newspaper reviews (Alvstad 2017, 157).
4 Emerging issues
A change may be perceived in recent empirically oriented research towards an ethical evalua-
tion of translators’ decisions. Combining perspectives from Descriptive Translation Studies and
ethnography, Sturge (2007, 5) notes, “the work of ethnography is a kind of translation.” She
depicts translation as closely connected to representation, pointing out that the English word
representation “combines the notion of portraying other people with that of speaking for them”
(Sturge 2007, 2, emphasis original). Both understandings are put in play in translation, since
translation claims “at once to ‘show’ others to the domestic audience and to speak the others’
words in the language of that audience” (Sturge 2007, 2).
Focusing on both these understandings, Sturge creates a framework which focuses on ethical
perspectives precisely by pointing at negative aspects of translators’ output (most of the translators
she analyzes, it ought to be mentioned, would self-identify as ethnographers rather than transla-
tors). She herself comments early on in the book that her comments at times “will seem only
negative, following the hallowed tradition of translator bashing” (Sturge 2007, 4). Her reason
for doing so, however, is neither to prescribe better solutions nor to find faults in the work of
others, but to open a space in which ethical issues can be discussed.
Elsewhere, a recent article by Chesterman (2019) relates directly to the question of whether
obvious errors should be corrected in later editions. In Chesterman’s example (2019, 667), a
Finnish Shakespeare translator insisted on keeping obvious semantic errors in a new edition of
one of his translations because “the text was ‘a whole’, and therefore individual details could
not be tampered with at some later stage”; Chesterman himself found the argument “astonish-
ing and thoroughly unethical, and the translator’s behavior absolutely unprofessional.” Whereas
the Finnish translator seemingly considered his translation “a fixed text, as some sacred texts
are regarded by some believers” (2019, 667), Chesterman persuasively argues that the translator
should have emended it because such inaction “goes against the fidelity requirement mentioned
in most codes of [translation] ethics.”
As a third example of the turn towards a more critical evaluation of literary translations,
Deane-Cox (2017) analyzes the translation of autobiographical accounts of two French female
prisoners in Nazi camps. Her analysis stresses the value of empathy and the responsibility of the
translator towards Holocaust survivors. Both camp accounts are told with marked irony, a way
of expression that survivors typically rely on “as both a means of communicating and coping”
(Deane-Cox 2017, 105). This irony is only translated partially and is instead “neutralized” and
“misappropriated,” leaving the reader with fewer clues for the interpretation of these passages
(Deane-Cox 2017, 106). Deane-Cox (2017, 114) goes on to show how shifts between tenses, a
190
feature that in Holocaust testimonies “can serve to unsettle the narrative and point towards the
abiding anguish of the survivor,” are similarly neutralized. There are also inaccuracies regarding
numbers, as when the English translation states that the camp held 20,000 women, not 2,000 as
in the French (2017, 125). Pinpointing such slips, and highlighting the underlying translation
strategies that caused them, might prevent similar inaccuracies in transmission and thus improve
future translations.
5 Conclusion
Literary translation will always be performative in the sense that it will take the texts somewhere
else and mean something else than the source text did. As such, literary translation is reminiscent
not only of other acts of literary writing but also of other acts of literary reading. Studies carried
out over the last fifty years have enhanced our understanding of what translation does to texts,
authors, and cultures. The widespread idea that literary translators should translate in a way that
follows the source text as closely as possible – if that could indeed be defined – represents a rather
naive understanding of what literary translation is and does. Descriptive Translation Studies was
the first theoretical approach to unmask the naivety of the belief in the neutral translator and the
idea of translation as “sameness.” It was not a framework that told translators how to translate,
but underlying their observations was nonetheless a desire to make literary translators aware of
the constraints they were working within.
Other frameworks have been more forthright in sharing their views on what is ethical and
not. Venuti’s advocacy of foreignization and visibility has greatly influenced translation ethics,
in part because Venuti’s approach highlights how translators, by deliberately choosing certain
strategies to help change the target culture, can both promote intercultural understanding and
improve their own status and remuneration. The subsequent criticism of these core ideas in
Venuti’s framework have served to create an awareness of how inequalities of power must affect
the strategies used. Feminist and postcolonial approaches have likewise been vital in uncovering
structural differences and in showing how conscious and strategic translation might change the
world as we know it.
Two major lines can be identified in recent research. One is to examine more complex
translation situations such as retranslation and indirect translation. More texts and agents are
involved in complex translations, which has brought ethics to the surface in very concrete ways.
The other line is to examine translation choices made by translators in ethical perspectives, dis-
cussing how some ways of translating may be injurious to, for example, the author, the source
text, or the source culture. These recent studies challenge the frameworks set up by Descriptive
Translation Studies. At the same time, they are not prescriptive in the sense of, for example,
Meschonnic or Venuti. Rather, they take steps towards a conceptual space in which ethics can
be discussed. To whom are the translators responsible? How does the cultural context, power
inequalities, and the poetics and content of the text affect the priorities that must be made?
Although translators might find some guidance on how to handle ethical dilemmas in the
existent research literature, something seems to be missing. As of yet, there is no comprehensive
ethical framework which can help translators evaluate the consequences of different solutions to
various ethical dilemmas, such as the ones listed at the beginning of this chapter. In the light of
this, it is encouraging that recent research on literary translation has begun discussing questions
of representation, responsibility, and accountability. It may not be the role of researchers to pro-
vide concrete ethical guidelines to practising literary translators or translation students, but if the
research community refuses to discuss the characteristics of good and bad practice, it is cutting
its ties with the practitioners in the field.
191
Cecilia Alvstad
In the recent critical evaluative approaches, exemplified earlier with the work of Sturge,
Chesterman, and Deane-Cox, the virtues of “attention” and “empathy” stand out as being espe-
cially important. Translators who translate both the surface level of the text and its deeper levels,
with attention to and empathy for the text as well as for the people and the cultures involved,
are likely to translate in a more ethical way. At the same time, translators who foster these virtues
will also further them in themselves, thus contributing to their own ethical growth. Obviously,
translation researchers, just like translators, need to approach the texts, people, and cultures we
study with attention and empathy and cultivate these virtues. Thus, the field of literary transla-
tion ethics can be developed into a field that is neither purely descriptive nor purely prescriptive,
but value-oriented.

Ethics in Berman and Meschonnic; the ethics of linguistic hospitality and untranslatability in
Derrida and Ricœur; the ethics of postcolonial translation; feminist translation ethics; Venuti
and the ethics of difference; ethics of collaboration and control in literary translation.
References
Alfvén, Valérie. 2016. “Violence gratuite et adolescents-bourreaux: Réception, traduction et enjeux de
deux romans suédois pour adolescents, en France, au début des années 2000.” PhD diss., Stockholm
University, Stockholm.
Alvstad, Cecilia. 2017. “Arguing for Indirect Translations in Twenty-First-Century Scandinavia.” Transla-
tion Studies 10, no. 2: 150–65.
Alvstad, Cecilia. 2018. “Children’s Literature.” In The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation, edited by
Ben Van Wyke, and Kelly Washbourne, 159–80. London: Routledge.
Alvstad, Cecilia. 2020. “Anthropology over Aesthetics: On the Poetics of Movement and Multilingualism
in Three Translations of Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo.” In Literatura latino-
americana mundial: Dispositivos y disidencias, edited by Gustavo Guerrero, Jorge Locane, Benjamin Loy,
and Gesine Müller, 223–41. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter.
Assis Rosa, Alexandra, Hanna Pięta, and Rita Bueno Maia. 2017. “Theoretical, Methodological and Ter-
minological Issues Regarding Indirect Translation: An Overview.” Translation Studies 10, no. 2: 113–32.
Bassnett, Susan, and André Lefevere. 1992. “General Editors’ Preface”. In Translation, Rewriting, and the
Manipulation of Literary Fame, edited by André Lefevere. London: Routledge.
Batchelor, Kathryn. 2018. “Sunjata in English: Paratexts, Authorship, and the Postcolonial Exotic.” In The
Palgrave Handbook of Literary Translation, edited by Jean Boase-Beier, Lina Fisher, and Hiroko Furukawa,
409–26. Cham: Springer International.
Bjørnstad, Hall, ed. 2008. Borrowed Feathers: Plagiarism and the Limits of Imitation in Early Modern Europe.
Oslo: Unipub.
Carbonell Cortés, Ovidio. 1998. “Orientalism in Translation Familiarizing and Defamiliarizing Strategies.”
In Translators’ Strategies and Creativity: Selected Papers from the 9th International Conference on Translation and
Interpreting, Prague, September 1995. Honor of Jiří Levý and Anton Popovic, edited by Ann Beylard-
Ozeroff, and Barbara Moser-Mercer, 63–70. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Casanova, Pascale. 2005. “Literature as a World.” New Left Review 31: 71–90.
Chesterman, Andrew. [1997] 2016. Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory, revised
edition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Chesterman, Andrew. 2019. “Post Errorem.” Perspectives 27, no. 5: 664–74.
Cronin, Michael. 2017. Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. London:
Routledge.
Deane-Cox, Sharon. 2017. “Remembering, Witnessing and Translation: Female Experiences of the Nazi
Camps.” Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal 6: 91–130.
Even-Zohar, Itamar, ed. 1990. “Polysystem Studies.” Special issue of Poetics Today 11, no. 1: 1–270.
Goodwin, Phil. 2010. “Ethical Problems in Translation.” The Translator 16, no. 1: 19–42.
192
Gouanvic, Jean-Marc. 2001. “Ethos, Ethics and Translation.” The Translator 7, no. 2: 203–12.
Hermans, Theo. [1985] 2014. “Translation Studies and a New Paradigm.” In The Manipulation of Literature:
Studies in Literary Translation, edited by Theo Hermans, 7–15. London: Croom Helm. Republished in
Routledge Revivals 2014.
Hermans, Theo. 1999/2020. Translation in Systems: Descriptive and Systemic Approaches Explained. Manches-
ter: St. Jerome Publishing. Reissued in Routledge Translation Classics Series 2020.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2018. “Revising and Retranslating.” In The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation,
edited by Ben Van Wyke, and Kelly Washbourne, 315–24. London: Routledge.
Koskinen, Kaisa, and Outi Paloposki. 2015. “Anxieties of Influence: The Voice of the First Translator in
Retranslation.” Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 27, no. 1: 25–39.
Lefevere, André. [1985] 2014. “Why Waste Our Time on Rewrites? The Trouble with Literary Inter-
pretation and the Role of Rewriting in an Alternative Paradigm.” In The Manipulation of Literature:
Studies in Literary Translation, edited by Theo Hermans, 215–43. London: Croom Helm. Republished
in Routledge Revivals 2014.
Lefevere, André. 1992. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London: Routledge.
Lefevere, André, and Susan Bassnett. 1990. “Introduction: Proust’s Grandmother and the Thousand and
One Nights. The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Translation Studies.” In Translation: History and Culture, edited by
Susan Bassnett, and André Lefevere, 1–13. London: Pinter.
Liljegren, Lars. 2018. “The Taming of a Viking: August Strindberg, Translation and Post-Victorian Cen-
sorship.” PhD diss., Linköping University, Linköping.
Looby, Robert. 2015. Censorship, Translation and English Language Fiction in People’s Poland. Leiden: Brill.
DOI: 10.1163/9789004293069
Malmkjær, Kirsten. 2003. “What Happened to God and the Angels.” Target: International Journal of Transla-
tion Studies 15, no. 1: 37–58.
Marín-Lacarta, Maialen. 2012. “A Brief History of Translations of Modern and Contemporary Chinese
Literature in Spain (1949–2009).” 1611: Revista de historia de la traducción/A Journal of Translation History/
Revista D’història de la traducció 6: 1–7.
Martens, Hanna Veerle Lut. 2016. “Tradición y censura en las traducciones de literatura infantil y juve-
nil en la cultura franquista: Los cuentos de Perrault en español hasta 1975.” PhD diss., University of
Extremadura, Cáceres.
Meschonnic, Henri. 2011. Ethics and Politics of Translating. Translated and Edited by Pier-Pascale Boulanger.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Oittinen, Riitta. 2000. Translating for Children. New York: Garland.
dam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Polezzi, Loredana. 2012. “Translation and Migration.” Translation Studies 5, no. 3: 345–56.
Pym, Anthony. 2012. On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation between Cultures. Amsterdam: John Ben-
Racz, Gregary J. 2013. “No Anxiety of Influence: Ethics in Poetry Retranslation after Analogical Form.”
Translation Review 85, no. 1: 42–58.
Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London:
Routledge.
Snell-Hornby, Mary. 2006. The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? Amster-
dam: John Benjamins.
Steiner, George. [1975] 1998. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Sturge, Kate. 2007. Representing Others: Translation, Ethnography and the Museum. Manchester: St. Jerome
Publishing.
Tenngart, Paul. 2010. “Svenska Baudelairebuketter: Les Fleurs du Mal i översättning.” In Kasta dikt och
fånga lyra: Översättning i modern svensk lyrik, edited by Daniel Möller, and Paul Tenngart, 15–52. Lund:
Ellerström.
Thomson-Wohlgemuth, Gaby. 2009. Translation under State Control. London: Routledge.
Toury, Gideon. [1995] 2012. Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond, revised edition 2012. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Vandaele, Jeroen. 2015. Estados de gracia: Billy Wilder y la censura franquista (1946–1975). Leiden: Brill.
Venuti, Lawrence. [1995] 2018. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge.
Reissued in Routledge Translation Classics series 2018.
193
Cecilia Alvstad
Von Flotow, Luise. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the “Era of Feminism”. Manchester: St. Jerome
Publishing.
Washbourne, Kelly. 2018. “Ethics.” In The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation, edited by Ben Van
Wyke, and Kelly Washbourne, 399–418. London: Routledge.
Further reading
Alvstad, Cecilia. 2020. “Anthropology over Aesthetics: On the Poetics of Movement and Multilingualism
in Three Translations of Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo.” In Literatura latino-
americana mundial: Dispositivos y disidencias, edited by Gustavo Guerrero, Jorge Locane, Benjamin Loy,
and Gesine Müller, 223–41. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter.
This article is a critical evaluation of three translations of a contemporary Latin American novel. It
discusses ethical consequences of the translators’ simplifications, normalizations, and explicitations. It is
argued that Herrera’s novel, with the help of literary devices such as neologisms, questions stereotypical
ways of representing the two central themes of the novel – migration and multilingualism. The three
translations flout the literary devices of the source text, producing texts that give priority to (stereotypi-
cal) anthropological representation over aesthetic values. As a consequence, both the text and the author
come across as less innovative in translation.
Batchelor, Kathryn. 2018. “Sunjata in English: Paratexts, Authorship, and the Postcolonial Exotic.” In The
Palgrave Handbook of Literary Translation, edited by Jean Boase-Beier, Lina Fisher, and Hiroko Furukawa,
409–26. Cham: Springer International.
A study of the paratexts of various English translations of the West African Mande oral epic Sunjata. It
compares the visibility given to the Malian djeli (the oral storyteller) in the different English translations.
Referring to Venuti’s concept of “visibility,” Batchelor notes that the translatedness of the text and the
Western translator is highly visible, and that the high “visibility” of the Western translator is “likely to
reproduce and reinforce global power inequalities,” since the djeli, collaborators in Africa who helped
produce the translation and the collective ownership of the epos, is practically invisible in most of the
translations.
Washbourne, Kelly. 2018. “Ethics.” In The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation, edited by Ben Van
Wyke, and Kelly Washbourne, 399–418. London: Routledge.
Recent and comprehensive overview of ethics in relation to literary translation. It takes a broader
perspective than does the present chapter since it does not primarily focus on ethics in relation to the
literary “translator” but also focuses on ethical dilemmas for publishers (selection, editing, marketing,
and the terms of contracts), reviewers, and teachers of translated literature.
194
14
Conference interpreter ethics
1 Introduction
Although interpreter’s ethical principles had already been partially covered in interpreting-
related handbooks (e.g. Herbert 1952), professional codes of conduct (AIIC, AUSIT, etc.), and
occasionally in some first-hand experience-based articles since the 1950s (Yu 1951; Tang and
Zhou 1958), more scholarly discussion on the ethics of interpreting started to gain momentum
after the publication of Return to Ethics (Pym 2001). Researchers exploring ethical issues in
interpreting usually focus on what an interpreter should (or is expected to) be or do and what
an interpreter is and actually does in public service/community interpreting, where interpret-
ers may have some room to maneuver their subjectivity/agency – that is, their capacity to act
independently and to make their own free choices (Barker 2005, 448) – when their default judg-
ment of what’s right is challenged (Angelelli 2004a, 2004b; Dean 2011; Inghilleri 2005, 2012;
Ren 2010). Conference interpreters’ agency, on the other hand, is believed to be often restricted
by their working environment, the interpreting modes, institutional constraints, as well as the
expectations of others concerning their roles in such situations.
In this chapter, conference interpreting is defined as interpreter-facilitated communica-
tive events that happen in formal settings, such as diplomatic, political, and military meetings
between countries or regions, or between and within supranational organizations (such as the
EU or UN organizations), or in formal conferences focusing on specific topics. Conference
interpreting can take place in modes of either simultaneous interpreting (SI) or consecutive
interpreting (CI). Unlike community interpreting, where interpreters are often present with
interlocutors in close proximity with more information of their identity (names, professional
experiences, institution affiliations, etc.) revealed, conference interpreters are to a certain
degree “detached” from their interpreting service receivers because of their physical loca-
tion and the formality of the event. Simultaneous conference interpreters (sign language
interpreters excluded here) most often work in a booth at a distance away from speakers.
In some rare conference settings when a separate booth is not available, they are placed
normally at the back or on one side of the front of a conference venue that enables them to
have a clear view of the speaker. In either circumstance interpreters’ visibility is through their
voices, leaving the interpreting service receivers a limited access to their identity and physical
195
presence. Even in whispered SI, conference interpreters are more likely seated behind clients,
which weakens their visibility due to their low voice and hardly observed extra-linguistic
factors (e.g. facial expressions, gestures) and the often restricted one-direction communica-
tion mode. Consecutive conference interpreters enjoy a slightly higher degree of freedom
and more visibility, because they are often seated next to the main speaker and interpret after
the speaker pauses, thus making them more conspicuous to the audiences. But due to the
generally formal atmosphere of conferences, institutional restrictions on interpreters’ behav-
iours, some participants’ expectation of conference interpreters’ role as language experts only,
as well as interpreters’ own perception of their role in such situations, consecutive confer-
ence interpreters are less likely than public service interpreters to execute discourse process
management strategies such as initiating, interrupting, or distributing a speaking turn. And
they are usually more controlled in paralinguistic and nonverbal aspects as well when com-
pared with community or liaison interpreters. For instance, one might assume that they
do not often demonstrate rich vocal varieties or gesticulate much unless they have to. This
also means that if conference interpreters are caught in an ethically debatable situation, the
interpreting strategies that work in similar situations in liaison or community interpreting,
such as asking for further explanation from the speaker, initiating a dialogue turn in favour
of a particular participant in communication, etc., may not be as effective or cannot even be
implemented in the first place. On the other hand, as there is little power differential among
conference participants (in particular when compared with the opposite situation in medical
or court interpreting), it is generally believed that conference interpreters seldom encounter
the need for “alignment” or partisanship, i.e. siding with or leaning towards one side by
offering suggestions, giving advice, gatekeeping certain information, etc. (Ren 2010), unless
their institutional loyalty requires them to do so, as with EU interpreters’ alignment with EU
institutions (Beaton 2007).
This being said, it doesn’t mean that in conference interpreting ethics is not an issue, or
that conference interpreters always observe professional ethical principles, or that clients always
judge their behaviours according to professional codes of conduct. Discussions have been heard
in real-life interpreting events and, to a lesser extent, seen in literature (Kalina 2000; Diriker
2004; Donavan 2011; Duflou 2016) regarding conference interpreters’ competence, (in)fidelity,
(non)neutrality, confidentiality, etc. Besides, ethical issues arising from the recent development
of machine-aided interpreting, AI interpreting, and human-machine interaction also fall mostly
into the sphere of conference interpreting within the interpreting genres, which will be dis-
cussed in section 4.2.
2 Previous research on conference interpreter ethics

Although most scholarly works on ethics in interpreting studies focus on ethical issues in com-
munity interpreting (see Chapter 15 “Ethics in public service interpreting” in this volume), and
in-depth discussion of ethics-related problems in conference interpreting is scarce, interpreting
communities and professional translation and interpreting (T&I) organizations have addressed
these issues long ago, though mostly in prescriptive rather than descriptive or explanative man-
ners. The Interpreter’s Handbook: How to Become a Conference Interpreter by Jean Herbert (1952) is
the earliest searchable systematic writing of what a conference interpreter should be equipped
with and should do. As the chief interpreter of the United Nation’s interpretation service, Her-
bert summarizes the qualifications that conference interpreters need to possess and the strategies
they can adopt, many of which can be seen as the prototypical guidelines of the present-day
interpreter’s code of conduct of professional organizations.
196
Although there are now many international as well as national professional translator and
interpreter associations in the world which regulate their members’ professional behaviours
through their own code of ethics in various interpreting settings, the International Associa-
tion of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) seems to be the only global organization dedicated
to conference interpreters and prioritizing conference interpreter ethics. Founded in 1953
and with about 3,000 members in more than 100 countries up to date, AIIC requires candi-
dates applying for membership to make a commitment to respect AIIC’s Code of Ethics and
Professional Standards, because these two “are at the heart of a collective effort to promote
professionalism and quality” (AIIC 2015b). AIIC’s Code of Ethics (2018) specifies the stan-
dards of integrity, professionalism, and confidentiality that all AIIC members shall be bound
to respect when they serve as conference interpreters. AIIC’s Professional Standards (AIIC
2015a) attends to details like the signing of contracts, remuneration, minimum team strength,
number of languages needed, etc., which intend to guarantee quality service and conditions
that are beneficial to all parties participating in the conference. Through the implementation
of these two rules and giving “a voice to practitioners and users alike” (AIIC 2015b), not
only does AIIC hope to offer ethical guidance to, and lift professional bars for, its members,
it also intends to exercise an underlying regulatory power on conference interpreting events
as a whole.
In addition to AIIC, other international/national professional T&I organizations, though
not dedicated exclusively to conference interpreters, such as AUSIT (Australian Institute
of Interpreters and Translators), ATA (American Translators Association), AVLIC (Associa-
tion of Visual Language Interpreters of Canada), etc., also set out their own codes of ethics
that guide the professional conduct of their members. Different in specificity and wording
though they may be, five “common and near-universal ethical principles” were identified
from those codes first by Bancroft (2005), and later summed up by Setton and Prunc (2016).
They include competence, integrity, confidentiality, neutrality, and fidelity, which will be
discussed in detail later.
Professionalism is a word that is often used in the codes of conduct of different T&I associa-
tions and translator/interpreter training handbooks across the world. Rarely, however, is the
term clearly defined either because perhaps people often take it for granted or because it is
used as synonymous with professional skills or competence, thus mitigating the need for further
explanation. Only recently Setton and Dawrant (2016a, 360–362) explicitly defined profes-
sionalism as “technical competence plus a commitment to provide the best possible service
while adhering to defined ethics and standards as a responsible member of a professional com-
munity.” In other words, they believe, professionalism in the field of conference interpreting can
be understood from three interacting dimensions: craft (mastering the skills of the trade), eth-
ics (ethical precepts and standards), and service (providing a satisfactory service to help people
communicate). Based on Setton and Dawrant’s understanding, professional ethics constitutes
an important component of professionalism, but the two are not one and the same, and the
latter is broader in connotation.
Professional codes of ethics of T&I association aside, over the years (in-print or online)
publications with both a pedagogical and prescriptive nature relating to ethics in conference
interpreting have been seen from time to time, discussing the skills and “the quality of the
interpreter” (Seleskovitch 1998; Seleskovitch and Lederer 1995), professional loyalty and the
principle of fidelity (Gile 1995), what it means to be a competent or qualified conference inter-
preter (Kalina 2000; Kremer 2015a, 2015b), and professionalism and ethics (Setton and Dawrant
2016a, 2016b). They echo, elaborate, and sometimes expand codified professional ethics with
examples from real-life interpreting events.
197
Since 2000, in particular since the “cultural turn” (Cronin 2002) and the sociological turn
(Angelelli 2012; Ren 2016) took place in interpreting studies, empirical studies (Angelelli 2004a,
2004b; Inghilleri 2003, 2012) have been conducted on topics related to interpreters’ visibility,
fidelity, and neutrality. Although the liveliest debate over the applicability of these principles is
again mainly in the field of community interpreting, the understanding and practice of these
principles by conference interpreters in real-life events started to be discussed in some empirical
research, describing professional interpreters in highly restricted environments, who sometimes
deliberately deviate from the principles of fidelity (Seeber and Zelger 2007) or neutrality (Zhan
2012; Wang and Feng 2018), not because of their ignorance or negligence of professional eth-
ics, or lack of ability, but out of their conscious choices, i.e. agency, and more often than not, to
the satisfaction of one or more parties. These studies, though not necessarily intended to defy
prescribed ethical principles, wish to paint a more realistic picture of what is actually happening
and how interpreters may interpret the notions of fidelity and neutrality differently when assum-
ing different cultural, national, or institutional affiliations. The consistency as well as discrepancy
between what is codified in professional ethics and how ethical principles are practised in real-
life conferences constitutes the core issues and topics of conference interpreter ethics.

As competence, integrity, confidentiality, neutrality, and fidelity are identified as the five “com-
mon and near-universal ethical principles” in interpreting (Bancroft 2005; Setton and Prunc
2016), they are discussed in the following sections with emphasis on conference settings. It is
worth noting that there is no clear-cut line between these concepts, and some of them may
overlap in certain aspects.
3.1 Competence
Setton and Prunc (2016, 146) define interpreter competence as follows:
Competence entails a commitment to maintaining high standards of performance, and

requires the interpreter to ensure that s/he has the requisite skills and knowledge (which
entails preparing assignments, and declining any assignment for which s/he is not qualified,
or will not have time to prepare) and adequate working conditions, including access to
relevant information and documentation.
What is not included in Setton and Prunc’s defnition but specifed in the professional T&I orga-
nizations is the ability “to convey meaning between people and cultures faithfully, accurately,
and impartially” (ATA 2010), increasing and maintaining skills through ongoing professional
development (AUSIT 2012; AIIC 2018), and accountability for professional competence, i.e.
members accepting full responsibility for the quality of their own work (AVLIC 2000). As one
may notice, “faithful interpretation” may overlap with fdelity, and “declining assignments for
which one is unqualifed,” with integrity.
That professional organizations all relate competence with ethical conduct and professional
behaviours makes sense. As one might assume, interpreters’ competence and their ethical behav-
iours are often in a relationship of an uprising complementary spiral, i.e. the more competent
they are, the more likely they will conform to the professional ethics (such as being able to
interpret accurately and impartially); and the more times they comply with code of ethics, the
more professional their conduct will be. This is how competence feeds into ethics.
198
3.2 Integrity
The notion of integrity seems to be largely agreed upon by professional organizations, prac-
titioners, and researchers alike. As summarized by Setton and Prunc (2016, 146), interpreters’
integrity embodies:
honesty (avoiding or declaring conflicts of interest, and deriving no personal gain from
information obtained in the exercise of the profession); responsibility (e.g. not cancelling
bookings without cause); solidarity (cooperating and sharing knowledge with colleagues,
supporting beginners, affording colleagues moral assistance and collegiality); and refusing
any job or situation which might detract from the dignity of the profession or bring it into
disrepute.
Other integrity-related professional conduct includes presenting true credentials, making suf-
fcient advance preparation for all assignments, adhering to appointment times, and accepting
responsibility for all professional decisions and actions (AUSIT 2012; ATA 2010; AVLIC 2000).
It thus can be seen that conference interpreters’ integrity is more often manifested before or after
conferences rather than during. However, issues of integrity during interpreting are emerging
with the incorporation of AI into conference interpreting and might also arise when collabora-
tion between booth-mates in SI is needed, which will be further discussed in sections 4.2 and 4.3.
3.3 Confidentiality
As a cornerstone of professional ethics, confidentiality is rather self-explanatory: interpreters
shall hold in confidence all information obtained in providing interpreting service, except with
clients’ authorization or by order of law. AIIC (2018) clearly stipulates that its members “shall be
bound by the strictest secrecy, which must be observed towards all persons and with regard to all
information disclosed in the course of the practice of the profession at any gathering not open
to the public.” And they “shall refrain from deriving any personal gain whatsoever from confi-
dential information they may have acquired in the exercise of their duties as conference inter-
preters.” This principle is also shared by the code of ethics of AUSIT, ATI, AVLIC, etc. and is
often understood as a must-observed code of conduct on a par with similar ethical requirements
of other professions such as psychologists, doctors, lawyers, and business associates. Therefore,
confidentiality is generally believed to be clear-cut and not subject to controversy.
However, confidentiality might become an issue when national interest conflicts with the
interpreter’s need to adhere to secrecy. Recent news (Itkowitz 2019) has covered the example of
Marina Gross, an interpreter with the US Department of State for the closed-door meeting of
US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. Gross adhered
to the principle of confidentiality in the face of pressure of a subpoena from the American
Democratic Party. She chose to keep to the oath of professional ethics for interpreters and did
not make any comment in response to the accusation that President Trump might have used his
position to pursue his own interest. Her decision won support from ATA. ATI spokeswoman
Judy Jenner emphasized the importance of confidentiality and commented, “confidentiality is
a cornerstone of all interpreter code of ethics, regardless of the setting. The parties we interpret
for must be certain that we will not divulge what is being discussed and if they doubt this, they
are not able to speak freely” (Itkowitz 2019).
Apparently, Gross made the ethically right decision if what needs to be protected is only
the interest of the people closely involved in the interpreting event. But when doubts were
199
raised after President Trump had seized the interpreter’s notes from the one-on-one meeting,
the Democrats’ desire to hear directly from the interpreter can be explained by the fear that
America’s national security may be jeopardized and people’s interests may be at stake. Gross was
thus caught in an ethical dilemma of whether to observe the principle of secrecy and be loyal
to her immediate “client,” or to be loyal to her country and put the interests of the people first.
3.4 Fidelity
Fidelity (also called faithfulness or accuracy) is not only one of the most significant factors in
interpreting quality assessment, but also a touchstone for an interpreter’s qualification and eth-
ics. However, unlike the generally agreed-upon ethical principles of competence and integrity,
fidelity seems a shaky term and is not always understood in the same way by professional orga-
nizations, practitioners, and researchers. This is manifested by the slightly different explanations
ascribed to the term by different professional organizations, interpreter trainers, and in the recent
empirical studies of researchers.
Unlike AIIC, who doesn’t spell out explicitly the term fidelity, most of the T&I professional
organizations offer their own definition of what it means to be faithful or accurate. AUSIT’s
(2012) definition is probably the strictest. It defines accuracy as “optimal and complete message
transfer into the target language preserving the content and intent of the source message or text
without omission or distortion” ATA (2010), while stressing the need for faithful interpretation,
clarifies that faithful, accurate, and impartial interpretation should not be equal to word-for-
word translation. In a similar vein, AVLIC (2000) explains, “faithful interpretation should not be
confused with a literal interpretation. The fidelity of an interpretation includes an adaptation to
make the form, the tone, and the deeper meaning of the source text felt in the target language
and culture.” Setton and Dawrant (2016a), as professional interpreters and interpreter trainers
themselves, are even more lenient when interpreting fidelity, giving consideration to the com-
municative effect of the renditions, the limit of the ability of interpreters at work, the differing
user expectations, and the complicated situation in each case, thus justifying interpreters’ choice
to sometimes “optimize the form (or even content) of utterances in the interests of better com-
munication” (384–385). They also provide a menu of options for interpreters to choose when
they encounter obstacles, for instance, when the speaker is unclear or elliptical, or when some-
thing seems untranslatable (346–348).
If Setton and Dawrant’s intention is to bridge the gap between what is prescribed in codified
ethics and what can be achieved in reality, some studies serve to prove that fidelity in confer-
ence interpreting can be a complex issue. Seeber and Zelger (2007, 292) probe into accuracy
in SI from an ethical perspective and argue that betrayal of the speakers sometimes can be seen
as a virtue rather than a vice. They point out that in real-life situations, conference interpreters
sometimes deliberately alter the original message even when such change is not imposed by
constraints such as time or mental resources. Thus, they differentiate the meaning of “accuracy”
from “truth,” and further problematize the notion of accuracy in interpreting as the exact rendi-
tion of the verbal, semantic, and intentional components of the original message. They present
the case of an international conference featuring several European and African heads of state
and government where all of the interpreters on site chose not to interpret the conference host’s
words of calling an African head of state a “traffic cop” because the latter used hand gestures
during the speech like a police directing traffic. The interpreters on site sensed that the speaker
(i.e. the conference host whose everyday job is talk-show hosting) was not ill-intended, and
the accurate rendition of the “traffic cop” may have caused misunderstanding. Their research
generates no prescriptive results but concludes, “what on the surface looks like a betrayal of
200
the speaker may actually be an ethically justified interpretation of the original” (296). In other
words, it is not necessarily against professional ethics if the interpreters alter, truncate, or omit
parts of the original message for better communication effect.
The infidelity of the conference interpreters detailed in Seeber and Zelger’s research is not
an isolated case. In an empirical study on the interpreter’s role in political settings, Zhan (2012)
provides evidence that government staff interpreters sometimes mediate the talk and may even
have a “voice” when doing on-site CI. Though not intended to focus on ethical issues, Zhan,
through quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data from the political meetings between
provincial government leaders in China and their foreign guests, finds that formal and content
shifts exist considerably in the interpretations of the provincial government’s interpreters. He
concludes that rather than always faithfully rendering the original utterances by the govern-
ment officials, staff interpreters sometimes opt for meaning shifts for discourse mediation. He
attributes the shifts to the interpreters’ “identity construction,” meaning they feel the need to
“speak for their government and political institution, even sometimes at the expense of violating
certain professional codes of conduct” (2012, 205–206). In this sense, (in)fidelity is inextricably
associated with the issue of (un)neutrality, and this is especially true when the interpreter has an
institutional affiliation.
3.5 Neutrality
Like fidelity, neutrality/impartiality is also a principle required in nearly all handbooks of inter-
preters’ code of conduct. It means that interpreters remain impartial and objective throughout
the communication event, do not allow their personal opinion, attitude, or faith to influence
their performance. Interpreters’ neutrality is often reflected specifically through their acts of
offering equal services to all participants, not giving advice, providing faithful interpretations,
and not softening, strengthening, altering, adding, or omitting the message conveyed by the
speaker for whatever purposes. Thus fidelity and neutrality often work side by side, and the more
faithful an interpreter is, the more neutral s/he appears to be.
The scholarly debates over whether there is absolute impartiality are often based on cases of
community interpreting (Wadensjö 1998; Angelelli 2004a, 2004b; Ren 2010), and it is gener-
ally believed that conference interpreters do not have a problem with neutrality as there is no
need for them to align with a particular side. However, some recent studies argue that neutral-
ity may not be the default choice of all conference interpreters since in some settings, diplo-
matic, business, in-house, or military, “interpreters are typically employed by one side, to which
they are expected to provide preferential service in some respects” (Setton and Dawrant 2016a,
377). Conference interpreters may be “shared” (377) and thus tend to be more impartial when
they work as freelancers or are employed by an intergovernmental, international, or suprana-
tional organization as they do not represent a particular government or country; or they can be
“attached/affiliated” to a diplomatic, business, or military institution, and in such a situation,
they are more likely to work on behalf of their employer and their role or identity is usually
understood by all parties (377).
One of the most commonly seen scenarios of conference interpreters’ “partiality” is in diplo-
matic settings, where interpreters do not play the role of a language expert only; they are often
also government workers whose institutional loyalty requires them to align with parties of inter-
ests (as is the situation in countries like China and Russia where diplomatic interpreters are often
diplomatic officers or civil servants). In such cases, interpreters’ partiality is not just perceived but
also understood. Wang and Feng (2018) examine the diplomatic interpreters’ stance-taking (i.e.
alignment with the Foreign Ministry) in press conferences based on a parallel bilingual corpus
201
of interpreted political discourse from Chinese to English. The data reveals that the interpret-
ers’ lexical choices reflect their conscious decision-making to align with the government’s atti-
tude and stance on various political and social issues. For instance, 问题 wenti is a frequently
used content word and has various lexical options in translation such as “question,” “problem,”
“issue,” and “matter,” which display different attitudes and stances. The research discovers that
interpreters tend to choose “issue” when wenti in Chinese is used in concordance with words
about international matters open for debate or discussion. They tend to adopt “problem” when
wenti is associated with domestic affairs which are difficult but can be overcome and solved.
Interpreters tend to select “question” with the implication that the matter is beyond debate
or negotiation and the words in concordance are usually related to sensitive issues in China’s
politics (2018, 255). They further probe into the possible reason for the different lexical choices
and find out that this can be attributed mainly to their compliance with the institutional norm
of interpreting, i.e. to align themselves with the stance of ideology of the Chinese government.
“As in-house interpreters of the Chinese government, they act like the government’s ‘spokes-
persons’” (2018, 258).
Wang and Feng’s research doesn’t stand alone in looking into conference interpreters’ non-
neutrality. Beaton’s research in 2007 presents a similar case of SI interpreters in EU plenary
sessions. It explores the struggle of competing ideologies (EU institutional hegemony vs. inter-
preters’ axiology) in the political speech context and the impossibility of absolute neutrality on
the part of the interpreter. Through a quantitative analysis of lexical repetition of the concept
European Union, it concludes that interpreters’ lexical repetition of the superordinate concept
European Union in the target text can be seen as strengthening the salience of EU institutional
hegemony, and interpreters’ contraction of European Union as EU has the function of semantic
stabilization of EU institutional hegemony.
Thus, for “attached” in-house interpreters, neutrality is a relative term and subject to the
checks-and-balances of the influence from their affiliated institution. But for “shared” confer-
ence interpreters, impartiality still remains a pillar of their professional ethics, not only because
this is what they are expected to observe, but also because this position “protects them from
awkward and even threatening criticism and deflects potential pressure from powerful clients”
(Donavan 2011, 113).
3.6 Codification vs. real life

It seems unquestionable that professional interpreters should do their utmost to abide by profes-
sional codes of conduct and perform their duty accordingly. However, in real-life interpreting,
they sometimes are found to deviate from professional ethics, as described earlier. The puzzling
question often asked is which factors interpreters should prioritize to ethically justify their
choices. The difficulty (and sometimes impossibility) in setting a standard for all interpreters’
ethical decision-making mainly lies with two reasons: (1) two different sets of ethical models –
deontology and teleology – may guide interpreters to take different and, most likely, opposite
actions under the same circumstances; (2) interpreters’ dual/multiple identity results in split
loyalties.
First, deontology and teleology represent two distinctive models of ethical reasoning. The
former, based on Kantian (Kant and Gregor [1785] 1998, 25) ethics of the “categorical impera-
tive,” defines what is ethical or unethical by the rightness or wrongness of actions themselves
independent of the rightness or wrongness of the consequences of the actions. The actions to
be taken are usually guided by such principles as duty, loyalty, and respect for human dignity
202
which are believed to be intrinsically good. By contrast, teleology, based on Bentham’s (Ben-
tham and Hart 1977, 393) utilitarianism emphasizing the largest benefits for the largest number
of people, determines what is ethical precisely by the value or desirable outcome an action may
bring. The action that produces the best result can justify the undesirable means. In the case
of Marina Gross, if she chooses to be true to her duty as a professional interpreter and loyal to
her immediate “client” President Trump, which she did, her decision to keep secrecy would be
judged as ethical from the point of view of deontology and the professional code of ethics (often
in line with the deontological model). But if she decides to put the interests of the majority first
and makes known to the public what was discussed between the two heads of state, her behav-
iour would be appraised as ethical by the teleologists, but would be denounced as unethical by
deontologists.
Second, interpreters’ dual/multi identities require institutional/national loyalty and call
for different ethical preferences. As described previously, sometimes conference interpreters,
in-house in particular, may assume more than one social identity in interpreter-mediated
conferences. Runcieman (2018, 35–38) defines a person’s social identity as dynamically (re)
creating and negotiating alignments with the social world in their situated discourses, and
an individual’s sense of self as appearing to be expressing themselves in relation to others in
an instance of situated talk. A conference interpreter with more than one social identity, for
instance, simultaneously a professional interpreter, a government worker, and a member of
an ethnic group or a citizen of a country, needs to balance all the duties attached to each and
every identity, especially when those duties are not in harmony with one another. Different
duties require the interpreter to act accordingly and determine the most suitable interpret-
ing strategy at conferences. How interpreters act depends on how they perceive themselves
in a specific context, and the action chosen may vary from person to person. Thus, when
interpreters’ professional ethics goes against their institutional interests or/and national loyalty,
their prioritized decision-making is influenced by the dynamic balance of external factors of
power and their internalized ethical views. In other words, the key lies in how interpreters
balance their dual/multi social identities and to which institution they stay loyal and assume
their accountabilities.
In the Marina Gross case, her role as a professional interpreter urged her to keep infor-
mation obtained from the interpreting service confidential. On the other hand, people who
called for a public testimony from her placed her duty as a government worker over her duty
as a diplomatic interpreter. The different views on what’s ethical in Gross’s story suggests that
an assessment of conference interpreters’ performance and evaluation of their ethical decisions
demands an integration of more than one set of standards, which requires consideration of
all of the interpreters’ identities and senses of self in situated contexts. When interests of one
identity antedate or defy the interests of another, or when different “selves” perceive their
positions and functions in a contextualized interpreting event differently, behaviours of dif-
ferent ethical concern may ensue.
However, interpreters should also realize that their decisions are not made on a whim because
they are often held accountable for the consequences of their decisions and behaviours. There-
fore they “have to reflect carefully about how their decisions, both textual and non-textual,
impact the lives of others” (Baker and Maier 2011, 3). It may be useful to know that the discrep-
ancy between what is stated in the handbook and what is happening in reality does not negate
the legitimacy of codified ethics. Sticking to the principle of fidelity and neutrality on the part
of the interpreter not only ensures the audience’s right to know the “truth,” but also serves to
protect the interpreter from taking undue responsibility for what is said by the speaker.
203
4 Emerging issues
In addition to the scholarly debates over codification and reality in different conference settings,
recent years have seen some emerging issues concerning conference interpreter ethics, including
the teaching of ethics in conference interpreter training, ethics in AI interpreting, collaboration
and partnership in SI, and conference interpreters’ location on site.
4.1 Ethics education in conference interpreter training

Baker and Maier (2011, 1–14) suggest that classroom activities to stimulate student translators’
and interpreters’ ethical reflection should be incorporated into the curriculum, and they have
noticed an increased attention to ethics in the context of translator and interpreter education.
While it’s true that since 2000 elements of ethics have been found in translator and interpreter
training programs and accreditation systems in some countries or regions, ethics education for
conference interpreters appears to have regional disparity and features.
Firstly, training programs with education of professional ethics for interpreters are not
evenly distributed. In countries and regions that enjoy a higher degree of professionalization
of interpreting and relatively longer history of interpreter education such as Australia and
Europe, professional ethics is generally incorporated into the training curricula but not always
explicitly as a separate course. A survey of the 18 EMCI (European Masters in Conference
Interpreting) member programmes in 2010 revealed that all but three had included ethics
teaching explicitly into their curricula in the form of separate teaching units (Donavan 2011,
124). In contrast, in countries and areas where professionalization of interpreting service had
a later start, the teaching of interpreters’ professional ethics is often neglected. In emerging
markets with increasing demand for conference interpreters such as China, education of
interpreter ethics is yet to be seen in most translation and interpreting programmes at both
undergraduate and graduate levels. An investigation of the curricula of 253 universities with
MTI (master of translation and interpreting) programs in China indicates that only six pro-
grams have a separate professional ethics-related course (Zhao, forthcoming). America is an
interesting example. In the US where interpreters’ ethical practice is required in various codes
of conduct by different interpreters’ associations for different domains (medical, legal, etc.),
formal ethics education is scarcely seen in the form of a separate course in degree conference
interpreting programmes based on a website search. For instance, the master of arts pro-
gramme in conference interpretation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at
Monterey (MIIS) cultivates conference interpreters at the cutting edge, but its curriculum of
60 credits is mainly skill-based, and ethics education is absent from it. (MIIS n.d.) By contrast,
some non-degree interpreter-training programs have separate courses focusing on different
aspects of professional ethics (e.g. APEX n.d.).
Secondly, regional disparity is also seen in professional accreditation examinations. NAATI
(National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters) is Australia’s national stan-
dards and certifying authority for translators and interpreters and the only organization to issue
certification to practitioners who wish to work in this profession in the country. It tests appli-
cants’ ethical competency based on Descriptors for Interpreting: [A certified conference inter-
preter] has full and detailed knowledge and understanding of the relevant code of ethics, and is
able to apply this to situations in interpreting practice, client interactions, and other professional
activities (NAATI n.d.). In China’s two most popular interpreting accreditation tests, CATTI
(China Accreditation Test for Translators and Interpreters) and SIA (Shanghai Interpreting
Accreditation), no questions on ethical issues are asked or tested.
204
Thirdly, the modules and ways of cultivating interpreting trainees’ awareness of professional
ethics vary with programmes and decontextualized training is not uncommon in universities.
Baker and Maier (2011, 2) notice that university-level translator and interpreter trainers have
long instructed their students to follow professional codes of ethics unquestioningly. This way
of teaching professional ethics out of context may lead to confusion and hesitation for novice
interpreters in ethically debatable situations. Dean and Pollard (2011, 155) argue that inter-
preting students receive a mixed message when educators assert a non-contextual, rule-based
approach to teaching ethics while simultaneously responding to both ethical and translation
questions with the answer that “it depends” – an obvious reference to the centrality of context
in decision-making. Baker and Maier (2011, 4–6) thus propose three suggestions on how to
conduct training in ethics in contextualized discourse: first, provide students with theoretical
tools (e.g. deontological and teleological ethics) so that they learn to reason critically about the
implication of the decision made by themselves or others; second, enable students to identify a
range of potential strategies that they may employ in ethically complex situations; third, develop
a set of pedagogical tools, such as classroom debate, writing critical essays, and role play, so as to
create an environment in which students can learn to make situated ethical decisions.
The learning tasks and pedagogical tools suggested by Baker and Maier find their resonance
in Donavan’s observation. She (2011, 124) finds that in EMCI member programmes interpreter
ethics is dealt with in a three-pronged way: (a) examples commented on in class, (b) professional
deontology (frequently with leading members of the profession invited to give talks), and (c) a
more substantial debate about ethics initiated in specific modules.
Although the importance of conference interpreters’ ethics education has been given more
attention to and improvement has been seen in recent years, training in ethics should not end at
the graduation from universities. Yin conducted a survey at the 57th ATA annual conference in
2016, probing into respondent interpreters’ education of moral philosophy, general professional
ethics education, interpreters’ professional ethics training, and familiarity with interpreters’ code
of conduct. The survey results demonstrate that interpreters’ ethics education does not guarantee
a long-standing memory of it (Yin 2018, 155–158). Hence, cultivation of the ethical awareness
of interpreters should be continual and included in on-job training.
4.2 Ethical issues of machine/AI translation/interpreting

With the development of deep learning and the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in
T&I, we see more conferences utilizing machine translation/interpreting technology to pro-
duce “simultaneously interpreted” texts either on the screens in the conference venues or in
artificially produced voices broadcasted to the conference audiences or both. The general work-
flow consists of the following steps: AI interpreters decode speakers’ messages through speech
recognition technologies, translate the messages into target languages with the help of deep
learning technologies and corpora, and present the target texts either on the screen for confer-
ence attendants to read or through voice-over technologies for them to listen. Currently there
are three major ethical concerns in machine/AI translation/interpreting: confidentiality and
intellectual property rights (IPR) issues in data collection and software design, accountability
of inaccuracy of machine/AI produced interpretations, and ethical issues arising from human
machine/AI interaction.
First, ethical issues concerning confidentiality and IPR. Drugan and Babych (2010, 4)
state that sharing translation resources requires consideration of a much wider range of ethi-
cal and legal issues, which include but are not limited to confidentiality of data, industrial and
state secrets, and IPR of translators, authors, and data owners. Most of the present machine
205
translation/interpreting applied to conference interpreting is neural machine translation, which

requires more complicated algorithms and larger data sets compared to earlier technologies.
Thus, new ethical issues may arise. In some cases, collection and use of parallel corpora does not
incur serious ethical issues when the used resources are of the nature of legitimately published
texts and intended for public use; but in other cases, some information may be either confi-
dential or is not owned by the technology developer. When translation memories are shared,
ethical issues related to confidentiality and IPR may appear.
Second, (in)accuracy of renditions and accountability can be problematic in the application
of machine/AI interpreters to conference interpreting. While it is still unclear whether and to
what degree AI will replace human interpreters, there is discussion on how accurate machine
translation (displayed on screen) can be in real-life conferences, who should be responsible for
the inaccurate or even wrong renditions produced by machine translation, and in what way
the accuracy of interpretations produced by AI and human interpreters should be compared.
As Kenny (2010) points out, the accountability of interpretations produced by AI interpreters
constitutes a big ethical issue. AI interpreters are machines, thus cannot take legal liabilities and
bear consequences. The accountabilities are debated among programme and software develop-
ers, on-site monitoring technicians, and the translators and interpreters whose target texts are
included in the translation corpora which are used to serve and teach the machines.
The third ethical issue is the interaction between AI and human interpreters, due to the imma-
turity of AI and deep learning technology at the moment. It seems to be the general view that
AI interpreters and human interpreters should not be competing with each other but assisting in
each other’s mutual improvement. However, a recent event presents a somewhat complex sce-
nario. A simultaneous interpreter (Bell Wang 2018) posted an account of his personal experience
at Zhihu, a well-known online community in China on September 20, 2018. While interpret-
ing for a conference, he discovered that the interpreted versions of his and his colleague’s were
analyzed by an on-site software development company’s voice recognition technology, converted
into an artificial voice, and then broadcasted to the audience as the output of interpreting. The
interpreter complained that the company did not make it clear to the audience that the interpre-
tations were actually from the human interpreters in the booth, misleading the public to believe
that the company’s technology had replaced the human conference interpreters. This event has
been interpreted by many as AI technology industry’s unethical violation of interpreters’ IPR.
As AI T&I technology further advances, more and new ethical issues may emerge among
conference interpreting stakeholders: technology developers, providers and users, conference
interpreting trainers and trainees, conference organizers, interpreter employers, interpreters, and
so on. How conference interpreters coexist and develop ethically desirable relations with them
is yet to be explored.
4.3 Collaboration and partnership in SI

Collaboration and partnership in SI may induce ethical concerns for interpreters. Simultaneous
interpreters collaborate by taking turns to interpret and rest in the same booth or by relaying
in different language pairs from booth to booth. A number of critical elements, which remain
invisible in transcripts or audio/visual records of on-mic performance, should be probed into as
research subjects of conference interpreters’ ethics, such as off-mic or non-verbal assistance and
intervention (Duflou 2016, 317), and joint text production in relay interpreting. Behaviours of
the off-mic interpreters that aim at providing assistance to interpreters on-mic and form part of
solidarity in interpreters’ ethical code include jotting down numbers to relieve on-mic interpret-
ers’ memory load, checking the newly emerged terminology in dictionaries or online, signalling
206
the partner in fatigue to go off mic and take turns, and asking the technicians or conference
organizers for help when the equipment is malfunctioning or something else goes wrong. Such
behaviours remain somewhat unexplored and need further study from the perspective of ethical
concerns. Research should also address questions of poor cooperation or non-cooperation, such
as leaving the booth unnecessarily, making sounds in the booth, neglecting an on-mic inter-
preter’s emergency, and so on. In addition, accountability of (in)accuracy of jointly produced
texts in relay interpreting also ensues ethical issues of “who shall be liable for what.”
4.4 Conference interpreters’ location on site

Whether an interpreter’s presence, location, and standing/seating positions will influence com-
munication process is a topic that has been discussed in community interpreting quite often;
however, it remains a largely underexplored area in studying conference interpreters’ professional
conduct. Researchers in psychology and criminology did an experiment to test if interpreters’
physical presence, their location on the communicative venue, and their postures have influence
on the interlocutors, and their findings proved negative (Ewens et al. 2017). However, this experi-
ment was conducted in a controlled setting where interpreters displayed what they described as “a
neutral demeanour.” In real-life conference interpreting events, it’s still unclear whether interpret-
ers’ seating arrangements and postures impact the effectiveness of communication. Interpreters
sometimes can have a final say in where they are located in the room, but typically they do not,
especially in formal high-level meetings or when they work in the simultaneous mode. As inter-
preters’ sitting and standing positions or booth location may impact the quality of interpreting ser-
vice, many codes of conduct require interpreters to object to unfavourable location or other poor
working conditions, and not to accept the assignment if they think necessary conditions cannot
be met. On the other hand, the relative subordinate position of diplomatic, military, or other in-
house interpreters and institutional rules may place obedience as a professional priority. Situations
like this may pose ethical challenges to interpreters and thus need more in-depth investigation.
5 Conclusion
As facilitators in bilingual/multilingual communicative events, conference interpreters’ moral
judgments, ethical stances, as well as their understanding and compliance with professional eth-
ics, be it in written form, such as laws, code of ethics, standards of practice, or in convention,
are of crucial significance. Due to the constrained nature of their task and their limited agency,
conference interpreters’ ethical conduct has been the subject of much less extensive research than
that of public service interpreters. But in diplomatic or military settings, and in conferences on
sensitive topics, issues of ethical concern do exist. As in community interpreting, competence,
confidentiality, integrity, fidelity, and neutrality constitute the major ethical principles in confer-
ence interpreting. Also as in community interpreting, there are discrepancies between what is
prescribed in codes of ethics and what is practiced in reality. Apart from mere accounts of each
individual cases of conference interpreters’ decisions and behaviours “derailing” from codified
standards of practice, we need to look into the reasons behind these phenomena.
Different ethical models that overlay the level of professional ethics, such as deontological
or teleological ethics, may guide interpreters to make different and even opposite decisions in
ethically challenging situations. Dual/multiple identities as well as the sense of self of confer-
ence interpreters may sometimes problematize the longstanding dichotomies of accurate vs.
inaccurate; neutral vs. partial; confidential vs. betraying. The awareness of conference inter-
preters’ multiple identities provides a new angle to evaluate their performance. It further steers
207
interpreting studies towards a holistic view of interpreters’ subjectivity and inter-subjectivity in

interpreter-mediated communication.
Education of ethics in conference interpreter training is much needed and should embrace
more modules and be set in a contextualized situation instead of being reduced to the mere
introduction to the existing code of conduct. Besides, it should provide trainees with conceptual
tools of ethics so that they can learn to judge what is ethically right in a more critical manner.
Reinforcement of ethics education should also be incorporated into continual or on-the-job
training programmes to ensure interpreters’ sustained familiarity of professional ethics and to
avoid a mere experience-dependent ethical decision-making.
Ethical issues deriving from collegiality, such as off-mic and non-verbal assistance, joint text
production in relay interpreting, as well as the conference interpreters’ physical position in
conference settings, need further probing. Ethical issues of applying machine/AI translation/
interpreting to conference settings emerge for the increasing prevalence of AI technology. Con-
fidentiality, accountability of texts interpreted, and competitive relationship between AI inter-
preters and human interpreters are among the major ethical concerns.

Virtue ethics; the ethics of public service interpreting; ethics codes for interpreters and translators.
References
AIIC. 2015a. “Professional Standards.” Accessed February 1, 2020. https://aiic.net/page/6746
AIIC. 2015b. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://aiic.net/page/1673/aiic-an-inclusive-and-representative-
professional-body/lang/1
AIIC. 2018. “Code of Professional Ethics.” Accessed February 1, 2020. https://aiic.net/page/6724/
code-of-professional-ethics-2018-version/lang/1
Angelelli, Claudia V. 2004a. Revisiting the Interpreter’s Role a Study of Conference, Court, and Medical Interpreters
in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Angelelli, Claudia V. 2004b. Medical Interpreting and Cross-Cultural Communication. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Angelelli, Claudia V., ed. 2012. “The Sociological Turn in Translation and Interpreting Studies.” Special
issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies 7, no. 2.
APEX. n.d. “APEX’s Course List.” Accessed February 1, 2020. www.apexidcorp.com/courselist
ATA. 2010. “ATA Code of Ethics and Professional Practice.” Accessed February 1, 2020. www.atanet.org/
governance/code_of_ethics.php
AUSIT. 2012. “AUSIT Code of Ethics.”Accessed August 17, 2020. ausit.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/
Code_Of_Ethics_Full
AVLIC. 2000. “AVLIC Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Professional Conduct.” Accessed February 1,
2020. www.avlic.ca/ethics-and-guidelines
Baker, Mona, and Carol Maier. 2011. “Ethics in Interpreter & Translator Training.” The Interpreter and
Translator Trainer, no. 5: 1–14.
Bancroft, Marjory. 2005. The Interpreter’s World Tour: An Environmental Scan of Standards of Practice for Inter-
preters. Washington, DC: National Council on Interpreting in Health Care.
Barker, Chris. 2005. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, 4156–59. London: Sage.
Beaton, Morven. 2007. “Interpreted Ideologies in Institutional Discourse: The Case of the European
Parliament.” The Translator: Translation and Ideology 13, no. 2: 271–96.
Bentham, Jeremy, and Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart. 1977. “A Comment on the Commentaries and a
Fragment on Government.” In The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, edited by J.H. Burns, J.R. Din-
widdy, F. Rosen, and T.P. Schofield. London: Athlone Press, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Cronin, Michael. 2002. “The Empire Talks Back: Orality, Heteronomy and the Cultural Turn in Inter-
preting Studies.” In The Interpreting Studies Reader, edited by Franz Pöchhacker, and Miriam Shlesinger,
386–97. London: Routledge.
208
Dean, Robyn, and Robert Q. Pollard. 2011. “Context-Based Ethical Reasoning in Interpreting: A
Demand Control Scheme Perspective.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 1: 155–82.
Diriker, Ebru. 2004. De-/Re-Contextualizing Conference Interpreting: Interpreters in the Ivory Tower? Amster-
dam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Donavan, Clare. 2011. “Ethics in the Teaching of Conference Interpreting [J].” The Interpreter and Translator
Trainer 1: 109–28.
Drugan, Jo, and Bodagan Babych. 2010. “Shared Resources, Shared Values? Ethical Implications of Sharing
Translation Resources.” In Proceedings of the Second Joint EM+/CNGL workshop Bringing MT to the User:
Research on Integrating MT in the Translation Industry, edited by Ventsislav Zhechev, 3–9. http://www.
mt-archive.info/10/JEC-2010-Drugan.pdf
Duflou, Veerle. 2016. Be(com)ing a Conference Interpreter: An Ethnography of EU Interpreters as a Professional
Community. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Ewens, Sarah, Aldert Vrij et al. 2017. “The Effect of the Presence and Searing Position of an Interpreter
on Eliciting Information and Cues to deceit.” Psychology, Crime & Law 2: 180–200.
Gile, Daniel. 1995. Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training. Amsterdam, Philadelphia:
Herbert, Jean. 1952. The Interpreter’s Handbook: How to Become a Conference Interpreter. Geneva: Librairie de
l’Université.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2003. “Habitus, Field and Discourse: Interpreting as a Socially Situated Activity.” Target
15, no. 2: 243–68.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2005. “Mediating Zones of Uncertainty: Interpreter Agency, the Interpreting Habitus
and Political Asylum Adjudication.” The Translator 11, no. 1: 69–85.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2012. Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics and Language. New York: Routledge.
Itkowitz, Colby. 2019. “Democrats’ Desire to Subpoena Interpreters in Trump, Putin Meetings Raises
Ethical Questions.” The Washington Post, January 14. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/14/
democrats-desire-subpoena-interpreters-trump-putin-meetings-raises-ethical-questions/?noredirect=
on&utm_term=.38b28bfb321b
Kalina, Sylvia. 2000. “Interpreting Competences as a Basis and a Goal for Teaching.” In The Interpreters’
Newsletter, vol. 10, edited by Alessandra Riccardi, and Maurizio Viezzi, 3–32. Scuola Superiore di
Lingue Moderne, per Interpreti e Traduttori. Trieste: Universita degli Studi di Trieste. https://www.
openstarts.units.it/bitstream/10077/10168/1/10%20full%20text.pdf
Kant, Immanuel, and Mary Gregor. [1785] 1998. “Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy.” In
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Kenny, Dorothy. 2010. “The Ethics of Machine Translation.” Proceedings of the XI New Zealand Society for
Translators and Interpreters. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11311284.pdf
Kremer, Benoit. 2015a. “AIIC and Ethic.” Accessed February 1, 2020. http://aiic.net/page/739/
aiic-and-ethics/lang/1
Kremer, Benoit. 2015b. “Another Look at Professional Secrecy.” Accessed February 1, 2020. http://aiic.
net/page/6342/another-look-at-professional-secrecy
MIIS. n.d. “Monterey’s Curriculum.” Accessed February 1, 2020. www.middlebury.edu/institute/
academics/degree-programs/translation-interpretation/curriculum#ci
NAATI. n.d. “NAATI.” Accessed February 1, 2020. www.naati.com.au/media/2473/descriptors-for-
interpreting.pdf
Pym, Anthony, ed. 2001. The Return to Ethics: Special Issue of the Translator. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Ren, Wen. 2010. The Liaison Interpreter’s Subjectivity Consciousness. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and
Research Press. (任文. 2010. 联络口译过程中译员的主体性意识研究. 北京：外研社.)
Ren, Wen. 2016. “The ‘Sociological Turn’ of Interpreting Studies: An Interview of and Dialogue with
Professor Claudia Angelelli.” Chinese Translators Journal 1: 70–6. (任文. 2016. 口译研究的“社会学转向” –
Claudia Angelelli教授对话访谈录, 中国翻译, 1: 70–6).
Runcieman, Alan J. 2018. The Identity of the Professional Interpreter: How Professional Identities Are Constructed
in the Classroom. Singapore: Springer.
Seeber, Kilian G., and Christian Zelger. 2007. “Betrayal-Vice or Virtue? An Ethical Perspective on Accu-
racy in Simultaneous Interpreting.” Meta: 290–8.
Seleskovitch, Danica. 1998. Interpreting for International Conferences. Translated by Stephanie Dailey, and Eric
Norman McMillan. Washington, DC: Pen and Booth.
Seleskovitch, Danica, and Marianne Lederer. 1995. A Systematic Approach to Teaching Interpretation. Paris:
The Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf.
209
Setton, Robin, and Andrew Dawrant. 2016a. Conference Interpreting: A Complete Course. Amsterdam, Phila-
delphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Setton, Robin, and Andrew Dawrant. 2016b. Conference Interpreting: A Trainer’s Guide. Amsterdam, Phila-
delphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Setton, Robin, and Erich Prunc. 2016. “Ethics.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies, edited by
Franz Pöchhacker, 144–8. London, New York: Routledge.
Tang, Sheng, and Yueliang Zhou. 1958. “Interpreting Work and the Training of Interpreters.” Languages
of the West 3: 321–7. (唐笙,周钰良. 1958. 口译工作及口译工作者的培养. 《西方语文》 3: 321–7)
Wadensjö, Cecilia. 1998. Interpreting as Interaction. London: Longman.
Wang, Bell, 2018. “A Simultaneous Interpreter’s Own Account of His IPR Being Possibly Breached by
iFlY TEK on Sept. 20.” https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/45010541
Wang, Binghua, and Dezheng Feng. 2018. “A Corpus-Based Study of Stance-Taking as Seen from Critical
Points in Interpreted Political Discourse.” Perspective 2: 246–60.
Yin, Mingyue. 2018. “Interpreter Ethics: Modeling and Empirical Study on Interpreters’ Moral Judgment
and Decision Making Process.” PhD diss., Sichuan University, Sichuan. (殷明月. 2018. 译员伦理 – 译
员道德判断与决策之建模与实证研究[D].)
Yu, Ming. 1951. “Lüetan Kouyi Gongzuo” [A Brief Discussion of Interpreting Work]. Fanyi Tongbao [The
Bulletin of Translation] 2, no. 6: 16. (玉明. 1951. 略谈口译工作. 《翻译通报》 2, no. 6: 16.)
Zhan, Cheng. 2012. The Interpreter’s Role as a Mediator in Political Settings. Beijing: Foreign Language Teach-
ing and Research Press.
Zhao, Tianyuan. Forthcoming. “Study on Setting an MTI Course ‘Professional Translation Ethics’ Based
on Language Service Market Demands and an MTI Survey.” Unpublished manuscript. (赵田园. 翻译
硕士“翻译职业伦理”课程构建研究 – 基于语言服务市场现状和MTI教学调研的反思.待刊发)
Further reading
Baker, Mona. 2018. “Beyond Equivalence: Ethics and Morality.” In In Other Words: A Coursebook on Transla-
tion [M], 3rd edition, 307–33. London, New York: Routledge.
This chapter is particularly suitable for the undergraduate/graduate students of interpreting programs
who start to look into the ethical issues in translation and interpreting activities. In this chapter, Baker
first makes an effort to differentiate the two terms – ethics and morality – which are often used
interchangeably or indiscriminately by practitioners and academics alike. She then explains a few
dichotomous terms – deontology vs. teleology, relativism vs. universalism, etc. – in moral philosophy,
which may be used as conceptual tools to help readers better understand, evaluate, and decide what is
ethical in ethically challenging situations. She also manages to analyze the relationships as well as the
differences between professionalism, code of ethics, and the law.
Donovan, Clare. 2011. “Ethics in the Teaching of Conference Interpreting.” The Interpreter and Translator
Trainer 5, no. 1: 10–28.
This article provides guidance for interpreter trainers to conduct professional ethical education. It points
out the shift of research interest in interpreting studies to interpreters’ roles in complex communicative
situations, states the reasons of such shift, and analyzes the consequences of professional self-perception
and socialization for the place of ethics in conference interpreter training. Donovan specifies how pro-
fessional ethics education is designed into the curricula in interpreting programs in EU countries, and
what is lacking and what needs improvement. Her vision on education of interpreters’ ethics sheds light
on interpreter training design for both professionalized and less professionalized interpreting markets.
Seeber, Kilian G., and Christian Zelger. 2007. “Betrayal: Vice or Virtue？An Ethical Perspective on Accu-
racy in Simultaneous Interpreting.” Meta: 290–8.
The authors explore the notion of accuracy (or “truthful rendition” as they prefer to use) in SI from
an ethical perspective rather than a merely linguistic one. It justifies that certain inaccurate renditions,
which appear to be a betrayal of the speaker at first sight, may be considered “truthful renditions” from
both a deontological and a teleological perspective. They then further propose the VSI (verbal, seman-
tic, and intentional) model to help interpreters produce truthful renditions.
210
15
Ethics in public service interpreting
1 Introduction
In public service interpreting (PSI), ethics is intricately interwoven with the role of interpreters.
Role refers to a particular behaviour of individuals in a particular situation. In PSI, ethically
challenging situations may be brought about by perceptions of the role of interpreters or their
performance of it, along with that of the other participants. These, depending on their severity
and the need to apply moral judgement, may be also called ethical dilemmas.
Interpreters’ role performance has been in the focus of PSI research since its beginnings.
Studies investigate role perceptions and interpreters’ performance, including in situations when
they cannot, or do not want to, behave as expected, as they are used to doing or as they are
trained to do. Interpreters and primary interactants (i.e. public service providers and users) as
well as scholars have divergent, often contradictory views of interpreters’ roles in institutional
encounters. This is largely because individuals with diverse backgrounds serve as interpreters,
and other interactants are often not aware of the complexity and the confines of the role of
interpreters.
PSI often involves high-stake encounters which may possibly entail life-changing decisions
for public service users’ futures. The interactants are driven by different motives, with interpret-
ers being granted access to confidential and private information. Much responsibility is placed
on the interpreters, and their performance might impact the outcome of the encounter both
positively and negatively, though the primary interactants are not necessarily aware of this. Also,
paradoxically, the other interactants have little control over the interpreters and have to trust in
them performing “correctly,” in other words, following ethical standards or fulfilling expecta-
tions that, however, are often neither explicit nor easy to perceive, and sometimes contradictory.
PSI is also characterised by systemic structural constraints. These include lack of awareness
as to the linguistic needs of non-native language service users (often marginalised minority
groups with low social prestige) and ad hoc solutions to language problems, including the use of
untrained interpreters in a sometimes adversarial and often under-resourced environment with
predominantly monolingual language ideologies. As interpreting is not legally regulated, with
court interpreting an exception in some jurisdictions, anyone feeling equal to the task may work
as an interpreter, irrespective of training or experience.
211
What has been said so far suggests that ethics would appear to be a prominent topic. Branded
as a “trendy topic” by Mikkelson (2000, 49), ethics, however, often seems to be used as a catch-
word or keyword, mentioned in the title or only in passing, with little reference to meta-ethical
thought or a deep-going discussion of ethical challenges. This review concentrates on research
that provides a more thorough discussion, though ethics is admittedly a topic encompassing the
gamut of research.
We include both spoken and signed/sign language (SL) interpreting, as ethical challenges
affect interpreters irrespective of the language modality used. Court interpreting is included
likewise, even if this domain is sometimes labelled a distinct field from PSI.
2 Trajectory
This trajectory can only sketch a rudimentary timeline mentioning some central publications.
Research on PSI can be traced back to the 1970s, with a surge after the 1990s and the consolida-
tion of PSI as a field of research since the early 2000s. Early ethics-oriented publications mostly
date back to the late 1990s (e.g. Schweda-Nicholson 1994; Hale and Luzardo 1997). With the
start of the 2000s, the topic became more prominent (e.g. Rudvin 2002; Hoza 2003) and was
also addressed in a review on interpreting ethics (Mikkelson 2000) and included in both the
Routledge Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies (Setton and Prunc 2015) and Handbook of Interpreting
(Ozolins 2015). The second half of the 2000s also saw the publication of collective volumes or
monographs in which ethics was covered more comprehensively (e.g. Inghilleri 2012; Valero-
Garcés 2014; Valero-Garcés and Tipton 2017). The publication of the first monograph focusing
solely on ethics in PSI in 2019 (Phelan, Rudvin, Skaaden, and Kermit 2019) and a special issue
of Translation and Interpreting Studies on the ethics of non-professional translation and interpret-
ing (eds. Monzó-Nebot and Wallace 2020) indicate that academia still deems the topic worthy
of attention.
As regards research methodology, the literature in this review presents the full gamut of
empirical research (besides more conceptual works). As is typical for PSI research, qualitative
approaches are more common than quantitative and are often mixed-methods studies including
observational studies, case studies, interview and focus group studies, ethnographic approaches
or action research. Qualitative sample size varies, with many small and few large samples; experi-
mental methods are rare.
3.1 Theoretical approaches

In her definition of ethics, Drugan (2018) differentiates between (1) “metaethics” (defining
the elements constituting ethics and morality), (2) “ethical concepts and theories” (discussing
specific ethical or moral principles), with deontological (assessing the morality of an action based
on a set of rules), teleological and consequentialist approaches (assessing behaviour based on its
consequences or outcome) and virtue ethics (placing human virtues in the centre) as three major
strands of thinking, and (3) “applied ethics” (applying “ethics” to the ethical or moral problems
in a field). Much of the literature on ethics in PSI falls into the third category. This is also in line
with Dean (2015, 96–101), who suggests that a normative ethical perspective and descriptive
approaches seem to be prevalent in PSI research, with only a few authors adopting a meta-ethical
perspective. What is salient is the lack of integration of translation studies (TS) theories. Prunc
(2017, and earlier), for instance, integrates functionalist theories (Holz-Mänttäri; Nord) in his
212
model of translation culture (i.e. the norms and expectations that frame interactants’ behaviour
in a field of translation). Toury’s concept of translational norms has found some use (e.g. Ing-
hilleri 2003; Merlini and Favaron 2009). Llewellyn-Jones and Lee’s (2014) role-space concept
appears to be one of the few concepts from Interpreting Studies (IS) proper that has been applied
to ethical issues (e.g. Kent 2012; Devaux 2017).
Only a few publications relate to (meta-)ethical concepts from the field of philosophy of eth-
ics: with her broad focus on ethics in interpreting justice in war zones, Inghilleri (2012) presents
an overview of different ethical perspectives, stressing that a consequentialist approach may be
more ethical than a strict deontological approach, as being impartial does not necessarily imply
ethical conduct, and partiality need not necessarily be unethical. A very insightful discussion of
ethical theories can also be found in Phelan et al. (2019). Also, with a focus on justice, Heben-
streit (2017), referring specifically to the German ethicist Pieper’s line of thought, applies value
theory and virtue ethics to map principles guiding asylum interpreters’ conduct to specific moral
values and virtues. Brander de la Iglesia (2012) outlines different approaches to ethics, centring
on developmental stages of moral reasoning (Kohlberg). In a monograph on police interpreting,
Mulayim and Lai (2017) review ethical theories and stress that it is necessary to outline the moral
purpose of a profession (Fullinwider), that is to say, delivering a service for public good, which
should be stated in a preamble to a code (see also Camayd-Freixas (2013) for a similar stance).
The responsibility of the self (Niebuhr and Mandelbaum) is at the centre of Dean and Pollard’s
(2011) model of context-based ethical reasoning.
Other lines of thinking on ethics that are taken up are, for instance, Aristotelian ethics
(Kermit 2007), the ethics of interpersonal communication and holding ground (Kent 2012),
theories of prima facie duties (Mendoza 2012) and ethical responsibility (Dean and Pollard
2011), moral judgement (Hoza 2003; Dean 2015) and ethical maturity (Mills Stewart and
Witter-Merithew 2006). They all seem to depart from a deontological view and lean towards
a more teleological or consequentialist perspective of ethics. In spite of the range of different
theories applied, little metalevel reflection on their suitability or commensurability seems to
be present.
3.2 Central strands of topics

Topics such as role perceptions and expectations, dilemmas, role metaphors or typologies linked
therewith are pervasive throughout the literature. In what follows, we outline strands of themes
that emerge from a closer reading, bearing in mind that the borders between different categories
may be blurred and more than one theme may be present in works.
3.2.1 Codes clashing with reality

After training institutions, it is ethical codes which are the most central in imparting specific
role expectations. Ethical codes for PSI, often modelled on traditional conference interpreters’
codes, are not known either to all interpreters, especially those who serve as interpreters on
an ad hoc basis, or to service providers and users, and are often too generic to be of help in
quandaries. Studies have proved that the mechanistic role that is often ascribed to interpret-
ers cannot always be upheld in practice. This mismatch between codes and reality is a major
strand of thought (see also Chapter 20 “Ethics codes for interpreters and translators” in this
volume). Seminal works are, for instance, Tate and Turner (1997) for SL interpreting or Kaufert
and Putsch (1997) for spoken language interpreting, who stressed that ethical guidelines that
prioritise accuracy and neutrality fail to “take into account issues such as class, power, disparate
213
beliefs, lack of linguistic equivalence, or the disparate use of language” (1997, 72), a point
of criticism that is still valid. Tate and Turner (1997, 28) also hold that the “hegemony” of a
“machine” role has created a “conspiracy of silence” because interpreters, for fear of violating
the principle of confidentiality, feel they have no space in which they can discuss “role-dynamic
dilemmas.” They presented interpreters with a range of scenarios of ethical dilemmas and
analysed their individual dilemma resolutions, suggesting that “in ethically complex situations,
either the strictures of the Code itself or interpreters’ readings of its prescriptions were often
at odds with actual practice” (1997, 27). Several scholars have also proposed ways of addressing
this mismatch between codes and reality.
One compelling example is Camayd-Freixas (2013), who, motivated by a personal dilemma
he had experienced as an interpreter, urges professional associations to revise their codes, for
example by including a preamble that outlines the “guiding virtues of the profession” (16) (also
see Chesterman 2001). Camayd-Freixas bluntly criticises interpreters’ associations for seeming
“unprepared to deal with a major ethical challenge” (6) when these had failed to adopt an offi-
cial position after he had made public practices which human rights activists viewed as abusive
“crimmigration” of migrants (2–3): in an immigration raid in Postville (Iowa), illegal immigrants
were sentenced in fast-track prosecutions for “identity theft.” Interpreters such as Camayd-
Freixas had been contracted for this “secretive mission” and they thus unwittingly became wit-
nesses of massive human rights abuses: “By simply doing my job and following my code of ethics
to the letter, I, like the rest of the participants, had facilitated the wrongful demise of hundreds
of impoverished workers and vulnerable families” (Camayd-Freixas 2013, 3). Camayd-Freixas
decided to break with the principle of confidentiality and speak out: “Denouncing the proceed-
ings after they were over, at my own personal and professional risk, was the only ethical choice”
(6). He claims that in order not to become “accomplices” and “facilitators of abuse” (2013, 10),
interpreters should be allowed to be guided by their moral sentiment and empathy to confront
human rights abuses.
With a focus on asylum interpreting and from a socio-political and anthropological perspec-
tive, Gibb and Good (2014) review interpreters’ codes in a comprehensive ethnographic study
of UK and France asylum procedures and point to the “naivety” of expecting interpreters to be
invisible. They argue that conflicting expectations and contradictory advice conveyed by codes
obscure the fact that interpreters are active participants who often have to take complex deci-
sions (396).
That interpreters are not always able or willing to live up to expectations is also shown by
Pöllabauer (2004), who suggests in a discourse analytical study that interpreters in an asylum
context, in contradiction to normative role prescriptions, often adopt more interventionist roles,
sometimes also serving as co-interrogators who side with the caseworkers, seemingly often
because they do feel obliged to do so, while at the same time also trying to maintain rapport
with the applicants. Such conflicting expectations are a source of role dissonance, and they also
make it more difficult for the other participants to place trust in the interpreter.
Looking into the multi-agency context of social work, Tipton (2014) suggests in a mixed-
methods qualitative study that if the codes of different professional groups – here social workers’
and interpreters’ codes – do not align, the negotiation of expectations and relationship work
may be hampered. Based on a survey among professionals in the same field, Drugan (2017, 127)
stresses the importance of ethics training for interpreters: while social workers can rely on con-
tractually enforced codes of ethics and are required to attend ethics training, not all interpreters,
especially ad hoc interpreters, “can rely on the same sort of ethical infrastructure.”
Within the adversarial context of interpreting in prisons, a field that is strife with ethi-
cal tensions and conflictual rapport, Martínez-Gómez (2014) suggests that non-professional
214
interpreters in prisons both intentionally and non-intentionally “challenge relevant norms”

(174) due to lack of competence or the desire to comply with user expectations.
Resera, Tribe, and Lane (2014, 204), who have conducted focus group interviews with
interpreters working in mental health settings, hold that the role ascribed to interpreters may
belittle their actual significance in the encounter as they are usually “fully engaged participants
in the three-way relationship and contribute to it in a wide range of ways.” In mental health
settings, however, where a relationship of trust between service users and the interpreter is
essential, interpreters walk a very fine line in keeping professional distance and are often likely to
become overinvolved. Therefore, some interpreters view clear role boundaries as a strategy for
coping with the challenges of mental health interpreting and service users’ demands (Doherty,
MacIntyre, and Wyne 2010). Challenges such as these and the emotional content of mental
health encounters may impact interpreters’ well-being (see Chapter 27 “Ethical stress in transla-
tion and interpreting” in this volume).
3.2.2 Degrees of interpreter agency

What has been said so far indicates that interpreters’ roles can be traced on a continuum from
a distinctively distanced and non-activist role to a decidedly (intentionally or unintentionally)
activist and interventionist role, with a range of roles in between. Even if prescriptive demands
on the role of interpreters, emphasising interpreters’ “invisibility,” are sometimes still present,
research suggests that a mechanistic “conduit role,” in which interpreters are viewed as machines
that passively convey information from one language into another, often cannot be or is pur-
posely not upheld in practice as interpreters adopt hybrid roles, especially in asymmetrical situ-
ations or exchanges of a sensitive, intimate nature.
Interpreters’ agency may include interpreters serving as helpers or advocates of the less pow-
erful party; interpreters as institutional allies (co-interviewers, co-interrogators, co-therapists,
even facilitators of abuse); interpreters as communication facilitators, who are responsible for
interactional management; and interpreters as agents of change, cultural brokers or intercultural
agents, who contribute to the empowerment of the less powerful party (for a review of meta-
phors of manifestations of interpreter agency see, for example, Roy 1993; Ozolins 2014). The
term agency can be defined as “active force, action or power” (Collins Dictionary 2019a). It is
specifically this plea for, or denigration of, greater action and power of interpreters that is a
central theme and makes interpreters’ work ethically challenging.
3.2.2.1 Interpreter non-involvement

The controversy around interpreters as mere (verbatim) translators of content (conduit-like
translation devices) as opposed to interpreters conveying meaning and “interpreting” speakers’
utterances is particularly prevalent in court interpreting and in Anglo-American common law
jurisdictions. Acknowledging interpreters’ potentially intrusive power challenges the “legal fic-
tion” that an original message can, after simple conversion into another language, “continue to
function . . . as an original text” (Morris 1995, 30). A number of scholars have argued that the
role of court interpreters as mechanistic language-converters cannot be upheld. Data suggest that
interpreters do indeed influence legal proceedings, by changing the pragmatic effect and register
of talk (Hale 2004) or adding content to convey supposed meaning (Jacobsen 2003; Hale 2008).
While empirical research seems to indicate that complete non-involvement is often not fea-
sible, some, nonetheless, seem to nurture the idealistic belief in the practicability of a verbatim
translation. Goodman-Delahunty and Martschuk (2016), for instance, in a study based on a large
215
(N = 121) sample of semi-structured interviews with police and military officers show that some
officers still expect interpreters to provide a “word-for-word translation” (467) and adhere to
professional codes. In a similar vein, Lee (2017) also views adherence to professional ethics as
fundamental: based on a video-recorded murder case in South Korea and the subsequent textual
representation of the interview in the interview record and court documents, Lee shows that
alteration of witness statements and faulty renditions on the part of the interpreter may remain
undetected. While her conclusion that training interpreters, and training police officials in how
to work with interpreters, is most significant, her suggestion to “adhere to professional ethics”
(195) may not be of help to interpreters in concrete dilemmas arising in spite of training.
In an experimental study in a police context, Hale, Goodman-Delahunty, and Martschuk
(2018, 8) also use criteria such as “accuracy of propositional content” and “appropriate use of
interpreting protocols” to assess differences in the performance of trained vs. untrained inter-
preters, proving that training does indeed make a difference in performance. The study counts
among the few to compare the performance of trained vs. untrained interpreters.
In healthcare and mental health contexts, studies drawing on interviews with medical
interpreters, healthcare providers and patients have shown that while some healthcare pro-
viders and patients prefer an idealised role of the interpreter as mechanical conduit, other
healthcare providers and patients alike expect interpreters to adopt a more engaged role,
including, for instance, the articulation of personal opinions, providing practical support
and emotional comfort, and keeping interactants’ secrets (e.g. Hsieh 2006, 726–727; Zend-
edel et al. 2016, 983). Negative ethical implications of such proactive roles, such as the
other interactants’ feeling of disempowerment (Zendedel et al. 2016, 984–985) or denying
healthcare providers the opportunity to assess patients’ true health literacy (Hsieh 2013)
are mentioned at times but hardly discussed thoroughly in the literature on healthcare
interpreting. Based on the observation that some healthcare practitioners want interpret-
ers to merely translate while others consider them part of the team and expect them to
take active roles, Clifford (2004) describes the development of the relationship between
healthcare providers and interpreters and links it to the ethical principles in TS outlined
by Pym (2001): as the relationship grows and trust and familiarity are gained, interpreters
progress from conduits (“ethics of representation”) to trusted active team members (“ethics
of respect for norms”).
3.2.2.2 Interpreter involvement

As degrees of interpreter involvement vary, the following outlines the challenges related to
increased involvement and agency.
3.2.2.2.1 INTERPRETERS AS COMMUNICATION FACILITATORS AND CULTURAL BROKERS

As Wadensjö (1998) has comprehensively shown in her seminal monograph, interpreters as lan-
guage and communication experts are active parties in triadic encounters, who may also need
to facilitate communication and understanding by coordinating talk – a view that has since been
recurrently confirmed in PSI research.
The “myth” of a mere mechanistic role of interpreters’ is, for instance, unveiled by Nakane
(2009) who studies real-life English-Japanese interpreter-mediated police interviews and stresses
the discrepancies between prescriptive tenets conveyed by codes and interpreters’ behaviour. He
particularly shows that interpreters use strategies to manage discourse and maintain interactional
alignment and serve as a “cultural bridge” (6). His examples also offer proof of the fact, however,
that the “mismanagement” of such strategies may be problematic and sometimes also unethical
216
and to the detriment of interviewees, especially if interpreters elicit responses from suspects or
leave out information of their own accord.
That interpreters adopt different, sometimes also conflicting “habitus,” a concept borrowed
from Bourdieu, which can roughly be described as ingrained habits and dispositions, is also
addressed by Inghilleri (2003) in a publication on interpreting in an asylum context: in spite of
the prevalence of the invisibility norm in a monolingual monoculture such as the British asylum
system, interpreters adopt different roles and sometimes become over-involved, providing advice
and attempting to serve as cultural mediators and advocates for the applicants. In a follow-up
ethnographic study on interpreting in asylum interviews, Inghilleri (2005) stresses that interpret-
ers, however, may not always be in a position to successfully act as cultural mediators as their
habitus “remains vulnerable to exercises of power outside of their control” (13).
Cooke (2009), based on interviews with interpreters, explores how trained interpreters with an
Aboriginal background struggle with their professional role in court settings, trying to uphold the
principles of the Australian code of ethics when Aboriginal customary law and culture requires them
to serve as cultural brokers. The complex Aboriginal kinship system sets the rules for how to speak
and behave with one another. Interpreters with an Aboriginal background will, in spite of a West-
ern training background, thus often be expected to comply with group expectations, for example
sharing or not sharing specific information, explaining specific terms, behaving respectfully towards
elders, or rephrasing disrespectful language. As these expectations will inevitably collide with the
professional codes, interpreters may often feel compelled to serve as cultural brokers. Specifically
because of these conflicting expectations, some, as a consequence, refuse to work in such settings.
Based on recordings from a court trial, Defrancq and Verliefede (2017) explore how an
interpreter handles a specific (“paternalistic”) participation framework that, imposed by the rules
of procedure, is upheld at a Belgian criminal court, whereby the defendant is a bystander who
is treated as an unaddressed recipient and referred to in the third person rather than talked to
directly as the addressee. This situation prompts the interpreter to employ a series of strategies
that lead her to breach major provisions of her code of ethics. The interpreter sets up a paral-
lel participation framework by directly addressing the defendant in the second person instead
of referring to her in the third person, which also facilitates brokering cultural and procedural
knowledge for the defendant, both actions that “seem to be instrumental in protecting the
defendant against a powerful court” (227).
Määttä (2018) also discusses an example of an interpreter who assumes an active role as a
coordinator of turns in a phone interpreting encounter in which French was used as a lingua
franca by the interpreter and the suspect in an investigative interview. The overall situation
was shaped by severe communication problems, and he concludes that codes of ethics convey
unrealistic expectations, particularly in environments with strictly monolithic language ide-
ologies such as law enforcement, making it necessary for interpreters to serve as active agents
in the “co-construction, maintenance, and erasure of indexical meanings” (1). This example
of phone interpreting is also one of two examples in this chapter that fall under the broader field
of remote interpreting. While remote interpreting has been prominent in IS research, interpret-
ers’ role perceptions in such contexts are still under-researched, and apart from Devaux (2017,
also see later), ethical issues seem to have been tackled mainly between the lines.
3.2.2.2.2 INTERPRETERS AS ADVOCATES

Advocacy can be defined as “active support of a cause” (Collins 2019b), or, as we would suggest,
“active support of someone.” The examples provided previously already suggest that interpreters
often show active and interventionist support of (at least) one party and their cause. The lines
217
between different forms of advocacy, however, are blurred, and support for one party or the
other may shift. More extreme forms of support may also take the form of active empowerment
of the weaker party, or even partisanship, which may carry negative consequences for some.
Barsky’s (1996) seminal research on interpreting in an asylum context may be counted among
those which support a pronouncedly activist role of interpreters that stretches beyond the role
of cultural broker. Interpreters as “intercultural agents” should, according to him, help empower
applicants for asylum by intervening on their behalf and also embellishing their claims. Interpret-
ers themselves, however, do not always seem to agree with such an activist role: survey results
(Fenton 2001) suggest that interpreters themselves are sometimes hesitant to “violate” the prin-
ciple of impartiality and adopt an overly activist role, also fearing pressure from asylum applicants
and impact on their private lives.
For the field of healthcare interpreting, Hilfinger Messias, McDowell, and Estrada (2009)
advocate a “social justice” perspective with interpreters as cross-language and transcultural advo-
cates. Based on interviews with formal (paid) and informal (unpaid) interpreters they discuss
how interpreters, witnessing the discrimination and structural and informational barriers faced
by patients with limited proficiency in English in the US healthcare system, promote health
and are advocates for patients’ rights by serving as patient advocates, system navigators and
cultural brokers. Similarly, Hsieh (2013) uses extracts from interpreted medical encounters to
illustrate how interpreters can enhance patients’ health literacy and empower them to act as
“self-advocates,” for instance by making implicit information such as social norms or cultural
knowledge explicit, by reminding patients about questions to discuss with healthcare provid-
ers, and by helping them navigate the healthcare system. While she acknowledges that these
strategies and their consequences must be critically examined as they may, in fact, impair patient
autonomy, she argues that “it is essential that medical interpreters . . . actively respond to the
situational and contextual demands to ensure that a patient is informed and empowered to make
autonomous decisions” (47).
While impartiality and a high level of accuracy seem to be considered a foundation of qual-
ity court interpreting in Western countries, and there is discussion about whether interpreters
should explain cultural references, studies from non-Western countries seem to indicate a greater
acceptance of a more active and advocative role of the interpreter. Using a mixed-methods
approach, Ibrahim (2007) shows that in Malaysia, interpreters, who are employed as civil servants
and are involved before the court is in session, during and after the hearing, not only interpret
but act as clerks of the courts and advocates for underrepresented defendants, assisting in formu-
lating questions and responses and providing procedural advice.
De Pedro Ricoy, Howard, and Andrade (2018) explore in a qualitative study, based on inter-
views with interpreters and other interlocutors and a case study, how Peruvian state-trained
indigenous interpreters, who serve as interpreters in the Peruvian “Prior Consultation Process,”
struggle with upholding traditional principles such as neutrality and impartiality that are instilled
in them through state training. The consultation process allows indigenous communities to be
heard before the realisation of projects that are often linked to the industrialisation of natural
resources. The context of these talks is ruled by commercial motives and a clash of cultural
interests where indigenous interpreters as emic participants, in other words, members of the
communities themselves, are potentially likewise affected by the outcome of these consultations
and may thus be more inclined to adopt a partisan role. Community members often particularly
want interpreters to adopt a dual role forcing interpreters to “walk the tightrope” (206) between
conflicting demands.
Another field, where in-group interpreters are required to adopt a more involved role, is the
field of religious interpreting. Interpreters as fellow believers from within the community are
218
expected to be deeply involved as has been shown by Hokkanen (2017) in an autoethnographic

study of interpreting in the Finnish Pentecostal church. In such a context, it might, in fact, be
viewed as unethical not to serve as a “spiritual conduit” (Kotzé 2018). Based on the findings of
an ethnographic study of church interpreters in a Swiss Pentecostal community, Hild (2017) also
suggests that interpreters serve as “co-constructors” of meaning in a partnership where neutrality
is untenable (191).
Contexts where interpreters are part of a team and employed on a permanent basis also seem
to grant greater leeway to interpreters. Hauser, Finch, and Hauser (2008), for instance, present a
number of contributions which address ethical challenges for so-called designated interpreters,
that is to say, SL interpreters who work for Deaf 1 professionals in various workplace settings on
a permanent basis. In such environments, interpreters need to develop a close and often very
personal rapport with “their” clients and are involved in both micro (interpreter and profes-
sional) and macro (other staff) teamwork. Cook (2004) refers to similar demands on interpreters,
though she calls this form of interpreting “diplomatic.” If interpreters work with Deaf profes-
sionals on a permanent basis, typical power structures may be reversed. Due to the “covenantal”
(not “contractual”) ties between professional and interpreter, neutrality may no longer be ten-
able (Cook 2004, 64) and interpreters may even be required to be biased, as relations in such
a context need to be built on trust; “favouring” the Deaf professional may be the appropriate
ethical choice (66).
3.2.3 Social justice and fairness

One strand of thought that is linked with an interventionist role of interpreters, or the lack
thereof, are systemic constraints which may either help to induce or hinder social justice and
fairness. Studies that fall under this category are of high ethical relevance, though issues of eth-
ics are not always spelt out comprehensively. Findings suggest that interpreters are often aware
of the fact that their decisions are basically ethical ones in that the format and quality of their
interpreting may help to promote social justice. Sometimes, however, they seem to lack such a
gut feeling and basic moral understanding, and through their actions, they may even contribute
to exacerbating structural asymmetries.
Based on interviews with interpreters, Howes (2018), for instance, holds that the presence of
interpreters may influence the fairness of investigative (police) interviews negatively due to sys-
temic constraints “arising from the structure of the interpreting profession and situational aspects
of the police interview” (1). Also focusing on police investigative interviews, Gallai (2017, 177)
suggests that interpreting may, in fact, “disempower the interviewee”: “. . . utterances by pri-
mary participants are subject to distortion, omission or amplification. This can be so subtle that
neither the officer nor the interviewee notices resulting miscommunication” (190).
Monolingual institutional language ideologies that are in conflict with applicants’ “deter-
ritorialized” language practices are also taken up by Jacquemet (2011), who emphasises that the
choices made by interpreters (e.g. lexis, phonetics) may also contribute to a communicative
breakdown in the “institutional roulette” (482) of asylum interviews. “Distortions” that may
come along with translation or interpretation “from a multilingual setting to the monolingual
adjudicative process of asylum” (Craig and Gramling 2017, 96) are also critically discussed from
a law perspective by Craig and Gramling. In their view, acknowledging a “right to untranslat-
ability” would mean acknowledging the fact that within the asylum adjudication system certain
concepts are “untranslatables,” and that officials would need to bear this in mind and make
greater efforts to communicate with asylum applicants, instead of “solely [trusting] in the ability
of the interpreter to communicate” (97).
219
3.2.4 Frameworks for ethical reasoning and decision-making

The specifics of decision-making in ethically challenging situations are another recurrent theme,
addressed in models of decision-making, on a theoretical level and the basis of empirical data.
3.2.4.1 Models of ethical decision-making

Some very basic theoretical models of decision-making, mostly with a step-by-step approach
to problem identification and solution, can be found in practical resource books, often from
the field of SL interpreting (for a review see Hoza 2003). The value of such models is their
applicability for training as they can easily be used to discuss and reflect practical examples.
More profound models have also been developed within the context of SL interpreting. With a
focus on SL and Deaf interpreters (individuals who are Deaf and interpret for Deaf clients and
SL interpreters), Witter-Merithew and Mills Stewart (1998) present a theoretical framework
for developing “ethical fitness” as early as 1998, aiming at breaking up right vs. wrong ethical
decision-making. Based on the assumption that ethical maturity requires cultivation through
training, they use Perry’s scheme of ethical development to discuss practical examples that can
be used for ethical training (also see Mills Stewart and Witter-Merithew 2006 for a more com-
prehensive resource book).
Hoza (2003) presents a five-step Comprehensive Model of Ethical Decision Making, which
is also rooted in SL interpreting and based on Lombardi’s levels of moral analysis and can be
applied to “right vs. right” decisions that need to be taken in dilemma situations. “Interpreter
sensibility,” which is defined as a “deep bicultural/multicultural awareness” (1), is central to
Hoza’s model.
One of the most well-known schemas for “context-based ethical reasoning” that has been
applied widely in US SL interpreter training is Dean and Pollard’s (2001, 2011) Demand Control
Schema (DC-S). This is based on Karasek’s Demand Control Theory that addresses occupational
health (stress) and work effectiveness. The DC-S presents a teleological framework for reasoning
ethical decisions that hinges on the dialogical analysis of the situational context of interpreted
situations and assumes that “practice decisions are ethical decisions” (159).
3.2.4.2 Ethical reasoning from a theoretical perspective

Prunc’s (1997) concept of “translation culture” (first described in 1997; for details see Chapter
5 “Functional translation theories and ethics” in this volume) is a construct that has also been
applied to ethical decision-making in PSI. Translation culture can be defined as the diachronic-
ally and diaculturally variable set of norms, conventions and expectations framing interactants’
actions. Central aspects are loyalty, transparency and ecologicity. Prunc outlines different rela-
tions between source texts and target texts stressing that trialogical situations (Prunc 2011, 138),
in which translators serve as active third parties, require translators to take ethically challenging
decisions which may also include the “declination” or “refusal” of translation. Permeating most
of Prunc’s work is his plea for more agency for translators: any form of translation is seen as a
decision-making process requiring self-responsible, ethically and morally grounded conduct on
the part of the translator. With a focus on PSI, he criticises the naïve and defeatist (2011, 135)
upholding of impartiality in codes that are modelled on conference interpreting ethics, and, in
one of his last publications (2017, 34), calls for a more “democratic translation culture” in which
translators, as human beings who should strive for a higher good, are entitled and even obliged
to intervene on behalf of the less powerful party. Prunc’s approach has not been used as widely in
IS as one might expect in the face of such a broad approach. Among its applications is Martinsen
220
and Dubslaff ’s (2010) investigation of a trained yet apparently incompetent interpreter’s perfor-
mance in a Danish court.
3.2.4.3 Research on interpreters’ decision-making

One strand of research focuses on how to integrate ethical training into PSI training. Based on
interviews with court interpreters, Devaux (2017) suggests that interpreters prefer deontology-
based decisions and may not be well enough trained to rationalise decisions in dilemma situations
in terms of consequentialism or virtue ethics.
Results of a qualitative interview study lead Kaczmarek (2012) to suggest specific training
activities (e.g. learning diaries, role-play exercises, and observations of professional interpreters’
live performance) to address ethical dilemmas in the classroom, stressing that interpreter training
that is based solely on the criteria of ethical codes “will leave little if any room for dealing with
the ethical dilemmas that a community interpreter faces in real-life assignments” (2012, 230).
Differences between expert and novice interpreter decision-making routines are taken up
by Mendoza (2012). Based on a mixed-methods approach (surveys, interviews), Mendoza finds
that while both groups prioritise “fidelity,” “do good” and “reparation,” novice interpreters tend
to apply a “black and white” perspective and low-context, individualistic discourse patterns in
ethical decision-making, while experts apply a multi-layered, high-context perspective.
Mendoza’s typology of interpreters’ discourse narratives is used by Sheneman (2016), who
seems to have been the first to investigate Deaf interpreters’ ethical decision-making. Her
exploratory interview study suggests that most Deaf interpreters’ decision-making is guided by
intuition, which is shaped by experience and training.
Kent (2002) analyses the dynamics at interpreted staff meetings (interpreting for Deaf staff
in a group of hearing staff) where interpreters as group members have to make “informed
decisions” so as not to perpetuate group inequalities and argues that strict adherence to profes-
sional standards may even reinforce Deaf individuals’ minority status as “victims” who need to
be “rescued” by interpreters. Power dynamics are also discussed by Russell and Shaw (2016),
who study decision-making in interpreter teams comprising Deaf and hearing interpreters in a
legal context with a qualitative research design. Their findings suggest that the power dynamics
in interpreter teams may sometimes have a negative influence on the interaction. Participants’
conceptualisation of interpreting (as self, team partner, consumer) has also been shown to
impact interpreters’ decision-making, suggesting that “the interpreter’s own awareness of power
and privilege is a crucial prerequisite to support active decision-making that facilitates effective
interpretation” (1).
4 Emerging issues and conclusions

What is evident from a closer reading of the PSI literature on ethics is that certain topics or
perspectives are underrepresented. It might thus be worthwhile for research to leave the well-
trodden path and explore new avenues. For the remainder of these concluding remarks, we will,
therefore, outline some issues that seem to merit greater attention.
It has to be noted that, probably for reasons of accessibility, the literature in this review pre-
dominantly focuses on WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic) spheres
of populations (see Drugan 2018). Besides, a distinct gender perspective seems long overdue.
Our review does not include any empirical research with a distinct focus on gender-related
ethical issues. Gender awareness, let alone feminist theory, seems to be grossly neglected in PSI
ethics. Norma and Garcia-Caro (2016), in a conceptual contribution, criticise the interpreting
221
profession’s “superficial” understanding of impartiality and advocate alternative interpreter ethics

and greater feminist engagement, where victim safety should rank above neutrality.
As regards emerging topics, ethical decision-making by Deaf interpreters currently seems to
be gaining more attention. Even though the ethics of training and working with Deaf interpret-
ers have been discussed in a US context for some time, to date, this topic seems to have attracted
less attention in European countries. Another topic that would merit more comprehensive ethi-
cal guidance even though it has been present for some time, mostly in mental health research, is
trauma-informed interpreting and related issues (coping strategies, supervision).
Public service users’ vulnerability is a field rife with ethical challenges but under-researched;
see, for example, Salaets and Balogh (2015) for the only larger project on interpreting for minors
in police hearings, Keselman, Cederborg, and Linell (2010) on the ethics of interpreting for
children as a specifically vulnerable group of clients, and Crump and Glickman (2011) on ethi-
cal decision-making in interpreting for language-dysfluent Deaf clients. Interpreting for other
individuals with a high degree of vulnerability (e.g. LGBTI, elderly people, or individuals with
language dysfluencies) might entail different ethical dilemmas and would thus also seem worthy
of more research.
Remote interpreting has also been prominent in IS research but lacks a comprehensive
ethics-based framework. And even though language shifts (Hlavac 2010) and the use of a lingua
franca (Määttä 2018) have been discussed with a focus on ethics, it might also be worthwhile to
take a closer look at the ethical implications of choice of language, and choice of interpreters, in
court or extra-court legal settings. It is also surprising that there is little in-depth discussion of
ethical issues related to the use of untrained ad hoc interpreters and the underuse of professional
interpreters, particularly in healthcare settings, from an IS perspective.
This glimpse into different emerging issues and potential strands of debate suggests that PSI
research on ethics still has a busy schedule ahead and needs not fear a lack of interesting research
topics that spoken and SL interpreting scholars may delve into.
To conclude, it seems fair to say that research on ethics in PSI has become less normative;
descriptive approaches within applied ethics seem to outweigh prescriptive approaches to ethical
challenges and decision-making. Our review of different domains of PSI suggests that issues of
role are still often prevailing and that in many cases, a discussion of ethics ultimately boils down
to the well-known controversy around the interpreter’s (in)visibility and degree of agency. What
is also obvious is that meta-ethics is still a side issue. Scholarship might benefit from an infusion
with different meta-ethical perspectives and current lines of ethical thought and meta-ethical
theory-building, which would perhaps allow for a fresh perspective on interpreter ethics that
can be applied to both interpreting practice and training.

Ethics of volunteering in translation and interpreting; ethics of activist translation and interpret-
ing; ethics codes for interpreters and translators; ethics in translator and interpreter training;
ethics in child language brokering; translating and interpreting in conflict and crisis; ethical stress
in translation and interpreting.
Note
1 Deaf (with a capital D) is often used by or to refer to individuals who view themselves as being culturally
Deaf and as members of the Deaf community, while deaf (with a small d) is used to refer to the medical
condition of hearing loss.
222
References
Barsky, Robert F. 1996. “The Interpreter as Intercultural Agent in Convention Refugee Hearings.” The
Brander de la Iglesia, María. 2012. “Fit to Be Shared? Measuring the Acquisition of Ethical Awareness in
Interpreting Students.” In Iberian Studies on Translation and Interpreting, edited by Isabel García-Izquierdo,
and Esther Monzó, 91–102. Peter Lang: Oxford.
Interpreting in a Changing Landscape: Selected Papers from Critical Link 6, edited by Christina Schäffner,
Krzysztof Kredens, and Yvonne Fowler, 15–30. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Collins Dictionary. 2019a. “Agency.” Accessed August 3, 2019. www.collinsdictionary.com/de/
worterbuch/englisch/agency
Collins Dictionary. 2019b. “Advocacy.” Accessed August 3, 2019. www.collinsdictionary.com/de/
worterbuch/englisch/agency
Cook, Amy P. 2004. “Neutrality? No Thanks: Can a Biased Role Be an Ethical One?” Journal of Interpreta-
tion: 57–74.
Cooke, Michael S. 2009. “Interpreter Ethics versus Customary Law: Quality and Compromise in Aborigi-
nal Languages Interpreting.” In The Critical Link 5: Quality in Interpreting: A Shared Responsibility, edited
by Sandra Hale, Uldis Ozolins, and Ludmila Stern, 85–97. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Craig, Sarah, and David Gramling. 2017. “Is There a Right to Untranslatability? Asylum, Evidence and
the Listening State.” Tilburg Law Review 22, no. 1–2: 77–98.
Crump, Charlene, and Neil Glickman. 2011. “Mental Health Interpreting with Language Dysfluent Deaf
Clients.” Journal of Interpretation 21, no. 1: Article 3.
Dean, Robyn K. 2015. “Sign Language Interpreters’ Ethical Discourse and Moral Reasoning Patterns.”
PhD diss., Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.
Dean, Robyn K., and Robert Q. Pollard. 2001. “The Application of Demand Control Theory to Sign
Language Interpreting: Implications for Stress and Interpreter Training.” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf
Education 6, no. 1: 1–14.
Dean, Robyn K., and Robert Q. Pollard. 2011. “Context-Based Ethical Reasoning in Interpreting: A
Demand Control Schema Perspective.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1: 155–82.
Defrancq, Bart, and Sofie Verliefde. 2017. “Interpreter-Mediated ‘Paternalistic’ Interaction in a Judge-
Centered Courtroom.” Interpreting 19, no. 2: 209–31.
De Pedro Ricoy, Raquel, Rosaleen Howard, and Luis Andrade Ciudad. 2018. “Walking the Tightrope: The
Role of Peruvian Indigenous Interpreters in Prior Consultation Processes.” Target 30, no. 2: 187–211.
Devaux, Jérôme. 2017. “Virtual Presence, Ethics and Videoconference Interpreting: Insights from Court
Settings.” In Ideology, Ethics and Policy Development in Public Service Interpreting and Translation, edited by Car-
men Valero-Garcés, and Rebecca Tipton, 131–50. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters.
Doherty, Sharon, Anna MacIntyre, and Tara Wyne. 2010. “How Does It Feel for You? The Emotional Impact
and Specific Challenges of Mental Health Interpreting.” Mental Health Review Journal 15, no. 3: 31–44.
Drugan, Joanna. 2018. “Ethics.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, edited by Piers
Rawling, and Philip Wilson, Chapter 15. London: Routledge.
Fenton, Sabine. 2001. “Expressing a Well-Founded Fear: Interpreting in Convention Refugee Hearings.”
Accessed August 3, 2019. www.refugee.org.nz/Sabine.html
Gallai, Fabrizio. 2017. “Pragmatic Competence and Interpreter-Mediated Police Investigative Interviews.”
The Translator 23, no. 2: 177–96.
Gibb, Robert, and Anthony Good. 2014. “Interpretation, Translation and Intercultural Communication
in Refugee Status Determination Procedures in the UK and France.” Language and Intercultural Com-
munication 14, no. 3: 385–99.
Goodman-Delahunty, Jane, and Natalie Martschuk. 2016. “Risks and Benefits of Interpreter-Mediated
Police Interviews.” Varstvoslovje: Journal of Criminal Justice & Security 18, no. 4: 451–71.
Hale, Sandra B. 2004. The Discourse of Court Interpreting: Discourse Practices of the Law, the Witness, and the
Interpreter. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
223
Hale, Sandra B. 2008. “Controversies over the Role of the Court Interpreter.” In Crossing Borders in Com-
munity Interpreting: Definitions and Dilemmas, edited by Carmen Valero-Garcés, 99–121. Amsterdam,
Hale, Sandra B., Jane Goodman-Delahunty, and Natalie Martschuk. 2018. “Interpreter Performance in
Police Interviews: Differences between Trained Interpreters and Untrained Bilinguals.” The Interpreter
and Translator Trainer: 1–25.
Hale, Sandra B., and César Luzardo. 1997. “What Am I Expected to Do? The Interpreter’s Ethical
Dilemma: A Study of Arabic, Spanish and Vietnamese Speakers’ Perceptions and Expectations of Inter-
preters.” Antipodean: 10–16.
Hauser, Peter C., Karen L. Finch, and Angela B. Hauser, eds. 2008. Deaf Professionals and Designated Inter-
preters: A New Paradigm. Washington, DC: Gallaudet.
Hebenstreit, Gernot. 2017. “Justice as a Guiding Principle? Considering Ethical Values Underlying Work-
ing Principles for Interpreters in Asylum Hearings.” In Les Llengües Minoritzades En l’ordre Postmonolingüe,
edited by Esther Monzó-Nebot, and Joan Jiménez Salcedo, 5–14. Castelló de la Plana: Publicacions de
la Universitat Jaume.
Hild, Adelina. 2017. “The Role and Self-Regulation of Non-Professional Interpreters in Religious Set-
tings: The VIRS Project.” In Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation: State of the Art and Future of an
Emerging Field of Research, edited by Rachele Antonini, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi,
177–94. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hilfinger Messias, DeAnne K., Liz McDowell, and Robin Dawson Estrada. 2009. “Language Interpreting
as Social Justice Work: Perspectives of Formal and Informal Healthcare Interpreters.” Advances in Nursing
Science 32, no. 2: 128–43.
Hlavac, Jim. 2010. “Ethical Implications in Situations where the Language of Interpretation Shifts: The
AUSIT Code of Ethics.” Translation & Interpreting 2, no. 2: 29–43.
Hokkanen, Sari. 2017. “Experiencing the Interpreter’s Role.” Translation Spaces: A Multidisciplinary, Multi-
media, and Multilingual Journal of Translation 6, no. 1: 62–78.
Howes, Loene M. 2018. “Community Interpreters’ Experiences of Police Investigative Interviews: How
Might Interpreters’ Insights Contribute to Enhanced Procedural Justice?” Policing and Society: 1–19.
Hoza, Jack. 2003. “Toward an Interpreter Sensibility: Three Levels of Ethical Analysis and a Comprehen-
sive Model of Ethical Decision-Making for Interpreters.” Journal of Interpretation: 1–48.
Hsieh, Elaine. 2006. “Conflicts in How Interpreters Manage Their Roles in Provider-Patient Interactions.”
Social Science & Medicine 62: 721–30.
Hsieh, Elaine. 2013. “Health Literacy and Patient Empowerment: The Role of Medical Interpreters in
Bilingual Health Communication.” In Reducing Health Disparities: Communication Intervention, edited by
Mohan J. Dutta, and Gary L. Kreps, 35–58. New York: Peter Lang.
Ibrahim, Zubaidah. 2007. “The Interpreter as Advocate: Malaysian Court Interpreting as a Case in Point.”
In The Critical Link 4: Professionalisation of Interpreting in the Community, edited by Cecilia Wadensjö, Bir-
gitta Englund Dimitrova, and Anna-Lena Nilsson, 205–13. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2003. “Habitus, Field and Discourse: Interpreting as a Socially Situated Activity.” Target
15, no. 2: 243–68.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2012. Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics and Language. New York, London: Routledge.
Jacobsen, Bente. 2003. “Pragmatics in Court Interpreting: Additions.” In The Critical Link 3: Interpreters
in the Community, edited by Louise Brunette, Georges L. Bastin, Isabelle Hemlin, and Heather Clarke,
Jacquemet, Marco. 2011. “Crosstalk 2.0: Asylum and Communicative Breakdowns.” Text & Talk 31, no.
4: 475–97.
Kaczmarek, Lukasz. 2012. “Addressing the Question of Ethical Dilemmas in Community Interpreter
Training.” In Global Trends in Translator and Interpreter Training: Mediation and Culture, edited by Séverine
Hubscher-Davidson, and Michał Borodo, 217–39. London, New York: Continuum.
Kaufert, Joseph M., and Robert W. Putsch. 1997. “Communication through Interpreters in Healthcare:
Ethical Dilemmas Arising from Differences in Class, Culture, Language, and Power.” The Journal of
Clinical Ethics 8, no. 1: 71–87.
Kent, Stephanie Jo. 2002. “Interpreter Decisions and Group Dynamics.” In Tapestry of Our Worlds: Proceed-
ings of the 17th National Conference of Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, August 6–11, 2001, Orlando,
Florida, edited by Clay Nettles, 51–70. Alexandria, VA: RID.
224
Kent, Stephanie Jo. 2012. “Deaf Voice and the Invention of Community Interpreting.” Journal of Interpreta-
tion 22, no. 1: Article 3.
Kermit, Patrick. 2007. “Aristotelian Ethics and Modern Professional Interpreting.” In The Critical Link 4:
Professionalisation of Interpreting in the Community, edited by Cecilia Wadensjö, Birgitta Englund Dimi-
trova, and Anna-Lena Nilsson, 241–49. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Keselman, Olga, Ann-Christin Cederborg, and Per Linell. 2010. “‘That Is Not Necessary for You to
Know!’: Negotiation of Participation Status of Unaccompanied Children in Interpreter-Mediated Asy-
lum Hearings.” Interpreting 12, no. 1: 83–104.
Kotzé, Herculene. 2018. “Exploring the Role of the Pastoral Interpreter.” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological
Studies 74, no. 2: 1–9.
Lee, Jieun. 2017. “A Case Study of Interpreter-Mediated Witness Statement: Police Interpreting in South
Korea.” Police Practice and Research 18, no. 2: 194–205.
Llewellyn-Jones, Peter, and Robert G. Lee. 2014. Redefining the Role of the Community Interpreter: The Con-
cept of Role-Space. Lincoln: SLI Press.
Määttä, Simo K. 2018. “Accuracy in Telephone Interpreting.” The Interpreters’ Newsletter 23: 1–17.
Martínez-Gómez, Aída. 2014. “Criminals Interpreting for Criminals: Breaking or Shaping Norms?” The
Journal of Specialised Translation 22: 174–93.
Martinsen, Bodil, and Friedel Dubslaff. 2010. “The Cooperative Courtroom: A Case Study of Interpreting
Gone Wrong.” Interpreting 12, no. 1: 21–59.
Mendoza, Elisabeth. 2012. “Thinking Through Ethics: The Processes of Ethical Decision Making by Novice
and Expert American Sign Language Interpreters.”International Journal of Interpreter Education 4, no. 1: 58–72.
Merlini, Raffaela, and Roberta Favaron. 2009. “Quality in Healthcare Interpreter Training: Working with
Norms through Recorded Interaction.” In The Critical Link 5: Quality in Interpreting: A Shared Responsi-
bility, edited by Sandra B. Hale, Uldis Ozolins, and Ludmilla Stern, 187–200. Amsterdam, Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Mikkelson, Holly P. 2000. “Interpreter Ethics: A Review of the Traditional and Electronic Literature.”
Interpreting 5, no. 1: 49–56.
Mills Stewart, Kellie, and Anna Witter-Merithew. 2006. The Dimensions of Ethical Decision-Making: A
Guided Exploration for Interpreters. Burtonsville, MD: Sign Media Inc.
Morris, Ruth. 1995. “The Moral Dilemmas of Court Interpreting.” The Translator 1, no. 1: 25–46.
Monzó-Nebot, Esther, and Melissa Wallace, eds. 2020. “Ethics of Non-Professional Translation and Inter-
preting.” Special Issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies 15, no. 1.
Mulayim, Sedat, and Miranda Lai. 2017. Ethics for Police Translators and Interpreters. Boca Raton/London,
New York: Taylor & Francis.
Nakane, Ikuko. 2009. “The Myth of an ‘Invisible Mediator’: An Australian Case Study of English-Japanese
Police Interpreting.” PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 6, no. 1: 1–16.
Norma, Caroline, and Olga Garcia-Caro. 2016. “Gender Problems in the Practice of Professional Inter-
preters Assisting Migrant Women in Australia: A Theoretical Case for Feminist Education.” Violence
against Women 22, no. 11: 1305–25.
Ozolins, Uldis. 2014. “Descriptions of Interpreting and Their Ethical Consequences.” FITISPos-Interna-
tional Journal 1, no. 1: 23–41.
Ozolins, Uldis. 2015. “Ethics and the Role of the Interpreter.” In Routledge Handbook of Interpreting, edited
by Holly Mikkelson, and Renée Jourdenais, 319–36. London, New York: Routledge.
Phelan, Mary, Mette Rudvin, Hanne Skaaden, and Patrick Kermit. 2019. Ethics in Public Service Interpreting.
Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Pöllabauer, Sonja. 2004. “Interpreting in Asylum Hearings: Issues of Role, Responsibility and Power.”
Prunc, Erich. 1997. “Translationskultur.” Textcontext 11 = NF 1: 99–127.
Prunc, Erich. 2011. “Neutralität in der Krise.” In Turgay Kurultay’a Bir Armağan Çeviribilimden Kesitler. Ein
Kaleidoskop Der Translationswissenschaft: Festschrift Für Turgay Kurultay, edited by Sakine Eruz Eruz, and
Filiz San, 130–42. Istanbul: Multilingual.
Prunc, Erich. 2017. “Auf der Suche nach Aschenbrödels Schuh: Ethische Perspektiven des Kommunaldol-
metschens.” In Interpreting Studies at the Crossroads of Disciplines, edited by Simon Zupan, and Aleksandra
Nuc, 21–42. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Pym, Anthony, ed. 2001. “The Return to Ethics.” Special issue of The Translator 7: 2.
Resera, Elena, Rachel Tribe, and Pauline Lane. 2014. “Interpreting in Mental Health, Roles and Dynamics
in Practice.” International Journal of Culture and Mental Health 8, no. 2: 192–206.
225
Roy, Cynthia B. 1993. “The Problem with Definitions, Descriptions, and the Role Metaphors of Inter-
preters.” Journal of Interpretation 6, no. 1: 127–54.
Rudvin, Mette. 2002. “How Neutral Is ‘Neutral’? Issues in Interaction and Participation in Community
Interpreting.” In Perspectives on Interpreting, edited by Giuliana Garzone, Peter Mead, and Maurizio
Viezzi, 217–33. Bologna: Clueb.
Russell, Debra, and Risa Shaw. 2016. “Power and Privilege: An Exploration of Decision-Making of Inter-
preters.” Journal of Interpretation 25, no. 1: 1–26.
Salaets, Heidi, and Katalin Balogh. 2015. “Co-Minor-IN/QUEST: Improving Interpreter-Mediated Pre-
Trial Interviews with Minors.” TRANS: Revista de Traductologia 19, no. 1: 57–76.
Schweda-Nicholson, Nancy. 1994. “Professional Ethics for Court and Community Interpreters.” In
Professional Issues for Translators and Interpreters, edited by Deanna L. Hammond, 79–97. Amsterdam,
Setton, Robin, and Erich Prunc. 2015. “Ethics.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies, edited
by Franz Pöchhacker, Nadja Grbić, Peter Mead, and Robin Setton, 144–48. London, New York:
Routledge.
Sheneman. Naomi. 2016. “Deaf Interpreters’ Ethics: Reflections on Training and Decision-Making.” Jour-
nal of Interpretation 25, no. 1.
Tate, Granville, and Graham H. Turner. 1997. “The Code and the Culture: Sign Language Interpreting:
In Search of the New Breed’s Ethics.” Deaf Worlds 13, no. 3: 27–35.
Tipton, Rebecca. 2014. “Perceptions of the ‘Occupational Other’: Interpreters, Social Workers and Inter-
cultures.” British Journal of Social Work 2, no. 1: 463–79.
Valero-Garcés, Carmen, ed. 2014. (Re)Visiting Ethics and Ideology in Situations of Conflict: (Re)Considerando
Ética e Ideología En Situaciones de Conflicto. Alcalá: Universidad de Alcalá.
Valero-Garcés, Carmen, and Rebecca Tipton, eds. 2017. Ideology, Ethics and Policy Development in Public
Service Interpreting and Translation. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters.
Wadensjö, Cecilia. 1998. Interpreting as Interaction. London, New York: Longman.
Witter-Merithew, Ann, and Kellie Mills Stewart. 1998. “Keys to Highly Effective Ethical Decision-
Making: An Approach for Teaching Ethical Standards and Practice.” In The Keys to Highly Effective Inter-
preter Education, edited by Joseph A. Alvarez, 342–54. Charlotte, NC: Conference of Interpreter Trainers.
Zendedel, Rena, Barbara C. Schouten, Julia C.M. van Weert, and Bas van den Putte. 2016. “Informal
Interpreting in General Practice: Comparing the Perspectives of General Practitioners, Migrant Patients
and Family Interpreters.” Patient Education and Counseling 99: 981–7.
Further reading
Interpreting in a Changing Landscape: Selected Papers from Critical Link 6, edited by Christina Schäffner,
Krzysztof Kredens, and Yvonne Fowler, 15–30. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
The author presents a comprehensive review of meta-ethical thought and, based on personal experi-
ence, adopts a critical stance on interpreter ethics.
This contribution discusses ethical approaches based on Chesterman’s (2001) ethics of translation and
relates them to ethical challenges in healthcare interpreting.
Dean, Robyn K., and Robert Q. Pollard. 2011. “Context-Based Ethical Reasoning in Interpreting: A
Demand Control Schema Perspective.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1: 155–82.
The authors present a model for context-based ethical reasoning that is applicable to different domains
of interpreting.
Hoza, Jack. 2003. “Toward an Interpreter Sensibility: Three Levels of Ethical Analysis and a Comprehen-
sive Model of Ethical Decision-Making for Interpreters.” Journal of Interpretation: 1–48.
This article explores ethics in the field of SL interpreting and outlines a model of ethical decision-making.
226
16
Ethics of volunteering in
translation and interpreting
Salah Basalamah
1 Introduction
At the outset, it is important to make a distinction between this chapter and the chapter about
professional ethics. Although non-professional interpreting/translation (NPIT) is by definition
the opposite of professional translation/interpreting (PIT), volunteering can be performed by
both categories of translators/interpreters. For example, professionals can offer pro bono assis-
tance or community service such as in religious settings (Antonini, Cirillo, Rossato, and Torresi
2017; Hild 2017; Hokkanen 2017). Although similar ethical issues may arise for professionals
and non-professionals alike, this chapter will address only the issues pertaining to the ethics of
volunteer NPIT.
Volunteering is grounded in a motivation that compels an individual toward the collectivity.
Although volunteers sometimes receive remuneration (Smith 2000), normally volunteering is
performed without any rewards, except, possibly, those of a non-material nature, such as recog-
nition, experience and self-satisfaction (McDonaugh Dolmaya 2011; Olohan 2012). To volun-
teer is to be committed to a belief that one’s contribution to a philanthropic cause – no matter
how insignificant – is worthy of one’s time and beneficial to everyone involved. For the volun-
teer, the time and efforts invested are compensated for by a sense of reward; and for the society or
organization receiving the service, the contribution, no matter how modest, is appreciated and
valued. The rewards are shared as the contributor is benefiting from the service given as much
as the beneficiary is, though in different ways (Stebbins 1992; Smith 1981). Volunteer translators
and interpreters can be motivated by an interest in belonging to and caring for the collectivity
to whom the service is offered and possibly by the chance to gain experience and training in
order to perform better. Volunteer interpreting/translation (IT) can help foster an ethical sense
of citizenship, especially when the service is provided to vulnerable members of a community.
In this way, volunteer IT literally becomes a matter of “social justice” (Bancroft 2015).
This drive to devote one’s time and expertise to others derives from the feeling or convic-
tion that, as a member of the collectivity, each individual should be responsible for the well-
being of the community and hence be held accountable toward others. As members of their
communities, volunteer translators/interpreters feel responsible for facilitating the flow of
communication in situations in which language may be a barrier to overcome for vulnerable
227
Salah Basalamah
citizens to enjoy the right to equal access to social services (Martin and Marti 2008). Nowa-
days, with the increasing flux of migrations around the world, especially to Western coun-
tries, community interpreting and humanitarian IT seem to be among the research areas of
interpreting and translation studies (ITS) which have substantially developed in the last few
years (Hale 2007; Inghilleri 2016; Taibi and Ozolins 2016). Despite this growth there is a lack
of community interpreters/translators, especially in healthcare settings (see e.g. Eklöf, Hupli,
and Leino-Kilpi 2015), as well as in refugee camps and conflict zones (Moser-Mercer 2015).
This lack of professionals and non-professionals with adequate preparation (Roy 2006) cre-
ates challenges and raises doubts for mediating organizations that deal with these populations
(Murphy, Ndegwa, Kanani, Rojas-Jaimes, and Webster 2002). While not all volunteers are
non-professionals, and not all non-professionals are volunteers, the ethical questions remain
for both intersecting categories: what are the limits of their playing field? And what are the
various motivations of volunteers for not being paid, regardless of whether they possess the
required qualifications?
To translate/interpret voluntarily is generally understood as an action that is motivated by
the ethical understanding that the effective connection and communication between members
of a collectivity would not otherwise be possible due to the costs and accessibility of profes-
sional translation. Therefore, translation/interpretation would necessarily be an action that
can foster justice in two ways: it compensates for the inability of some members to express
themselves in the dominant linguistic and social code, and it prevents inequality and possible
unfair treatment by enhancing communication and understanding. Given this backdrop, this
chapter aims to shed light on the ethical dimension of non-professional or volunteer IT discus-
sions beyond the moralizing “shoulds” and the “shouldn’ts” that typically load the discourse on
ethics (Sonderling 2008).
In order to distinguish among the concepts of non-professional, amateur and volunteer, it
is important to refer to more generic definitions of these terms, beyond IT, and consult D.H.
Smith (1981, 2000) and Stebbins (1992), who were among the earliest scholars to tackle the
topic in the fields of healthcare and grassroots organizations. According to Smith’s (1981) work-
ing definition, a volunteer is:
An individual engaging in behavior that is not bio-socially determined . . . nor eco-

nomically assisted . . . nor socio-politically compelled . . . but rather that is essentially
(primarily) motivated by the expectation of psychological benefts of some kind as a
result of activities that have a market value greater than any remuneration received for
such activities.
(22–23)
Smith limits his description of volunteer motivation to non-monetary rewards. What he under-
scores is that “the degree of altruism manifested by a particular volunteer or kind of volunteer
is an empirical question, not a defnitional matter” (23). The altruistic motivation behind a
volunteer’s undertaking is context dependent and therefore difcult to measure.
As for defining the “non-professional,” it is generally characterized as the opposite of “pro-
fessional” and is often associated pejoratively with being an “amateur,” “novice,” “dilettante”
or “dabbler” (e.g. Smith, Stebbins, and Dover 2006). The definitions of volunteer that appear
in the literature, including amateur, hobbyist and one engaging in “serious leisure” (Stebbins
1992) overlap with some features of the non-professional. More current perspectives describing
volunteers and non-professionals have become increasingly less judgemental and have come to
228
Ethics of volunteering in T&I
encompass notions such as (non-)payment, self-satisfaction or interest, length and frequency of

commitment, degree of the activity’s seriousness and social/political functions (see e.g. Volun-
teer Canada 2017; Williamson, Basarab, and Coussée 2018).
In the specific field of IT, these criteria correspond more or less to the overview and mapping
of volunteer and non-professional interpreters and translators. The defining feature of “volun-
teer translation” for Pym (2011) is the absence of payment:
Recommended alternative to “community translation” (q.v.), “crowdsourcing” (q.v.), “col-

laborative translation” (q.v.) or TC3 (q.v.). The term assumes that the fundamental dif-
ference at stake is the monetary payment received (or not received) by the translator. If a
professional translator is one who receives monetary reward, then the opposite term should
be “volunteer” (qualifying the person, not the action). The alternative terms here seem
shot through with activist ideologies, all of which are very well meant, and none of which
highlight the most problematic feature concerned.
(108)
Interestingly, this defnition of volunteer IT overlaps with that of non-professional IT as devel-

oped by Harris (2016). This means that whether volunteer, non-professional, natural or native
translators, they all have in common the fact they are unpaid.
Pérez González and Susam-Saraeva (2012) emphasized the criteria of absence of payment and
formal training. But they put forth the current fact that the development of NPIT coincides with
both the development of the digital culture of “today’s post-industrial, informational society”
(151–152) and “new sites of cross-cultural contact and interaction – resulting from voluntary
migration flows as well as the involuntary displacement and resettlement of populations affected
by armed conflict or humanitarian tragedies” (152). These indicators of our contemporary world
show that technological access and mass migrations contribute to Pérez González and Susam-
Saraeva’s two criteria.
While Hagemann (2016) points to the criteria of non-payment (35) and lack of institution-
alization “in the sense of formal . . . training, membership in professional association and codes
of ethics” (36) and low level of competence (37), Antonini et al. (2017, 8) are more nuanced
when they state that non-professional translators/interpreters are not always unpaid; if they
lack training, it does not mean they are not competent, and if they have no code of ethics or
standards of practice in IT, it does not imply they do not “comply with the code of conduct
of other professions.”
In addition to the aforementioned key terms, worth mentioning are also “natural,” (Har-
ris 1977) “ad hoc,” (Bührig and Meyer 2004) “native translator,” (Toury 1995) “language
brokers,” (Orellana 2009) “circumstantial bilinguals,” (Angelelli 2010) as well as the vaguer
notion of “service” (Perold, Stroud, and Sherraden 2003) and “informal” interpreters (Mac-
Farlane et al. 2009); all may be considered as interrelated and complementary concepts to
“volunteer” and “non-professional” translators/interpreters – “non-professional” seeming
to represent, for some, the preferred “umbrella term” (Pérez González and Susam-Saraeva
2012; Antonini et al. 2017, 6). It is interesting to note that the latter publication does not
even discuss the term of “volunteer” among the variety of terms in its introductory chapter
(Antonini et al. 2017, 4–5), although the topic is treated in the chapters by Hild (2017) and
Hokkanen (2017). However, the concept of “volunteer” over that of “non-professional”
remains worthy of discussion in that it is the only term that includes both professionals and
non-professionals.
229
Salah Basalamah
It may be relevant to recall that the cultural turn of TS has focused on the study of translation
as a socially functional activity. This has probably resulted in the extant studies on volunteer and
non-professional interpreters and translators as socially contributing actors (Jensen and Jakob-
sen 2000; O’Hagan 2011; Fernández Costales 2012; Pérez González and Susam-Saraeva 2012;
Antonini et al. 2017).
For a broad overview of NGOs which heavily rely on or even institutionalize non-
professional and/or volunteer IT, one can use Baker’s (2006) categorization. Baker distin-
guishes between three types of organizations. The first is made up of individuals and groups
(such as Peace Brigades International, Front Line Defenders, Gush Shalom) who participate
in “translating and interpreting a range of narratives that challenge the dominant institutions
of society” (Baker 2006, 462). Although the primary activity of these organizations is not IT,
they draw a great deal on it. The second type of organization consists of “politicized commu-
nities” that were constituted through “the partly spontaneous and partly planned conversions
of professional IT communities into political/activist groups” (such as Translators for Peace,
Babels, ECOS) (463). Unlike the first type of organization, this category consists primarily of
translators and interpreters who are committed to political agendas and ideologies and whose
primary activity is IT (see Chapter 17 “Ethics of activist translation and interpreting” in this
volume). The third type of organization may be represented by Translators Without Borders/
Traducteurs Sans Frontières, which was created in 1993 in Paris and in 2017 was merged with
the Irish-based Rosetta Foundation. Unlike the second type, these organizations not only
recruit professional volunteer translators, but they are more specifically “used by Eurotexte as a
selling point for the agency, thus arguably commodifying the very idea of establishing political
communities of action within the professional world of translation” (463). This category of orga-
nization is thus not interested in non-professional volunteers, similar to its parallel predecessor
Doctors Without Borders, which only recruits professional medical doctors. Baker’s categoriza-
tion helps to demonstrate the distinction between sometimes overlapping not-for-profit and
non-professional volunteer institutions. Only the former would recruit primarily professionals.
As far as the second category, which consists of organizations that use only volunteer non-
professional IT and do not serve for-profit institutions, a notorious example has been studied in
TS research, i.e. Babels by Boéri (2012). To facilitate the communication between the partici-
pants of the Social Forum, this network of volunteer translators and interpreters organized itself
along the lines of the ethical principles promoted by the Forum, i.e. “participation,” “delib-
eration,” “process” and “horizontality” (271). These principles were designed to counter those
implemented by professional IT and hence make an ethically motivated political statement that
reinforces the specificity of NPIT.
To conclude this section, it may be worthwhile to point out the changing status and role of
professionals vs. non-professionals, amateurs and volunteers in the last few decades. Not only
have volunteers been increasingly recognized, valued and accepted as semi-professionals or even
para-professionals, whether paid or unpaid (Feinstein and Cavanaugh 2017; Lough 2015), but
their very objectives and types of engagements have also evolved and produced a “new breed”
of volunteers in the last decades (McKee and McKee 2012). With the upsurge of perceived
humanitarian disasters (Rogl 2017) and the proliferation of private digital initiatives through
online user-generated practices (O’Hagan 2009) and with crowdsourcing initiatives like TED and
Facebook (Jiménez-Crespo 2017), translation and interpreting on a volunteer, non-professional
basis have gained a foothold in their respective fields in such a way that they have demonstrated
their indispensability.
230
3 Core issues
3.1 Ethical economics

A core issue of volunteer non-professional ethics of IT lies in the ways the market value of the
service is assessed. In Marxist parlance, the question could be raised as to whether a commod-
ity that is by definition generally not offered for any financial compensation can have a use-
value and be recognized as a parallel IT economy to be accounted for. Olohan (2012, 2014),
whose empirical work led her to emphasize the cost/benefit aspects involved in IT, calls for
more research on the behavioural economics of non-professional IT, especially because of the
altruistic motivations that are intertwined with it. Olohan recalls Andreoni’s (1990) notions of
“impure altruism” and “warm glow” (the feel-good of doing good to others) and demonstrates
that transactions in a non-profit environment do not always clearly show whether and to what
extent if at all IT services are rendered for financial remuneration but are sometimes recorded
through more indirect forms of work or investment between self-benefit and altruism (Olohan
2012, 196–197). From this perspective, ethics is then to be conceived of as balancing between
the altruistic response to a community’s humanitarian needs and the potential advantages that
could be gained by the volunteer.
Another aspect of the study of the ethical economics of volunteer IT calls attention to the
development of alternative economies that help reduce social inequalities by making avail-
able goods that would otherwise be objects of trade such as the “wiki” and “TED” models
(Désilets, Gonzalez, Paquet, and Stojanovic 2006; McDonough Dolmaya 2012; Olohan 2014).
These would qualify as “grants economy” as opposed to “exchange economy” (Boulding 1973)
and feed the notion of “collaborative consumption,” which means roughly sharing goods and
services online (Botsman and Rogers 2011). In the age of information technologies and the
extension of systems and legislations that protect intellectual property rights (IPR) over digital
contents, the movements of copyleft, creative commons and open source (Broussard 2007;
Berry 2008) have been yielding initiatives to make available localized contents that would oth-
erwise be inaccessible. Although apparently legitimized in developing countries to reduce the
digital gap with the more industrialized actors of the IPR world economy, the production of
software, for example, is estimated by the IMF (2018), to be worth, in the United States alone,
a third of “pre-packaged commercial software, or $35 billion in 2015” (6). As for the size of the
global translation and localization industry, the study indicates a market worth of US $46.52
billion (DePalma, Pielmeier, and Stewart 2018). While it was not within the scope of the study
to determine a number for the global value of both professional translation and interpreting
services, and even more so for the services of volunteer non-professionals, it could be deduced
from the wider spectrum and extent of the latter’s activities around the world that the estimated
value – if it were to be calculated at a cheaper rate than that charged by professionals – would
amount to more than one fold the market of the official industry and thus demonstrate that the
use-value of NPIT may match its exchange-value when compared to professional IT (O’Brien
and Schäler 2010).
The lack of ethics in the global cultural politics as promoted through the World Trade Orga-
nization (WTO) is clearly unveiled by the economic boundaries that are imposed upon trans-
lational activities (whether material or virtual) where the increasing needs for translation and
interpreting – beyond matters of economic rights – are going against the grain of international
copyright laws, e.g. TRIPS Agreement (Basalamah 2009).
Finally, the objections against IPR that suggest a culture of control and domination of access
does not come only from developing countries, but also from more industrialized countries
231
Salah Basalamah
(Fuchs 2008; Bakioǧlu 2016). While copyright has become a part of “global network capital-
ism” (Fuchs 2008, 104), it has “at the same time opened the doors to new opportunities for the
disaffected to cooperate and challenge domination” (Bakioǧlu 2016, 40). It can be argued that
non-professional volunteerism in IT can be deemed as a form of ethical resistance to economic
exploitation (Smith et al. 2006) motivated by the desire of volunteer non-professional (VNP)
translators/interpreters to preserve the ethical values and limits attached to their IT activities,
regardless of whether they are undertaken with an ideological agenda. Such objections are
also valid for translators in the case of crowdsourcing (Dodd 2011; Flanagan 2016), fansubbers
(Pérez González 2007; O’Hagan 2009; Orrego-Carmona 2016) or even collaborative transla-
tion (Jiménez-Crespo 2017) from which global corporations benefit without rewarding the
volunteering contributors (McDonough Dolmaya 2012; Cordingley and Manning 2017). The
ethical choice of VNP translators/interpreters lies in their awareness of the potential disruption
that their activities can have on the global monetary and knowledge economies. Whether they
act against the legal provisions of copyright laws or only with the balanced interest of the wider
public and their own, VNPIT has to be accounted for among the many activities that utilize the
most recent technologies that enable people to produce user-generated content.
3.2 The ethics of motivation

The motivation issue raises the question of what drives volunteer interpreters/translators,
whether professional or non-professional (Flanagan 2018). If they are not paid or compen-
sated in any form, what do they derive from their activity? Between altruism and selfishness
(Smith 1981), pure and impure altruism (Olohan 2012), conceptual distinctions of volun-
teerism help to explain the degrees of motivation of translators/interpreters as well as the
rewards of their investment of time and effort. For example, Fernández Costales (2012) has
enumerated three main motivations that drive non-professional translators/interpreters –
whether in the digital environment or elsewhere – to undertake unpaid IT. First, although
described as “for fun,” the core motivation for fansubbers and translators of widely known
works (e.g. Harry Potter) is to “allow people access to certain material which have not been
adapted to their culture” (12). This type of activity usually provides a sense of belonging to
its practitioners and audiences, and as such can be considered as forming a community of
practice (Jiménez-Crespo 2017, 71, 222) between private and public good. If private benefit
(self-interest, remuneration, etc.) far outweighed the public good, the activity would be
deemed merely as a means to some ends that are almost exclusively personal, such as influ-
ence or power in certain fields of interest. But what surveys have shown, at least in the case of
the Rosetta Foundation (a not-for-profit volunteer translation facilitator), is the co-existence
of “both personal and social motivations working in tandem” (O’Brien and Schäler 2010, 9).
This outcome is confirmed by Olohan’s study on TED Talks (2012), in which she found that
volunteer translators and interpreters are motivated by their belief in the institution’s mission.
Both of these examples are aligned with Baker’s second categorization of organizations that
are politically engaged.
In terms of the moral principles or standards that guide the conduct of volunteer non-
professionals and non-profit organization leaders alike (Jeavons 2004), volunteer translators and
interpreters are mainly inspired by the same sets of ethical principles and rules of conduct available
to professional translators and interpreters despite the looseness or absence of formal institutional
accountability. This is where motivation converges with the conformity to the principles that a
volunteer non-professional translator/interpreter may find in the cause, agenda or setting of the
activity in which they participate.
232
3.3 VNP codes of ethics?

Codes of ethics for professionals can also be applied to and expected from non-professionals, espe-
cially in institutional settings (Boéri 2012; Aguilar-Solano 2015), even though non-professionals
are not contractually or explicitly bound to abide by those codes (Chesterman 2001; Pym 2012;
Harris 2016; Jiménez-Crespo 2017; Hokkanen 2017). However, in some contexts there is an
exception to this general trend. According to Kotzé (2018), non-professional pastoral interpret-
ers are not bound by any specific professional code of ethics; furthermore, they claim that it
is mainly their spirituality – “what firstly defines the pastoral interpreter” – that dictates their
sense of accountability “’cause it might be the first time a person has ever heard the word of the
Lord” (7). This means that although volunteering non-professional translators/interpreters are not
legally bound to conform to a specific code of conduct as professionals do, they may be inspired
by it or feel the need to be acquainted with some aspects of it when embracing a philanthropic
mission, unless they are motivated by a superseding ideological principle as in the pastoral setting.
3.4 Ethics of/in training

When speaking of non-professionals’ lack of training as a defining feature, one may think of ad
hoc IT as the most spontaneous form of the activity, and by the same token the one that does not
require any prerequisites (see Chapter 25 “Ethics in child language brokering” and Chapter 28
“Linguistic First Aid” in this volume). However, if quality and training are important criteria of
professional codes of ethics – in any type of context or as a necessary prerequisite – they are not
the only measures to ensure ethical IT in the work of non-professional translators/interpreters.
In fact, the argument can be made for the ethical necessity of some sort of training even for
non-professionals; it is equally necessary that training in ethics be a key requirement in IT educa-
tion to ensure quality and “empowerment” (Abdallah 2011) (See Chapter 22 “Ethics in translator
and interpreter education” in this volume). Maier (2007) contends that training in the ethics of
IT should deal with conflict and with the real-world challenges at the heart of IT practice. In the
spirit of critical pedagogy that grounds ethics in social struggles, Washbourne (2013, 40) empha-
sizes that ethical rights and responsibilities “extend not only to others, but to one-self, one’s author,
one’s target community or communities, and to the profession.” This extends to non-professional
activities as well. These rights and responsibilities are elaborated through the notions of the “ethical
competence” (Schäffner 2013), “moral imagination” (Callahan and Bok 1980), “ethical reasoning,”
“moral identity,” “moral self-concept” (Washbourne 2013, 43) and “ethical efficacy” (Mitchell
and Palmer 2010) that translators/interpreters should acquire in addition to “information ethics” –
whether in training or through experience – and use when dealing with property rights and all
types of digital systems (Washbourne 2013, 44). Although ethics-of-IT education was developed
within the context of training IT students to become professionals, it could be argued that these
ethical skills, if not acquired in training, may be developed by volunteers, amateurs and non-
professionals in the field, especially if they are initially partnered with professional peers (Feinstein
and Cavanaugh 2017). This mentoring however, remains a relatively rare exception.
3.5 Between politics and ethics

The competing forces of professional/non-professional IT are but one aspect of the politics
that pit different agendas for social change against each other. Most of the studies in ITS are
mainly geared toward comparing the skills, performance and quality of professional and non-
professional interpreters/translators (Tirkkonen-Condit 1989; Jääskeläinen 2010; Jonasson 1998;
233
Salah Basalamah
Jensen and Jakobsen 2000; Drugan 2011) and rarely address issues pertaining to the actual rela-
tionship between those two groups. This is especially prominent in cases in which academia
acknowledges the competition as “‘good’ or at least harmless” (Antonini et al. 2017, 8). Despite
the impossibility for professionals to meet the needs in all areas of IT, the increasing number of
the non-professional interpreters/translators (Pérez González and Susam-Saraeva 2012; Anto-
nini et al. 2017) integrating into the field of IT may be of concern to professionals in areas where
non-professional services are more widely offered (Flanagan 2016). Is it fair for volunteers to
“compete” – for lack of a better term – with professionals when the services that volunteers offer
are free or much cheaper than those offered by professionals? Does this imbalance trigger power
relations similar to those witnessed on the intellectual-property-rights front between “legiti-
mate” actors (copyright owners) and contesting ones (free riders, among whom sometimes
are translators, like fansubbers)? And what would be the broad lines of some ethical guidelines
to manage their interactions or rather the mutual impacts of their parallel activities? In order
to answer these kinds of questions – beyond the strictly narrative analysis proposed by Boéri
(2008) – a political sociology of the relationships between professional and non-professional
translators/interpreters would have been in order. However, ITS research – despite its significant
development – has barely addressed this aspect (Tyulenev 2015; Flanagan 2016). As a general
observation, though, the open field of the world-wide web has led to an unprecedented growth
of VNPIT, where volunteer and amateur translation (fansubs, collaborative and other types) are
making a political statement of growing independence from corporative translated works, even
if sometimes at the cost of quality (Fernández Costales 2013).
From the perspective of what Wolf (2012) termed the “activist turn,” politics and translation
converge in other ways too, but more specifically in online collaborative practices. In fact, in the
last couple of decades, there have been several movements of resistance, as well as humanitarian
and human rights advocacy. For example, Jiménez-Crespo (2017, 203) described the deliber-
ate effort of moving information across boundaries as an international political rebalancing of
knowledge/power in times of mistrust in the mainstream media (Baker 2015). Boéri (2008,
2012), on the other hand – in the footsteps of Baker’s (2006) study of Translators Without
Borders (2017) – has focused on the study of a volunteer-based IT network, Babels, from a
narrative standpoint and investigated the tensions and paradoxes between principles of solidarity
and diversity on the one hand and, on the other hand, concrete practices that lead them to use
representative configurations (despite their participatory protocol) and resort to “colonial lan-
guages” (despite their anti-colonial and anti-imperialist ideological positioning). Tesseur (2014)
provides a final example where a group of sympathizers with Amnesty International’s advocacy
for human rights, because of their bilingual skills, were studied as volunteers for translating
internal “Urgent Actions” documents. Besides the belief that translation is a rather invisible task
that could be performed by staff members or volunteers, the researcher has found that volun-
teer translation was initially neither recognized as part of the wider network of volunteers nor
involved enough in Amnesty’s activities, but was nevertheless steadily increasing in status.
This pervasiveness of politics through technologies emphasizes the fact that it is not politics
that is engaging in IT but the other way around, which “illustrates how translation is increasingly
being appropriated by politically engaged individuals” (283) or by “ad-hocracies” defined as
[f]luid networks of engaged mediators [constituting] activist translators, i.e. groups of like-
minded of individuals gathering online and capitalizing on the potential of networked
communication to exploit their “collective intelligence” (Lévy 1997) regardless of their
professional afliation.
(Pérez Gonzales 2010, 284)
234
Pérez Gonzáles (2010) raises the following ethical question: how could the political discourse
be mediated by audiovisual texts and exert such an infuence on the public when translation is
handled by ad hoc activist networks, and yet the validity of the very term “translator” in relation
to them to them is fundamentally questioned because of their lack of training (284)?
Overall, volunteer, ad hoc, amateur and non-professional translators/interpreters – with all
their respective nuances – in these areas of ideologically motivated activities are usually bound
by their presupposed humanistic ethical principles. Those principles come above or even despite
of the fairness of the processes they follow, the recognition of their contributions and the quality
of their respective IT.
3.6 Some ethical pitfalls

Although always presented as models for very altruistic and ethical social behaviours, societies
that encourage volunteering could also fall into the trap of the state’s disengagement with the
most vulnerable social groups, the private sector’s predation on volunteers (e.g. through crowd-
sourcing or ad hoc collaborative translation) and the (further) undermining of the reputation of
interpreters/translators due to the lower quality of their work and insufficient training (Feinstein
and Cavanaugh 2017; Perold et al. 2003; Lough 2015).
Furthermore, volunteer non-professional interpreters/translators services could become vic-
tims of their conscience if they think they are acting by “pure altruism,” i.e. selflessly with no
private benefit (Graham 2002). Olohan (2012, 205) indicates, however, that volunteering is
“motivated by a mix of intrinsic, extrinsic and reputational motivations.” As shown in empirical
studies on various volunteering activities (Handy et al. 2000), NPIT can be both a feel-good
action and an action that has real impact on the ground, with benefits for both the service pro-
viders and the intended receivers (Andreoni 1990; Olohan 2012; Smith 2015; Jiménez-Crespo
2017).
Finally, being taken for granted is another trap that threatens the value of volunteer IT
activities – so much so that the increased or steady availability of volunteer services, espe-
cially to for-profit organizations, could further undermine the general status of interpreters/
translators (see e.g. Antonini et al. 2017). These types of risks and concerns could raise some
ethical questions which pit the interpreters/translators’ social responsibilities against the sustain-
ability of their value, role and status within the communities served.
4 New debates
4.1 The ethics of crowdsourcing/collaboration

Despite the insistence of Pym to define collaborative translation as voluntary (as it could
well be mandated to be), and that voluntary work is necessarily not paid – although that
was debunked by Garcia (2015) who found that many unpaid translations projects were not
completed, which caused initiators to turn to paid crowdsourcing (see also Jiménez-Crespo
2017, 57–60) – Cordingley and Manning (2017, 16) emphasize that “crowdsourcing” and
“community translation” made “by online communities for specific communities . . . are
frequently remunerated and not necessarily collaborative.” This should clearly distinguish the
notion of “collaborative translation” from “crowdsourcing” (as the former could be interac-
tive and concerted, whereas the latter might be externally coordinated (O’Brien 2011) and
should help emphasize the notions of legitimacy and quality as being ethical values because
collaboration entails additional benefit to the final product (Cordingley and Manning 2017,
235
Salah Basalamah
18). More recently, Jiménez-Crespo (2019) has focused on NPIT and differentiated crowd-
sourcing from collaborative translation, where the former is solicited and controlled by a
for-profit institution and the latter is organized by communities and independently produces
its own translation projects. Although there is clearly more to say on the terminological dis-
tinctions between “crowdsourced” (O’Brien 2011), “online” and “volunteer” collaborative
translation (Jiménez-Crespo 2017), it seems clear that all of those categories fall under the
generic label of “user generated translation” (Perrino 2009). All this boils down to the kind
of ethical question that is raised by McDonaugh Dolmaya (2011) on the matter: is opening
the way to volunteering non-professionals for the benefit of a for-profit organization a fair
thing for either professionals or non-professionals?
It is worth noting, despite some prevalent assumptions to the contrary, that crowdsourc-
ing and collaborative translation could in some cases be for-profit and paid, albeit at lower
rates (Garcia 2015), even if compensation is often felt as a “‘give back’ to the (ostensibly)
free communities, even though [they are] for-profit ventures” (McDonaugh Dolmaya 2011,
102). In some cases, volunteers are recognized by giving them visibility in the acknowledge-
ments (103).
Beyond the monopole of attention that has been traditionally drawn to professionals by
researchers in the relevant field (Robinson 2003; Pym 2012), there is a growing awareness that
the lack of affordability of professional services, especially in humanitarian and community set-
tings, has increased the variety and flexibility of choices in translation providers’ profiles, abili-
ties and dispositions to work in various conditions (McDonough Dolmaya 2012). In the age of
globalization, volunteers create new means and spaces of meaning brokerage, as well as parallel
economies of gifts and philanthropism (Smith et al. 2006) that are not fully quantifiable. This is
even more so in in the digital age (O’Brian and Schäler 2010). However, the digital environment
is not devoid of risks, as there is a growing ethical concern about for-profit organizations taking
advantage of free translations performed by unpaid and untrained members of the volunteer
community (O’Hagan 2011). For Dodd (2011), “crowdsourcing . . . is just one more method
corporations have found to push their costs onto the public while retaining profits and property
rights for themselves” which would possibly lead to “apartheid economics of socialism for work-
ers, capitalism for bosses” (n.p.).
In the same economic vein, the notion of microtasking in crowdsourced volunteer translation
(Bourdaillet, Roy, Jung, and Sun 2013; Rahman et al. 2015) is raising another ethical question
about the sustainability and fairness to translators that results from not being aware of the entire
textual landscape where one’s work segment is situated. Much like the factory production lines
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the segmentation of crowdsourced translation
jobs was criticized as “step-wise procedures that mimic industrial manufacturing” (DePalma and
Kelly 2011) and referred to as “translation Taylorism” (Beninatto and DePalma 2007). This is
an illustration of the ethical concern about the working conditions of crowdsourced volunteer
non-professional interpreters/translators that adds up to the long-haul problems of the transla-
tor’s status and invisibility.
Even if online collaborative translation may be a field in which volunteer and non-professional
interpreters/translators are more prevalent than professionals, this does not necessarily lower
the quality of the translation, as “fans’ knowledge can compensate for translation expertise”
(Jiménez-Crespo 2013, 26). Interestingly, Pérez González (2010) goes further and speaks of
the intervention not of volunteer or non-professional interpreters/translators but of “natural
translators” (Harris 1977) or “non-translators in activist translation on an ‘ad hoc’ basis” (Pérez
González 2010, 264), i.e. those who have no formal training nor even any experience beside
being bilingual.
236
4.2 The ethics of volunteer cultural mediation

In a time of increasing global migrations and humanitarian crises (IOM 2017), community IT
(defined by Pöchhaker [2008, 23] as “enabling communication between two interacting parties,
with information, orientation, conciliation or educational tasks added as extra responsibili-
ties”) has recently developed a great deal as a practice as well as a field (albeit an understudied
one) in ITS research (Taibi and Ozolins 2016). One of the characteristics of these volunteering
non-professionals cultural mediators (also named “public-service interpreters”) is the locality of
most of their ad hoc interventions (United Nation Volunteers 2015). Community translation/
interpreting is no exception, as it is usually situated in workplaces, healthcare facilities, social
services, classrooms, courtrooms and other community locations (Valero-Garcés and Martin
2008). In fact, not only does the very notion of “community” emphasize the dimensions of
belonging to a local social entity, but also the very fact that the ultimate function of this type of
IT is to integrate the beneficiaries of the service into the said community. Issues regarding the
ethics of community interpreters usually include the polarity between the “impartial model”
and the “cultural advocate model” (Pöchhaker 2008). To what extent can cultural mediation and
brokering, that are supposed to be part of the community translator/interpreter’s task, be ethi-
cally exercised by volunteer non-professionals (Taibi and Ozolins 2016, 52, 97), and what is the
acceptable wiggle room to intervene? The same ethical issue goes for court, war and healthcare
interpreters – professionals or VNP alike (Kaufert and Putsch 1997; Mikkelson 1998; Camayd-
Freixas 2013; Inghilleri 2012, 2016). Although the first two in the list were more closely studied
from the perspective of their professionalization, the healthcare and community interpreters are
demographically more numerous as volunteers and non-professionals because of mediations that
are required on an ad hoc basis – despite a recent development of institutionalized trainings and
a growing number of professionals (Hale 2007; O’Brien and Schäler 2010; Avalos, Pennington,
and Osterberg 2013).
4.3 The ethics of global civic consciousness

In the interest of gaining more insight in the context of the present discussion and situating it
within a wide human scope of telos, the following and final part of this section will focus on
a more fundamental level of reflection about the ethical significance of dedicating oneself and
one’s time to the translational task. This will be done along the lines of Paul Ricœur’s (1996)
search for a “translational ethos” – where he conceived of translation as the potential unity of the
human species through the translation of all meanings and differences. For Ricœur, translation
is a model whose “potential . . . extends very far, right into the heart of the ethical and spiritual
life of individuals and peoples” (4). This model, Ricœur (1996) explains,
invites us to extend the spirit of translation to the relation between cultures themselves,
that is, to the meaning contents conveyed by translation. Here is where there is a need for
translators from culture to culture, cultural bilinguals, capable of accompanying this transfer
operation into the mental universe of the other culture. . . . In meaning one can speak of
an ethos of translation, whose goal would be to repeat, on a cultural and spiritual level, the
gesture of linguistic hospitality.
(5)
Here, one could interpret that the task of the volunteer non-professional interpreter/translator –
when considered from an ethically engaged purview – embodies a committed and inherent
237
Salah Basalamah
impulse for bridging humans and for mediating the fow of meaning in the knowledge and
political cohabitation economy. “I translate, therefore I am” could be the starting point of a
philosophy of existence for pluralistic societies, whereby translation is conceived of as a rep-
resentation of the human ethos of being in society. Hence, the notion of “citizen transla-
tion” (Basalamah 2005), that is the ability that some citizens develop, within the realm of their
local jurisdiction, in bringing together people of diferent ideologies, denominations, frames of
reference, political belongings and other cultural and social identities. Other than the similar
expression of “citizen translation” later suggested by O’Hagan and Cadwell (2017), Federici and
Cadwell (2018), Federici (2018) and Shackelton (2018), the meaning of “citizen translation” by
Basalamah (2005) conveys not only an urgent response to a situation of crisis but is at the same
time an individual or collective long-term initiative motivated primarily by a sense of belonging
to the community and a willingness to commit to an activist agenda that could be paralleled to
the “translation proviso,” as spelled out by Jürgen Habermas (2008). In this sense, volunteer IT
requires decentering oneself, fnding an intimate drive and mediating between one’s own frames
of reference, positions and perspectives over reality and those of others, beyond and beneath
language and symbols (Basalamah 2018), but also beyond anthropocentrism.
An example of this is Michael Cronin’s (2017) notion of “tradosphere” and the web of lan-
guages beyond those of human beings. In his latest book, Cronin attempts to bring attention
to the post-anthropocentric awareness of being in a web of connections between the organic
and the inorganic. In the midst of the age of Anthropocene and the increasing global ecological
ethical awareness, the scope set by Cronin may be the horizon of responsibility that volunteer
interpreters/translators would like to consider for their mediating activities (see Chapter 19
“Translation and posthumanism” in this volume). Engaging the Earthly other would entail that
environmental activism is a volunteer IT activity driven by the awareness that “hyperobjects,”
such as global warming, are the very motivation for knowing our planet better, and hence by
the need to explore all possible means to communicate with and better understand the living
and the non-living worlds. Volunteering is one form of an “earthling’s” quest for knowledge
(Cronin 2017, 5).
5 Conclusion
Given the previous discussion, it might be a tautology to use the descriptor of “citizen volun-
teerism” to summarize the ethics of volunteer/non-professional translation, as both of these
terms imply selflessness and commitment for a cause and/or a group. “Citizen translation,” on
the other hand, would encompass all situations in which volunteering occurs by interpreting/
translating people’s languages, discourses, frames of reference, positions or ethos in a democratic
social project from the perspective of social justice (ethics) with a deep feeling of commitment
and belonging to a collective heterogeneous entity.
In that sense, citizen (i.e. volunteer, ethical and activist) translators/interpreters could be
more broadly studied as agents of connection (communication), transformation (production of
difference) and articulation (hinging disparities). Although not sufficiently recognized in the
mainstream social discourse, citizen translators/interpreters are increasingly considered as agents
of change in societies that favour their action and allow them to develop alongside professionals –
who may even be largely outnumbered. However, beyond and beneath the semiotic system, they
are also to be considered as connectors, transformers and articulators of people, information,
ideas and knowledge. Citizen translators would address not only matters that are usually mea-
sured against the reference point of professionals (e.g. quality, training, competence, etc.), but
more generally matters and beings characterized by their polymorphous ethoi and by a much
238
wider scope of action, whether face-to-face or online, paid or unpaid, trained or untrained,
individual or collaborative.
For instance, when translation is considered as a form of education with a social-justice-
inspired democratic project in mind, citizen interpreters/translators – as defined earlier – are
acting as educators and knowledge brokers. In that case, to interpret/translate is to operate
pedagogically in order to transform different states of being into more acceptable ones for their
end-receptors – in sum, to establish equal citizenship. As a final point, it is worth emphasizing
that it is rather impossible to be “faithful and invisible” when engaged as intervening citizen
interpreters/translators. Like activism, citizen IT may not be faithful if it is driven by social jus-
tice or political-reform agendas. Unfaithfulness is not about equating meanings but rather about
a citizen initiative for bringing together positions and perspectives within a pluralistic collective
entity. Beyond altruism, to interpret/translate as a citizen is to perform justice.

Ethics of activist translation and interpreting; linguistic first aid; translating and interpreting in
conflict and crisis; professional translator ethics; ethics in the translation industry.
References
Aguilar-Solano, Maria. 2015. “Non-Professional Volunteer Interpreting as an Institutionalized Practice
in Healthcare: A Study on Interpreters’ Personal Narratives.” The International Journal for Translation &
Interpreting 7, no. 3: 132–48. DOI: 10.12807/ti.107203.2015.a10
Andreoni, James. 1990. “Impure Altruism and Donations to Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow
Giving.” The Economic Journal 100, no. 401: 464–77.
Angelelli, Claudia V. 2010. “A Professional Ideology in the Making: Bilingual Youngsters Interpreting
for Their Communities and the Notion of (No) Choice.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 5, no. 1:
94–108. https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.5.1.06ang
Antonini, Rachele, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi. 2017. Non-Professional Interpreting and
Translation: State of the Art and Future of an Emerging Field of Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub-
lishing Company.
Avalos, Oswaldo, Kaylin Pennington, and Lars Osterberg. 2013. “Revolutionizing Volunteer Interpreter
Services: An Evaluation of an Innovative Medical Interpreter Education Program.” Journal of General
Internal Medicine 28, no. 12: 1589–95. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-013-2502-5
Baker, Mona. 2006. “Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community.” The Mas-
sachusetts Review 47, no. 3: 462–84.
Baker, Mona. 2015. Translating Dissent: Voices from the Egyptian Revolution. New York, London: Routledge.
Bakioǧlu, Burcu S. 2016. “The Gray Zone: Networks of Piracy, Control, and Resistance.” The Information
Society 32, no. 1: 40–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2015.1107164
Bancroft, Marjory. 2015. “Community Interpreting: A Profession Rooted in Social Justice.” In The Rout-
ledge Handbook of Interpreting, edited by H. Mikkelson, and R. Jourdenais, 217–35. London: Routledge.
Basalamah, Salah. 2005. “La traduction citoyenne n’est pas une métaphore.” TTR 18, no. 2: 49–69.
Basalamah, Salah. 2009. Le droit de traduire. Une politique culturelle pour la mondialisation. Ottawa, Arras:
Ottawa University Press & Artois Presses Université.
Basalamah, Salah. 2018. “Toward a Philosophy of Translation.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and
Philosophy, edited by Piers Rawling, and Philip Wilson, 478–91. London: Routledge.
Beninatto, Renato S., and Donald A. DePalma. 2007. “The End of Localization Taylorism.” In The Global
Watchtower. Lowell, MA: Common Sense Advisory.
Berry, David M. 2008. Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source. New York: Pluto Press.
Boéri, Julie. 2008. “A Narrative Account of the Babels vs. Naumann Controversy.” The Translator 14,
no. 1: 21–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2008.10799248
239
Salah Basalamah
Boéri, Julie. 2012. “Translation/Interpreting Politics and Praxis.” The Translator 18, no. 2: 269–90. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2012.10799511
Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. 2011. What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing
the Way We Live. London: Harper Collins.
Boulding, Kenneth E. 1973. The Economy of Love and Fear: A Preface to Grants Economy. Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth Publishing.
Bourdaillet, Julien, Shourya Roy, Gueyoung Jung, and Yu-An Sun. 2013. “Crowdsourcing Translation by
Leveraging Tournament Selection and Lattice-Based String Alignment.” Association for the Advance-
ment of Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Technical Report CR-13-01: 1–11. www.aaai.org/ocs/index.
php/HCOMP/HCOMP13/paper/viewFile/7516/7426
Broussard, Sharee L. 2007. “The Copyleft Movement: Creative Commons Licensing.” Communication
Research Trends 26, no. 3: 3.
Bührig, Kirstin, and Bernd Meyer. 2004. “Ad hoc-interpreting and the Achievement of Communicative
Purposes in Doctor-patient-communication.” In Multilingual Communication, edited by Juliane House,
and Jochen Rehbein. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishers.
Callahan, Daniel, and Sissela Bok. 1980. Ethics Teaching in Higher Education. The Hastings Center Series in
Ethics. New York: Plenum Press.
Interpreting in a Changing Landscape. Selected Papers from Critical Link 6, edited by Christina Schäffner,
15–30. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2001.10799097
Cordingley, Anthony, and Céline Frigau Manning, eds. 2017. Collaborative Translation from the Renaissance
to the Digital Age. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Cronin, Michael. 2017. Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. London:
Routledge.
DePalma Donald A., and Nataly Kelly. 2011. “Project Management for Crowdsourced Translation: How
User-Translated Content Projects Work in Real Life.” In Translation and Localization Project Management
the Art of the Possible, edited by Keiran Dunne, and Elena Dunne, 379–407. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Publishing Company.
DePalma, Donald A., Hélène Pielmeier, and Robert G. Stewart. 2018. “The Language Services Market:
2018.” CSA Research, June 14, 2018. https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/48585/Marketing
Désilets, Alain, Lucas Gonzalez, Sébastien Paquet, and Marta Stojanovic. 2006. “Translation the Wiki Way.”
WikiSym ’06: Proceedings of the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis, August 2006, 19–32.
Dodd, Sean M. 2011. “Crowdsourcing: Social(ism) Media 2.0.” Translatorial: Journal of the Northern
California Translators Association, January 1. http://translorial.com/2011/01/01/crowdsourcing-socialism-
media-2-0/
Drugan, Joanna. 2011. “Translation Ethics Wikified: How Far Do Professional Codes of Ethics and Prac-
tice Apply to Non-Professionally Produced Translation?” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series: Themes
in Translation Studies, no. 10. https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be/index.php/LANS-TTS/article/view/280
Eklöf, Niina, Maija Hupli, and Helena Leino-Kilpi. 2015. “Nurses’ Perceptions of Working with Immi-
grant Patients and Interpreters in Finland.” Public Health Nursing 32, no. 2: 143–50. https://doi.
org/10.1111/phn.12120
Federici, Federico, and Patrick Cadwell. 2018. “Training Citizen Translators Design and Delivery of
Bespoke Training on the Fundamentals of Translation for New Zealand Red Cross.” Translation Spaces
7, no. 1: 20–43.
Feinstein, Barbara, and Catherine Cavanaugh. 2017. The New Volunteerism: A Community Connection. Lon-
don, New York: Routledge.
Fernández Costales, Alberto. 2012. “Collaborative Translation Revisited: Exploring the Rationale and
the Motivation for Volunteer Translation.” FORUM 10, no. 1: 115–42. https://doi.org/10.1075/
forum.10.1.06fer
Fernández Costales, Alberto. 2013. “Crowdsourcing and Collaborative Translation: Mass-Phenomena or
Silent Threat to Translation Studies?” Hermeneus 15: 85–110.
Flanagan, Marian. 2016. “Cause for Concern? The Attitudes towards Translation Crowdsourcing in Profes-
sional Translators’ Blogs.” The Journal of Specialized Translation 25: 149–73.
Flanagan, Marian. 2018. “Translation Crowdsourcing: What Motivates People to Translate for Free?”
Circuit Magazine 138. www.circuitmagazine.org/dossier-138/translation-crowdsourcing-what-
motivates-people-to-translate-for-free
240
Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society. London, New York: Routledge.
Garcia, Ignacio. 2015. “Cloud Marketplaces: Procurement of Translators in the Age of Social Media.”
JoSTrans 23. www.jostrans.org/issue23/art_garcia.pdf
Graham, Keith. 2002. “Altruism, Self-Interest and the Indistinctness of Persons.” Critical Review of Interna-
tional Social and Political Philosophy 5, no. 4: 49–67.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge, UK, Malden,
MA, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Hagemann, Susanne. 2016. “(Non-)Professional, Authentic Projects? Why Terminology Matters.” In
Towards Authentic Experiential Learning in Translator Education, edited by Donald C. Kiraly, 33–53. Mainz:
V&R Unipress – Mainz University Press.
Hale, Sandra Beatriz. 2007. Community Interpreting. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Handy, Femida, Ram A. Cnaan, Jeffery L. Brudney, Lucas Meijs, Ugo Ascoli, and Shree Ranade. 2000.
“Public Perception of ‘Who Is a Volunteer’: An Examination of the Net-Cost Approach from a Cross-
Cultural Perspective.” Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary & Nonprofit Organizations 11: 45–65.
Harris, Brian. 1977. “The Importance of Natural Translation.” In Documents de Traductologie, no 2 = Working
papers on translatology no. 2, 96–114. Ottawa: University of Ottawa, School of Translators and Interpreters.
Harris, Brian. 2016. “What Makes an Expert Translator a Professional Translator?” Accessed November 22,
2019. https://unprofessionaltranslation.blogspot.com/2016/02/what-makes-translator-professional.html
Hild, Adlina. 2017. “The Role and Self-Regulation of Non-Professional Interpreters.” In Non-Professional
Translating and Interpreting: State of the Art and Future of an Emerging Field of Research, edited by Rachele
Antonini, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi, 177–94. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publish-
ing Company.
Hokkanen, Sari. 2017. “Simultaneous Interpreting and Religious Experience.” In Non-Professional Trans-
lating and Interpreting: State of the Art and Future of an Emerging Field of Research, edited by Rachele
Antonini, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi, 195–212. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub-
lishing Company.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2016. Translation and Migration. London, New York: Routledge.
International Monetary Fund (IMF). 2018. Measure the Digital Economy. Washington, DC: IMF
Publications. www.imf.org/en/Publications/Policy-Papers/Issues/2018/04/03/022818-measuring-the-
digital-economy
International Organization for Migration (IOM). 2017. “World Migration Report 2018.” www.iom.int/
wmr/world-migration-report-2018
Jääskeläinen, Riitta. 2010. “Are All Professionals Experts? Definitions of Expertise and Reinterpretation of
Research Evidence in Process Studies.” In Translation and Cognition, vol. 15, edited by Gregory Shreve,
and Erik Angelone, 213–7. American Translators Association Scholarly Monograph Series. Amsterdam,
Philadelphia: John Benjamins PubCo.
Jeavons, Thomas H. 2004. “Ethical Nonprofit Management: Creating a Culture of Integrity.” In The
Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management, edited by David O. Renz, and Robert D.
Herman, 204–29. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Jensen, Astrid, and Arnt Lykke Jakobsen. 2000. “Translating under Time Pressure: An Empirical Inves-
tigation of Problem-Solving Activity and Translation Strategies by Non-Professional and Professional
Translators.” In Translation in Context, edited by Andrew Chesterman, Natividad Gallardo San Salvador,
and Yves Gambier, 105–16. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Jiménez-Crespo, Miguel. 2013. “Crowdsourcing, Corpus Use, and the Search for Translation Naturalness:
A Comparable Corpus Study of Facebook and Non-Translated Social Networking Sites.” Translation
and Interpreting Studies 8, no. 1: 23–49.
Jiménez-Crespo, Miguel. 2017. Crowdsourcing and Online Collaborative Translation: Expanding the Limits of
Translation Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Jiménez-Crespo, Miguel. 2019. “Technology and Non-Professional Translation.” In The Routledge Hand-
book of Translation and Technology, edited by Minako O’Hagan, 239–54. London: Routledge.
Jonasson, Kerstin. 1998. “Degree of Text Awareness in Professional vs. Non-Professional Translators.” In
Translators’ Strategies and Creativity, edited by Ann Beylard-Ozeroff, Jana Králová, and Barbara Moser-
Mercer, 189–200. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Company.
Kaufert, Joseph M., and Robert W. Putsch. 1997. “Communication through Interpreters in Healthcare:
Ethical Dilemmas Arising from Differences in Class, Culture, Language, and Power.” Journal of Clinical
Ethics 8, no. 1: 71–87.
241
Salah Basalamah
Kotzé, Herculene. 2018. “Exploring the Role of the Pastoral Interpreter.” Theological Studies 74, no. 2.
https://hts.org.za/index.php/hts/article/view/4873/11693
Lévy, Pierre. 1997. Collective Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Presus Books.
Lough, Benjamin J. 2015. The Evolution of International Volunteering. Bonn: United Nations Volunteer
(UNV) Programme.
Macfarlane, Anne, Zhanna Dzebisova, Dmitri Karapish, Bosiljka Kovacevic, Florence Ogbebor, and
Ekaterina Okonkwo. 2009. “Arranging and Negotiating the Use of Informal Interpreters in General
Practice Consultations: Experiences of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the West of Ireland.” Social Sci-
ence & Medicine 69, no. 2: 210–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.04.022
Maier, Carol. 2007. “The Translator’s Visibility and the Rights and Responsibilities Thereof.” In Translat-
ing and Interpreting Conflict, edited by Myriam Salama-Carr, 251–66. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.
Martin, Anne, and Isabel Abril Marti. 2008. “Community Interpreter Self Perception: A Spanish Case
Study.” In Crossing Borders in Community Interpreting, edited by A. Martin, and C. Valero-Garces, 203–30.
McDonaugh Dolmaya, Julie. 2011. “The Ethics of Crowdsourcing – Nonprofessionals Translating and
Interpreting.” Linguistica Antverpensia 10: 97–110.
McDonaugh Dolmaya, Julie. 2012. “Analyzing the Crowdsourcing Model and Its Impact on Public Per-
ceptions of Translation.” The Translator 18, no. 2: 167–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2012.1
0799507
McKee, Johnathan, and Thomas McKee. 2012. The New Breed: Understanding and Equipping the 21st Century
Volunteer. Loveland, CO: Group Publishing Inc.
Mikkelson, Holly. 1998. “Toward a Redefinition of the Role of Court Interpreter.” Interpreting 3, no. 1:
21–45.
Mitchell, Marie S., and Noel F. Palmer. 2010. “The Managerial Relevance of Ethical Efficacy.” In Manage-
rial Ethics Managing the Psychology of Morality, edited by Marshall, 89–198. New York: Routledge.
Moser-Mercer, Barbara. 2015. “Interpreting in Conflict Zones.” In The Routledge Handbook of Interpreting,
edited by Holly Mikkelson, and Renee Jourdenais, 302–16. London: Routledge.
Murphy, D., D. Ndegwa, A. Kanani, C. Rojas-Jaimes, and A. Webster. 2002. “Mental Health of Refugees
in Inner-London.” Psychiatric Bulletin 26, no. 6: 222–4. https://doi.org/10.1192/pb.26.6.222
O’Brien, Sharon. 2011. “Collaborative Translation.” In The Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Yves
Gambier, and Luc van Doorslaer, 17–20. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
O’Brien, Sharon, and Reinhard Schäler. 2010. “Next Generation Translation and Localization: Users Are
Taking Charge.” Translating and the Computer Conference, London, November 17–18. http://doras.dcu.
ie/16695/1/Paper_6.pdf
O’Hagan, Minako. 2009. “Evolution of User-Generated Translation: Fansubs, Translation Hacking and
Crowdsourcing.” The Journal of Internationalization and Localization 1, no. 1: 94–121.
O’Hagan, Minako. 2011. “Community Translation: Translation as a Social Activity and Its Possible Con-
sequences in the Advent of Web 2.0 and Beyond.” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series: Themes in
Translation Studies, no. 10. https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be/index.php/LANS-TTS/article/view/275
O’Hagan, Minako, and Patrick Cadwell. 2017. “Training Community Translators for Crisis Scenarios.” Vth
International Translating Voices: Translating Region Conference. London, December 15–16. https://drive.
google.com/file/d/189KfUzdH7eKK2-TP1ob3YUqIfBW5Xj37/view
Olohan, Maeve. 2012. “Volunteer Translation and Altruism in the Context of a Nineteenth-Century Sci-
entific Journal.” The Translator 18, no. 2: 193–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2012.10799508
Olohan, Maeve. 2014. “Why Do You Translate? Motivation to Volunteer and TED Translation.” Translation
Studies 7, no. 1: 17–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2013.781952
Orellana, Marjorie Faulstich. 2009. Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth, Language, and Culture. New
Brunswick, London: Rutgers University Press.
Orrego-Carmona, David. 2016. “A Reception Study on Non-Professional Subtitling: Do Audiences Notice
Any Difference?” Across Languages and Cultures, November. https://doi.org/10.1556/084.2016.17.2.2
Pérez González, Luis. 2007. “Fansubbing Anime: Insights Into the ‘Butterfly Effect’ of Globalisation on
Audiovisual Translation.” Perspectives 14, no. 4: 260–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/09076760708669043
Pérez González, Luis. 2010. “‘Ad-Hocracies’: Translation Activism in the Blogosphere: A Genealogical
Case Study.” In Text and Context: Essays on Translation and Interpreting in Honour of Ian Mason, edited by
Mona, Maeve Olohan, and Maria Calzada Perez, 259–87. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Pérez González, Luis, and Şebnem Susam-Saraeva. 2012. “Non-Professionals Translating and Interpreting.”
The Translator 18, no. 2: 149–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2012.10799506
242
Perold, Helene, Susan Stroud, and Michael W. Sherraden, eds. 2003. “Service Enquiry.” In Service in the
21st Century. Johannesburg, St. Louis, MO: Global Service Institute and Volunteer and Service Enquiry
Southern Africa. www.clayss.org/04_publicaciones/SE1-Service-in-the-21st-Century.pdf
Perrino, Saverio. 2009. “User-Generated Translation: The Future of Translation in a Web 2.0 Environ-
ment.” The Journal of Specialized Translation. www.jostrans.org/issue12/art_perrino.php
Pöchhaker, Franz. 2008. “Interpreting as Mediation.” In Crossing Borders in Community Interpreting: Defi-
nitions and Dilemmas, edited by Carmen Valero-Garces, and Anne Martin, 9–26. Amsterdam: John
Pym, Anthony. 2011. “Translation Research Terms: A Tentative Glossary for Moments of Perplexity and
Dispute.” In Translation Research Projects 3, edited by Anthony Pym, 75–110. Tarragona: Intercultural
Studies Group. www.intercultural.urv.cat/media/upload/domain_317/arxius/TP3/isgbook3_web.pdf
Pym, Anthony. 2012. On Translation Ethics: Principles for Mediation between Cultures. Amsterdam: John Ben-
Rahman, Habibur, et al. 2015. “Task Assignment Optimization in Collaborative Crowdsourcing.” 2015
IEEE Conference on Data Mining. IEEE Computer Society, 949–954.
Ricœur, Paul. 1996. “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe.” In Paul Ricœur the Hermeneutics of Action,
edited by Richard Kearney, 3–14. London: Sage Publishing.
Robinson, Douglas. 2003. Becoming a Translator: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Translation, 2nd
Rogl, Regina. 2017. “Language-Related Disaster Relief in Haiti.” In Non-Professional Translating and Inter-
preting: State of the Art and Future of an Emerging Field of Research, edited by Rachele Antonini, Letizia
Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi, 231–55. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Roy, Cynthia B., ed. 2006. New Approaches to Interpreter Education. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University
Press.
Schäffner, Christina. 2013. Interpreting in a Changing Landscape: Selected Papers from Critical Link 6, vol. 109.
Shackelton, Jamie. 2018. “Preparedness in Diverse Communities: Citizen Translation for Community
Engagement.” In Work in Progress Insight Paper: Understanding Risk, Risk Reduction, Consequences and
Forecasting Track Proceedings of ISCRAM Asia Pacific 2018, edited by K. Stock, and D. Bunker. http://idl.
iscram.org/files/jamieshackleton/2018/1652_JamieShackleton2018.pdf
Smith, David Horton. 1981. “Altruism, Volunteers, and Volunteerism.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quar-
terly 10, no. 1: 21–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/089976408101000105
Smith, David Horton. 2000. Grassroots Associations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Smith, David Horton, Robert A. Stebbins, and Michael A. Dover. 2006. A Dictionary of Nonprofit Terms
and Concepts. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Smith, Megan. 2015. “The Cost of Volunteering: Consequences of Volunteerism.” Anthropology Senior
Thesis, Paper 170. http://repository.upenn.edu/anthro_seniortheses/170
Sonderling, Stefan. 2008. “What If Morality Should Turn Out to Be the Danger of Dangers? 1 Global
Ethics Terrorism and the Growth of Ignorance.” Communicatio 34, no. 2: 290–327. https://doi.
org/10.1080/02500160802456213
Stebbins, Robert A. 1992. Amateurs, Professionals, and Serious Leisure. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press.
Taibi, Mustapha, and Uldis Ozolins. 2016. Community Translation. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Tesseur, Wine. 2014. “Transformation Through Translation: Translation Policies at Amnesty International.”
PhD diss., Aston University, Aston.
Tirkkonen-Condit, Sonja. 1989. “Professional vs. Non-Professional Translation: A Think-Aloud Protocol
Study.” In The Translation Process, edited by Candace Lee Séguinot, 73–86. Toronto: H. G. Publication.
Translators Without Borders. 2017. “Language & Comprehension Barriers in Greece’s Migration Cri-
sis.” Executive summary, June. https://translatorswithoutborders.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/
Language-Comprehension-barriers.pdf
Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
Tyulenev, Sergey. 2015. “Towards Theorising Translation as an Occupation.” Asia Pacific Translation and
Intercultural Studies 2, no. 1: 15–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/23306343.2015.1013206
United Nations Volunteers. 2015. “State of the Worlds’ Volunteerism Report 2015: Transforming Gover-
nance.” United Nations Publications. www.unv.org/sites/default/files/2015%20State%20of%20the%20
World%27s%20Volunteerism%20Report%20-%20Transforming%20Governance.pdf
243
Salah Basalamah
Valero-Garcés, Carmen, and Anne Martin. 2008. “Crossing Borders in Community Interpreting: Defini-
tions and Dilemmas.” In EST Subseries, vol. 76. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Volunteer Canada. 2017. “Recognizing Volunteering in 2017.” https://volunteer.ca/vdemo/engagingvol-
unteers_docs/RecognizingVolunteeringIn2017_VolunteerCanada.pdf
Washbourne, Kelly. 2013. “Ethical Experts-in-Training: Connected Learners and the Moral Imagination.”
In New Prospects and Perspectives for Educating Language Mediators, edited by Don Kiraly, Sylvia Hansen-
Schirra, and Karin Maksymsky, 35–52. Tübingen: Narr Verlag.
Williamson, Howard, Tanya Basarab, and Filip Coussée. 2018. “The History of Youth Work in Europe.
Connections, Disconnections and Reconnections: The Social Dimension of Youth Work in History
and Today, vol. 6.” European Commission and European Council, Strasbourg.
Wolf, Michaela. 2012. “The Sociology of Translation and Its ‘Activist Turn’.” Translation and Interpreting
Studies 7, no. 2: 129–43.
Further reading
Brailowsky, Yan, and María Brander de la Iglesia. 2007. “Babels, la traduction et l’éthique hacker: la liberté
en action?” Actes de la 1ère journée d’étude Traduction et mondialisation, December 8. www.yanb.eu/wp-
content/uploads/ethiquehacker.pdf
This article shows how the notion of hacking, although generally considered an activity of piracy in
the realm of software, can be motivated by ethical values and helps moving forward the reflection about
freedom and horizontality in the field of translation and interpretation in activist context.
Garcia, Ignacio. 2018. “Volunteers and Public Service Translation.” In Translating for the Community, edited
by Mustapha Taibi, 98–109. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
This chapter shows the emergence of a new kind of community translation (2.0) that emphasizes the
agents (by the community) and the means (online) rather than the reception (for the community) of
the public service. The fact that the community is solicited to engage in the tasks of mediation and
communication allows social inclusion and collaboration from bottom up, and ultimately a sense of
citizenship for newcomers.
O’Brien, Sharon. 2019. “Translation Technology and Disaster Management.” In The Routledge Handbook of
Translation and Technology, edited by Minako O’Hagan, chapter 18. London: Routledge.
This chapter fleshes out in part the ethical dilemmas that might occur in situations of disaster response
where the use of translation technologies and volunteers could raise questions of risk management.
244
17
Ethics of activist translation
and interpreting
1 Introduction
“Activist translation and interpreting” encompasses a variety of communication practices across
languages, cultures and modalities, whose aim is to support political agendas and struggles at both
the local and the global level. Within this context, a wide array of translation actors – translators,
interpreters, subtitlers, dubbers, with or without a professional background – “identify with and
contribute to concrete political agendas, particularly through volunteer work,” and “participate
in collective action to bring about social change” (Boéri 2008, 22), be it within relatively stable
activist communities (Babels, ECOS, Tlaxcala, etc.) or in temporary, transient networks (Cuad-
erno del Campo, Mosireen, Voices of Women from the Egyptian Revolution). Although activist
translation (as a broad encompassing term for all its modalities) shares some of the characteristics
of volunteer or non-professional translation (see Chapter 16 “Ethics of volunteering in transla-
tion and interpreting” in this volume), its explicit political motivation singles it out, given the
ethical issues arising in activist circles.
Politically motivated and performed by actors with varying trajectories and backgrounds,
activist translation is situated at the crossroads between two social fields (activism and translation)
with their own set of norms and values (doxa in Bourdieu’s terms) (Bourdieu 1994; Thomson
2012). However, these fields are not homogenous nor do they have clear boundaries. Indeed,
the norms and values influencing the practice of translation are shaped primarily by both the
language industry and the academic (inter-)discipline of translation studies, while the norms and
values of activism arise within a liminal and contentious space between social movements, civil
society, (inter-)state institutions and, increasingly, digital culture. The intersection of activism
and translation gives rise to an even more complex environment, characterised by a high degree
of uncertainty (Inghilleri 2005), as regards which doxa should prevail (Delgado Luchner and
Kherbiche 2019). This intersection configures a space characterised by hybridity, uncertainty
and contentiousness, where ethical issues, and even dilemmas, are bound to arise.
Since exploring these ethical issues constitutes the raison d’être and the aim of this chap-
ter, it is at this very intersection between translation1 and political activism that our critical
engagement with ethics is situated. This will allow us to account for the complexity and
245
heterogeneity of the activist communities, spaces and practices in question and to examine the
ways in which principles and values are constructed, contested and renewed in this dynamic
and disputed space.
2 Historical trajectory: activist translation and interpreting

Adopting a very broad perspective, one could consider every act of translation as inherently
ideologically motivated, either at the macro-level with regards to the choice of content to be
translated (Schäffner 2003) or at the micro-level of the translation process, for instance the
decision to domesticate or foreignise the original text (Venuti 1995). One of the challenges
of sketching out a history of activist translation and interpreting therefore rests upon its very
definition.
We define activist translation and interpreting as practices that are specifically set out “to
connect across the globe and to bring about social and political change” (Boéri 2019, 1) and
to disrupt dominant discourses and institutions, in the same way that activist movements have
“agendas that explicitly challenge the dominant narratives of the time” (Baker 2006, 462), i.e.
as practices that are intentionally and explicitly geared towards social change and a disruption of
existing power structures. In this light, feminist (see Chapter 9 “Feminist translation ethics” in
this volume), humanitarian (Delgado Luchner and Kherbiche 2018, 2019) or developmental
(Delgado Luchner 2018) translation may sometimes overlap with activism, depending on the
articulation of ends and means.
For instance, some humanitarian organisations, and by extension their translators, may pursue
an activist agenda. However, the ethical principles that guide humanitarian work emphasise the
impartiality of aid organisations (Labbé and Daudin 2016) and the provision of aid to alleviate
immediate needs (van Arsdale and Nockerts 2008) rather than pushing an agenda for social
change. Similarly, development aid is generally provided without disrupting the world order,
and formerly alternative discourses (e.g. participatory or grassroots development) have become
co-opted into the mainstream (Escobar 1995), thereby losing their activist dimension. Another
aspect which contributes to delimiting activism is individual actors’ identification and engage-
ment with the agendas of the institutions, organisations, networks and communities they work
for. For instance, humanitarian work may resemble activism given its purposes, but translators in
this context unlike those involved in social movements (Baker 2006; Boéri 2008) may not self-
identify as activists nor even identify with the aims of the humanitarian organisation employing
them (for a discussion on refugees working as interpreters for the United Nations High Com-
missioner for Refugees in Kenya, see Delgado Luchner and Kherbiche 2018).
Conversely, the scope of activist translation can be extended to practices that may not bear
this label. Indeed, activist translation, despite its emergence as a field of enquiry in translation
studies in the 21st century, is not a new phenomenon. Historical examples include Luther’s
endeavour to translate the Bible into German with a view to subverting existing ecclesiastic
power structures (Baker 2014, 417), as well as Irish nationalists’ translations under British colo-
nial rule (Tymoczko 2000a). There are many other examples cutting across time and space,
although they may not have been described as activist in the literature. The three seminal edited
volumes which have explicitly addressed activism in translation studies (Boéri and Maier 2010;
Simon 2005; Tymoczko 2010) cover a wide array of translation practices throughout history
that aimed to redress power imbalances, support minorities and resist domination, dictatorship
or censorship.
This continuity between the scholarship on visibility and intervention (which had come to
the fore in the 1990s) and the emerging literature on activism at the turn of the century has led
246
Ethics of activist T&I
Gambier to dismiss “activism” as little more than a new term arising in the wake of globalisa-
tion to reiterate the old call for language diversity (see Gambier 2007). However, as argued by
Boéri (2019), the research on activism differs in ways that allow us to speak of an emerging field
of enquiry. It places the emphasis on practices situated outside of the translation industry, for
instance in civil society and social movements (Baker 2006, 2013, 2016a; Boéri 2008, 2012b),
uprisings (Baker 2016b) and, increasingly, in information and communication technology (ICT-)
mediated activist communities (Baker 2019; Boéri 2014b; Pérez-González 2010, 2016), where
translators and interpreters are more likely to have the agency to address systemic injustices.
It has also initially disregarded individual, textual interventions in order to explore collective
action and discourse beyond the micro-context of the mediated communication encounter,
although the increased technologisation of social life has tended to blur the line between texts
and contexts as well as individuals and communities. Scholars adopting an activist approach
have sometimes supported activist causes, while at the same time aiming to remain critical and
reflexive about the tensions and contradictions underpinning activism. The work of scholars
involved in ECOS, Babels, the Palestinian cause or the Egyptian revolution are cases in point
that illustrate a new trend of politically engaged research in translation and interpreting studies
(see Boéri 2016, 2019).
These trends in activist translation and interpreting scholarship have brought this research
area closer to that of contemporary social movements studies. Present-day social movements
have their roots in struggles of the 1960s and the 1970s, such as the labour movement, the civil
rights movement and the women’s liberation movement (Maeckelbergh 2009). However, while
these were associated with two important changes, namely the emergence of the market and
the creation of the modern nation-state, “new” social movements have shifted from a focus on
individual states towards supranational issues such as the fight against “neoliberal globalization”
(Della Porta and Diani 2006, 46) and from a “command-oriented logic” (typical of traditional,
bureaucratic and hierarchical organisational models) to a “networking logic” (typical of grass-
roots groups) (Juris 2005, 256–257).
The global justice movement is a case in point: it encompasses a set of “initiatives against
neoliberal globalization [that] are very heterogeneous, and not necessarily connected to each
other,” and whose actions have taken “a myriad of forms, from individual utterances of dis-
sent and individual behavior to mass collective events, and from a variety of points of view”
(Della Porta and Diani 2006, 2). The global justice movement or alter-globalisation movement
constitutes one of the most thoroughly researched contexts for activist translation (Baker 2013,
2016b, 2019; Boéri 2008, 2010, 2012b). Activist translation practices in this constantly evolv-
ing movement – often framed as a movement of movements, best captured by the French word
mouvance – constitute the kind of “anti-establishment initiatives” that Baker sees as addressing
“specific issues that exceed national and social boundaries” (Baker 2018, 453). However, it
would be reductive to limit activist translation and interpreting to exclusively political commu-
nities and initiatives since translators’ mobilisation in and beyond this movement take multiple
forms such as “social activism, cultural activism, art activism and aesthetic activism” (Baker
2018, 453) or language activism (Koskinen and Kuusi 2017).
The very purpose of activism is to defend specific values and principles associated with social
change (for instance “participation,” “deliberation” and “horizontality” as outlined in Boéri
2012b) and to usher in alternatives that embody these. Therefore, its practice and its study imply
ethical motives and have ethical consequences. Groups with diametrically opposed agendas may
consider themselves as “activist,” as evidenced in the example of pro-Israel activist groups, such
as the American Zionist organization, and pro-Palestinian activist groups who both “refer to
themselves and are referred to by others as activists” (Baker 2019, 453).
247
The legitimacy of one form of activism or another is a matter of perspective not only for the
groups undertaking it but also for the researchers analysing it. The use of different terms to label
change-oriented action – “radical activism” or even “terrorism” (Moskalenko and McCauley
2009), or “advocacy” (Keck and Sikkink 1998), to name but a few – may have to do with the
perspective of the researchers and the tradition of their discipline, as regards the groups under
analysis. For instance, social movements studies has been traditionally interested in movements
that are positioned on the left of the political spectrum (Benford and Snow 2000), despite the
fact that anti-globalisation movements exist at either end of this spectrum. It is worth noting
that the left/right vocabulary may be problematic because alter-globalisation groups tend to
eschew the vocabulary of mainstream politics, although, as Della Porta and Diani remind us, the
“majority of those who still regard the left-right distinction as meaningful identify with the left
of the political spectrum” (2006, 71).
Translation studies scholars have also primarily focused on groups closely associated with the
so-called new or international left which has emerged after the collapse of the USSR and the
spread of neoliberalism, even though there may well be translation activist projects on the other
side of the spectrum. This trend is likely to be due to translation scholars’ general commitment to
linguistic and cultural diversity and pluralism (Baker 2016a, 10) that they are likely to find within
these groups by difference with their right-wing, fundamentalist or terrorist counterparts in the
fight against globalisation. Scholars have also tended to focus on groups with global agendas
rather than “nationalist aspirations” or “religious belief ” (Baker 2013, 24; see Hokkanen 2012
on activist church interpreting, as an exception in this regard) and to explore activist translation,
performed on a volunteer basis (Boéri 2019) or within a radical, grassroots and revolutionary
ethos (Boéri 2008). In this strand of research, the dynamics of co-optation by the capitalist
market and by the service economy and the interplay between dominance and resistance have
been part and parcel of the analysis (Baker 2006, 2018; Boéri 2012b; Piróth and Baker 2019).
This brief historiography of activism in translation studies and social movements studies
sheds light onto the disparate territory configured by activist practices of translation and their
theorisations. Its contours may be renegotiated according to the definition of activism adopted
by researchers, their interest in and/or subscription to an ethics of inclusion or exclusion, of
homogeneity or diversity, an ethos of solidarity, humanitarianism, revolution, the resort to vio-
lence and armed struggle, and the level of critical engagement with the practices, actors and
spaces under analysis.
3 Core issues and topics: ethics of positionality and organisation

Activist translation and interpreting practices have given rise to ethical controversies within
activist, professional and academic circles. Tensions have particularly crystallised around two
issues, the positionality of translators and interpreters and the organisation of translation and
interpreting. As we shall see, they have been approached from two different, if not opposed,
perspectives: impartiality versus engagement and expertise versus grassroots knowledge.
3.1 Ethics of positionality: impartiality versus engagement

We understand positionality in the sense employed by Delgado Luchner and Kherbiche (2018),
i.e. as shaped concurrently by an individual’s agency, their personal background, their relation-
ships with others and a wider social and political context. In this light, positionality goes beyond
“positioning” as employed by Mason (2009), since it includes the wider socio-political context
individuals are embedded in and the conditions and constraints that shape power asymmetries.
248
Thus, “positionality” is a critical concept for addressing translators’ and interpreters’ dynamic
position and relation to the values and principles of our societies.
The ethical principles most commonly mentioned in professional codes of practice and
taught in training settings revolve around core stakes: accuracy, neutrality and confidentiality (see
Chapter 20 “Ethics codes for interpreters and translators” in this volume). Among these three
principles, it is by far that of neutrality (also linked to impartiality) that has been most challenged
over the last decades, first by post-structuralists who relegated neutrality to a mere epistemologi-
cal ploy, and then in the 1990s by translation researchers who questioned the traditional “conduit
model” of inter-linguistic translation (Baker 2005; Tymoczko 2006; Venuti 1995).
Criticisms of this model have also emanated from studies of dialogue interpreting, where the
physical proximity of the interpreter with third parties imposes a tangible limit on invisibility
and impartiality (Angelelli 2004; Tipton 2008; Wadensjö 1998), and interpreting for the military
(Baker 2010; Inghilleri 2010). In view of these developments, impartiality has ceased to be viewed
as an accurate description of the translator’s actual positionality (Baker and Maier 2011; Delgado
Luchner and Kherbiche 2019; Drugan and Tipton 2017). However, this development in research
has had a limited impact on professional organisations (and educational settings), which still
largely subscribe to impartiality and neutrality as inherently good (Boéri 2015; van Wyke 2010).
It was at the turn of the 21st century, with the emergence of activist communities of trans-
lators and interpreters, that the “ethos of neutrality and non-engagement” (Baker and Maier
2011, 3) was to be more openly questioned (van Wyke 2010). Babels, the international net-
work of volunteer translators and interpreters (Boéri 2008, 2010, 2012b; Lampropoulou 2010),
Tlaxcala (Baker 2013; Talens 2010) or ECOS, the association of translators and interpreters for
solidarity (Baker 2013; Boéri 2010; De Manuel Jerez, López Cortés, and Brander de la Iglesia
2004; Sánchez Balsalobre García, Manuel Jerez, and Gutiérrez 2010) and Translator Brigades
(Baker 2013), to name but a few, became new players in the field of translation. Alongside these
communities of “activist translators,” communities of “activists who translate” (Guo 2008) were
created mostly by actors with no background in translation or interpreting, namely Gush Sha-
lom (Baker 2006), Cuaderno del campo (Baker 2019; Pérez-González 2010), or Mosireen, an
Egyptian collective of citizen journalists and cultural activists (Baker 2016b).
All these communities have adopted a discourse of engagement and partisanship and put this
discourse into practice in highly visible settings, such as international social forums and digital
environments. This discourse is at odds with a profession that has traditionally been developed,
taught, theorised and learnt within an ethos of impartiality. Even within collectives which
involve an important number of professionals, and teachers or students of translation and inter-
preting like ECOS, Babels or Translator Brigades, engagement seems to take precedence over
neutrality and impartiality. Such a radical political profile was bound to spark conflict within
professional circles. Tensions became public after the World Social Forum in 2005, when con-
ference interpreter Peter Naumann published a letter against Babels (the network in charge of
volunteer interpreting in this event), in Communicate!, the webzine of AIIC (the French acronym
for the International Association of Conference Interpreters). His satiric portrayal of Babels’
members as “ideologues of militancy” (Naumann 2005, n.d.), for instance, is an unveiled criti-
cism of engagement at the elite end of the conference interpreting profession (see Boéri 2008).
However much at odds with the profession, it is the very blending of translation and activism,
and the hybridity of actors as both translators and activists, which is characteristic of activist set-
tings: translation becomes an activist endeavour and activism, in its attempt to build networks of
solidarity across the globe, becomes a translated collective action.
By getting involved in specific communities and agendas, by selecting and translating
“missing narratives,” translators and interpreters play a major role in boosting public opinion
249
attention and curtailing the state repressive power on specific communities. This is for instance
evidenced by the involvement of Translate for Justice since 2013 “in making suppressed news
and documentation about violations of human rights in Turkey available at a global level”
(Baker 2019, 455).
This has a direct bearing on the ethics of positionality, as reported by Samah Selim, award-
winning Arabic translator, scholar and volunteer activist subtitler for Mosireen during the Egyp-
tian revolution:
This type of translation is not and cannot be “neutral”, and I mean this both in the broader
ethical – or what I would prefer to call, political – sense, and in the pragmatic of “profes-
sional” sense. In times of revolutionary crisis, the dissident translator is a partisan, fully pres-
ent in non-textual actuality, in place.
(Selim 2016, 82; emphasis original)
Activist settings, particularly revolutionary ones, configure a space where being involved
means finding one’s “place,” “being-in-place”; a positionality that is dynamically constructed in
and through translation, for and by fighting injustices. Selim’s emphasis on the “political,” rather
than the “ethical,” shows how limiting the doxa of our field has been for an ethics of engage-
ment. Selim’s account shows that where and when the two fields of the profession and political
activism intersect, impartiality and neutrality are often overridden by political engagement.
3.2 Ethics of organisation: expertise versus grassroots knowledge

The tension over the positionality of the translator/interpreter is coupled with a tension over the
organisation of translation and interpreting in activist settings. Activism in contemporary social
movements is guided by several overarching principles, such as horizontality and participation
(Boéri 2008, 31), diversity and pluralism (Baker 2016a, 10), advocacy and listening (Mosko
2018, 326) and a quest for social justice (Della Porta and Diani 2006, 68). Even though they
do not provide clear “prescriptions for acting,” they illuminate “a moral posture” (Mosko 2018,
331) and shape the organisational principles of activist communities. For instance, both the
Social Forum and Babels, in their charter of principles, adhere to horizontality (in the sense that
they are both self-conceived as open spaces for people to freely and equally contribute with no
hierarchies in the organisation), participation (that is, the direct involvement of participants in
the organisation, as opposed to representation whereby mandated organisers take decisions on
behalf of others) and prefiguration (the belief that activism in the here and now should embody
the desired social transformation) (see Boéri 2012b). They believe that these principles have the
potential to create a space for pluralism, diversity, inclusion and grassroots knowledge (Boéri
2010, 65).
The experience of the Social Forum reveals an important development in contemporary
politics, namely that “ideology is increasingly expressed through organizational practice and
design as opposed to discourse” (Juris 2005, 258). It thus follows that studying the ethics of
engagement requires examining the organisational culture of activist translators and interpreters,
and the extent to which it corresponds to that of the profession.
Diversity and inclusion have been at the heart of the field of translation and interpreting,
but it is through the ethos of expertise (quality, working conditions, competences) that they
have been championed, sometimes creating the illusion that interpreting as a technical skill has
universal features that are unconstrained by a specific cultural context (Delgado Luchner 2019).
By contrast, Babels, like many other groups emerging outside of the profession, did not (at least
250
initially) show “any engagement . . . with issues of quality, nor working conditions” (Boéri
2010, 66), since requirements to join the group were very loose. Such a stance challenges the
very foundations of the profession, as it implies that speaking foreign languages is sufficient in
order to translate and interpret. However, professionalisation rests upon the development of a
profile of expert, rather than “natural,” “ad hoc,” “novice” translators and interpreters (see Boéri
2012a). It is thus not surprising that the shift in discourse (the emphasis on political engagement
rather than competence) and in practice (actual involvement of non-professional volunteers) has
sparked controversy in professional circles.
This is particularly the case in the field of conference interpreting, where services provided
for free by untrained bilinguals, interpreting students or recent interpreting graduates are per-
ceived as a threat to professional standards, as made explicit by Naumann’s (2005, n.d.) reference
to Babels as “the innocents, the dilettantes, the semi-professionals, the perfect fools and an army
of the well-intentioned [who] will again join the travelling circus and stage the next fiasco.” The
propensity of professional conference interpreters and their associations to speak out publicly
against activist and non-professional practices may also have to do with the volte-face brought
about by activism in a profession which has traditionally serviced the interests of the first world
(Cronin 2002) and which boasts the image of a “strongly eurocentrist, elitist professional caste”
(Gentile, Ozolins, and Vasilakakos 1996, 8, in Martin 2016, 231).
Furthermore, unlike other modalities of translation, activist interpreting practices enjoy a
high degree of visibility: Babels interpreters have been involved and seen in social forums across
the world, and their calls for volunteers are widely circulated across the globe. The visibility
of these initiatives can backfire given their uneven efficacy: interpreters’ booth planning sheets
have been described as hanging on “washing lines,” working conditions as “chaotic” (Cathy
Arnaud interviewed in Boéri and Hodkinson 2005), and Babels volunteers’ translation output
as “hazardeuse” (“arbitrary”) (Agrikoliansky 2007, 37; our translation from French). Interest-
ingly, the lack of efficacy is perceived differently at the two ends of the spectrum: as a decline
by the elite end of the profession (particularly AIIC), for whom interpreting services ought to
be provided by expert, remunerated professionals in the market economy (Boéri 2015); and as
part and parcel of the process of experimenting alternatives to neoliberalism for activists, which
requires inclusion of the grassroots from the bottom up (Boéri 2010). These two stances take
the ethics of organisation in two different directions – expertise in the market economy versus
grassroots experimentation in a new world under construction – and this has a direct bearing
on translation planning and language diversity. For instance, in their attempt to step out of the
market economy, activist communities question the law of supply and demand of languages and
champion the coverage of non-colonial languages or languages that are not used as an interna-
tional lingua franca, in order to allow all activists to contribute to political debates in the language
of their choice. This is particularly the case of Babels, whose identity as a political actor rather
than as a service provider shapes its interpreting and language policy in the Social Forum:
In addition to the unavoidable vehicular languages, Babels proposes the languages of the
location where the Forum takes place: Hindi and Marathi at the Mumbai WSF [World
Social Forum] in 2004, Quechua at the Quito Americas Social Forum in 2004, Catalan
at the Barcelona Mediterranean Social Forum in 2005, Greek at the Athens ESF [Euro-
pean Social Forum] in 2006, Swedish at the Malmö ESF in 2008, British Sign Language
(BSL) at the London ESF in 2004 and Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) at the Porto Alegre
WSF in 2005, and Arabic at the Tunis WSF in 2013. Added to this are languages that are
deemed strategic for the extension of forums into under-represented regions: languages of
India (Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam) and of Asia (Korean, Indonesian, Japanese and Thai) in
251
Mumbai, Mediterranean, Central and Eastern European languages in London, Barcelona

and Athens.
(Boéri 2013, 9; our translation from French)
Thus, by diference with many ad hoc translation and interpreting settings, engagement in activ-
ist settings is not a mere “side-efect” of power asymmetries or a lack of professional training. It
results from social actors’ deliberate choice to use translation, interpreting, subtitling, and dub-
bing as “means of engaging in political activism” (El Tarzi 2016, 92) and, more importantly, of
transforming our societies towards greater justice. In such a process, translation may also become
an empowering space of self-expression for engaged citizens and artists (Mohamed 2016; Strowe
2017), in a wide array of digital and non-digital settings.
Nevertheless, however much activist communities strive for an alternative ethics of organisa-
tion, they cannot fully escape logistical constraints, particularly the lack of training in minori-
tised languages. Therefore, there is a constant tension between the ideal of diversity and its
implementation, between organising translation and interpreting from a bottom-up perspective
(attending to the needs of the grassroots, and shaping the direction of social transformation by
their inclusion) and from a top-down perspective (resorting to formally trained translators and
interpreters in the major international lingua francas) (Boéri 2012b).
To strike a balance between the two approaches, activists might experiment with diversity
called for by many activist communities of translators and interpreters. And indeed, in spite of
an apparent clash between the doxa of activism and the doxa of the profession, the emergence
of activist practices of translation and interpreting have also opened a space for reflection and for
pushing the boundaries of each field towards the other.
4 Current debates and issues: revisiting ethics

The ethical principles and praxis emerging at the intersection of translation and activism are
heterogeneous. They are embedded in the power asymmetries of this intersectional space, and
consequently some of them may have more currency and recognition (ethics doxa) than others
have, which are shared only by a minority of marginal actors in the field (ethics heterodoxa).
4.1 Ethics doxa: impartiality and expertise in volunteer services

As already discussed, activist translation and interpreting tend to challenge the ethical principles
of impartiality and expertise. However, a critical examination of what is meant by engagement
may lead us to reconsider the apparent incompatibility of these principles with activism, at least
within certain activist circles. Indeed, activist communities of translators and interpreters rarely
refer to engagement as a form of intervention in the text, which is one of the key distinctions
between translation in the context of social movements (what we consider activist translation)
and feminist translation, where intervention in the text has tended to take centre stage. Instead,
they frame engagement in the very choice to translate and interpret for a particular cause. Even
in Babels which, in the first decade of the century, was recognised as one of the most politicised
communities of translators and interpreters (Baker 2006), intervention in the organisational and
interpreting policy of the event (Boéri 2012b) has taken precedence over textual intervention in
the booth (Boéri 2008; Baker 2018).
The professional background of some of the actors involved may be influential given their
usual concern for textual integrity, regardless of their ideological positioning (Tymoczko 2007).
As noted by Boéri (2019), “it is by way of stepping out of subservient role they [translators and
252
interpreters] are assigned within the communication encounter itself that they might find some
leeway to adopt a political stance” (4).
Nevertheless, research shows that translators and interpreters do intervene in and beyond
the text, through intentional omission, addition or alteration of elements (Tymoczko 2000b;
Kassiem 2017), choice of content to be translated (Schäffner 2003), choice of language (Martin
2016), paratextual interventions (Baker 2007), and so on. In fact, intervention – both at the
micro-level of the text and at the macro-level beyond the text – has been at the heart of scholarly
accounts of free, ethnodeviant, foreignising and resistant strategies of translation and interpret-
ing, be they displayed within elitist circles such as the French Canadian feminist translators (Von
Flotow 1997) or within grassroots contexts such as the case of immigrants acting as brokers
between the Indignados and the Occupy Wall Street movements (Romanos 2016).
Nevertheless, actors who organise and provide translation and interpreting services in vol-
unteer, activist circles might be more concerned with the logistics of getting the message across
than with accounting for the complexities and the granularity of translation engagement. As
“beneficiaries” of interpreting, they may be unaware of the fact that an interpreter is more than
a mere conduit and view activist interpreters as they would view any other language services
provider (i.e. impartial and qualified), with the only difference that they support their political
cause through volunteering their time and skills. Thus, even in activist circles, there may be an
assumption that translation and interpreting activism revolves around merely providing impartial
and expert (however free) services. This assumption is in some cases shared by the individuals
acting as translators and interpreters, whether they are trained or untrained, paid or volunteering
their time, as has been observed in the case of an advocacy organisation, Amnesty International
(Tesseur 2017). In these cases, the traditional view of translators as neutral, impartial and expert
is reconciled with an ethics of engagement that starts and ends with the choice of the cause to
support, with no intervention in the realm of the text and the message. Thus, at the core of the
intersectional space between political activism and translation, the professional doxa of impar-
tiality and the activist doxa of communicational and organisational efficiency shape an ethics of
selfless service provision based on expertise and solidarity. One of the risks of this “ethics doxa” is
that volunteering may be instrumentalised by commercial agendas which are concealed behind a
non-profit organisation. A case in point is that of Translators Without Borders, which functions
as an offshoot and a selling point of a commercial translation agency (Baker 2006) and as the
“philanthropic arm of a massive business consortium” (Piróth and Baker 2019).
Professionals who are reluctant to see interpreting services provided for free might view these
scenarios as evidence that volunteering is only about economic savings, and thus unethical. For
translators and interpreters who identify primarily as activists and derive their motivation from
this positionality, these scenarios might be alienating. Indeed, as observed by Baker (2016a, 11),
who draws on Boéri (2008), there exists
a persistent tension between the volunteers’ conceptualization of their role – as primar-

ily political activists . . . – and the conceptualization of that role by non-translators in the
movement, who often seem unable to think of translators as anything other than service
providers positioned outside the main struggle.
Nevertheless, both conceptualisations may well be championed by translators and non-trans-

lators alike. Those positioned within traditional organisational politics (NGOs, humanitarian
organisations, etc.), are more likely to subscribe to a service provision ethics, whereas those
positioned in “new” social movements, with grassroots politics of organisation, are more likely to
adopt a political stance on translation (Boéri 2012b). In any case, even radical social movements
253
struggle to resist the pattern of efficiency because of the pressure to deliver macro-events, like the
social forums, or the urgency to get the message across in violent, high-risk activism processes
such as the Egyptian uprising (Baker 2019).
In the case of the social forum, the logistical pressure is coupled with the dominance of
traditional groups over the organisational process because of inequality of resources (Boéri and
Hodkinson 2005). The subsequent reproduction of the ethics of selflessness, solidarity, impartial-
ity and expertise in a space that, according to the Charter of Principles of Porto Alegre, was to
embody alternative organisational politics has led Babels to withdraw from the Social Forums
process at several points in time, and definitively, it seems, in 2015.
From 2015 onwards, volunteer interpreting at the Social Forums has no longer been provided
by Babels. In a 2015 press release, the collective underlines,
[T]here has been a lack of prior participatory consultation with our collective on the politi-
cal or logistical issues that we consider should be jointly and collectively defned, including
diversity of languages to be covered by interpretation, and dates and content of training
sessions.
(www.babels.org/spip.php?article566)
Even though the press release ended on a somewhat conciliatory note, pledging support to
the organisers “through other means,” the 2016 WSF in Montréal seems to mark a split which
does not seem to have been overcome at the time of writing this chapter, given that this docu-
ment was the last to be posted on the Babels website. The Babels coordination for the 2016
edition of the World Social Forum provides the following reasons for the network’s withdrawal:
the Organising Committee’s decision to “only offer interpreting into three colonial languages,”
thereby running the risk of silencing “a number of grassroot indigenous voices as well as voices
from the Global South,” the provision of interpreting services and equipment “for large con-
ferences only,” due mainly to the absence of a “meaningful provision for a solidarity fund for
interpreting”; the impossibility of guaranteeing “the right of everyone to express themselves in
the language of their choice and to contribute to discussions on the part language plays in the
mechanisms of cultural domination and in the circulation of ideas,” the organising committee’s
decision to launch “an interpreter pre-selection process without the involvement or knowledge
of the Babels coordination team” and the lack of clarity surrounding working conditions for
volunteer interpreters (including reimbursement of expenses for travel, food and lodging, as well
as available interpreting equipment). In other words, Babels coordinators felt that their involve-
ment was to be relegated to a mere free service and that they were not given the leeway to shape
the politics of language and interpreting at the Social Forum.
These withdrawals are indicative of the difficulty, if not failure, to challenge the ethics of
solidarity, impartiality and expertise in service provision and indicate that this service provision
ethics currently constitutes the ethics doxa of the intersectional space between political activism
and translation. In this light, scholars may have to turn their attention to the alternative ethical
principles and practices relegated to the margins, so as to explore the ethics heterodoxa and its
potential for a renewed ethics of translation and interpreting.
4.2 Ethics heterodoxa: intervention and prefiguration

The Social Forum experience, one of the most documented cases of activist translation in the
field, has shown the logistical and political difficulties of developing alternatives to the service
economy and to the belief that societal development rests upon greater progress, championed
254
by experts rising above their own ideological biases. These alternatives are thus pushed away
by mainstream approaches to socio-political change (doxa), towards the margins of the inter-
sectional space between translation and political activism (heterodoxa). Despite their peripheral
positioning and their imperfect implementations on the ground, these alternatives take ethics
to uncharted territories where scholars and professionals alike may find inspiring principles and
practices of translation and interpreting to contribute to social justice.
The value of diversity has been constitutive of the collective identity and action of the
movement for global justice, since it is considered “an act of resistance to the homogenization
of 500 years of colonial history, contemporary democracy, the mass media and consumer-
ism” (Maeckelbergh 2007, 92). This mass-based movement which cuts across time, space and
struggles – including the 1960s’ women’s, civil rights and peace movements (Polletta 1998), the
alter-globalisation movement in the 1990s, the World Social Forum at the turn of the century
and the more locally rooted upsurges that have arisen this decade (the Arab Spring, the Occupy
and Square movements, etc.) – “stands against the unitary narratives of (neo-)colonialism, prog-
ress and expertise and advocates for social change as diverse, multilayered, undefined and under
construction” (Boéri 2020). It is thus constitutive of an alternative approach to knowledge and
power whereby translation and interpreting may take on a new meaning (Boéri 2010) both at
the micro-level and at the macro-level (e.g. in and beyond the communication encounter).
Activist movements take the view that if structures of oppression are to be overcome, their
communication practices ought to be inclusive of difference, in such a way that translation and
interpreting become constitutive of social justice. The conflation of means and ends of social
change and the attempt to enact “the values of an ideal society within the very means of struggle
for that society,” which are defining features of prefigurative politics according to Maeckelbergh
(2007, 43), is also championed by communities of activist translators and interpreters. This is
attested to by the fact that these communities spend a considerable amount of time discussing
their scope of involvement not only to avoid dumping but also to resist the co-optation of vol-
unteering by commercial agendas (Sánchez Balsalobre et al. 2010 for ECOS; Boéri 2014b for
Babels).
Challenging the commodification of all aspects of life and work and structures of cultural
oppression might not be achievable without translators’ and interpreters’ intervention within the
texts, at the micro-level of communication. Despite a lack of explicit engagement with activ-
ist translators’ and interpreters’ interventions at this level, as underlined earlier, communities
develop initiatives to prepare volunteers for the tasks awaiting them in the realm of mediation.
For instance, ECOS and Babels have developed the situational preparation materials that aim to
test volunteers’ technical skills and background knowledge (Boéri 2010, 67).
Quality is acknowledged as a necessary requirement if the actual process of translating is to
embody social change and justice, since the translation provision serves the purpose of allow-
ing everyone to partake in the debate and have their voice heard. However, quality is reframed
within a narrative of grassroots and critical knowledge, away from expertise and impartiality
(Boéri 2014a). This approach is very much in line with the “self-reflexive” nature of contempo-
rary social movements and their often lauded high “internal ability for critique, analysis, and the
distribution of perspectives” (Lewis 2012, 229). In this context, issues such as accuracy, quality
and working conditions have gradually emerged as important ethical concerns.
In this light, prefiguration (the principle of embodying the change one wants to see) appears
as a key concept for a renewed ethics of translation and interpreting, not only at the macro-level
(Boéri 2012b) but also at the micro-level, for example in subtitling practices (Baker 2019). In
this sense, Baker’s use of prefigurative politics to account for subtitlers’ “commitment to solidar-
ity, diversity, non-hierarchy, horizontality, non-representational modes of practice” (460) can
255
be extended to translation and interpreting at large. “Prefigurative translation and interpreting,”

thus, refers to these interventionist practices in the texts, the discourses, subtitles, sound tracks
or any other semiotic elements such as images and their paratexts, which bring to light the act
of mediation both at the micro- and the macro-levels, across cultures, languages, channels and
modalities in cultural, political and artistic activism, e.g. in making a film, in organising with and
for movements or in performing expressive political actions.
It is not surprising that it is in audiovisual translation studies that prefiguration at the micro-
level was first addressed to account for activist interventions, since as argued by Pérez González
(2014, 255–256), this area of practice is a “site of interventionist practice” through the replace-
ment of subtitles, the exploitation of the visual in order to communicate alternative messages,
the use of sarcasm, the subversion of conventions. These practices embody the trends of inter-
linguistic, multimodal and intercultural communication in social movements which include the
increased mediation of technologies, the increased disregard for authorship, a sense of urgency
to get the message across (particularly in high-risk activism), the blurring of the frontier between
aesthetic and political activism given the similarities between contemporary mobilisations and
fan cultures, the blurring of the frontier between individual and collective initiatives, and the
shift from formalised (fan) communities to ad hoc, temporary community building, i.e. “ad-
hocracies” (Pérez González 2014).
Exploring translation and interpreting practices through the lenses of prefiguration allows
scholars to explore how means and ends can be conflated in the very mode of doing translation.
For instance, with reference to subtitling revolutionary materials in the Egyptian uprising, Baker
(2019) underlines that not attending to register variation, code-switching, coherence when
translating at the micro-level of activist texts contradicts the agenda of empowering the peoples
and the communities “represented” in these audiovisual materials and neglects the empower-
ing potential of language and translation. The choice of languages (Boéri 2012b; Martin 2016),
technical and technological tools (Baker 2019; Boéri 2012b), and the causes to support at the
macro-level also deserves some reflection on the part of decision makers. For instance, Babels has
always strived to raise awareness among Social Forum organisers of the contradiction between
the political aim to involve the grassroots organisations (ends) and opting for colonial languages
only in their interpreting policy (means) which ultimately reinforces language and cultural bar-
riers. Similarly, resorting to patented soundproof booths from private monopolistic companies
contradicts the agenda of providing an alternative to capitalism in the Social Forum (Boéri
2013).
Such a reconciliation of practices from both levels can equip scholars to account for the
complexities and the granularity of activism in translation and interpreting. Prefiguration can
become a yardstick for scholars and practitioners to assess translators’ and interpreters’ interven-
tions in and beyond the realm of mediation, or to put it in another way, to assess the extent to
which their interventions embody the values of diversity, inclusion and social justice. The assess-
ment of these heterodox and marginal practices, however, need to take into account their limita-
tions in terms of lack of resources and time, as well as their difficulties to resist co-optation in
that “‘liminal’ space between the world of activism and the service economy” (Baker 2013, 23).
5 Conclusions
Research into activist translation and interpreting practices overlaps with a growing body of
research into non-professional, volunteer practices that are not performed or organised accord-
ing to professional standards. However, researching activism is distinct from researching these
unconventional practices in the sense that the former is claimed to be undertaken for bringing
256
about social change. The emergence of activist communities and ad hoc temporary communities
(ad-hocracies) of translators and interpreters on the ground, their political stance on translation
as an act of engagement to be organised from the bottom up, have disrupted the professional
standards of impartial and expert services provision. Nevertheless, the complexities of ethics can-
not be accounted for by drawing on professional versus activist, engaged versus impartial, expert
versus grassroots dichotomies, as actors who are involved in the liminal space between politi-
cal activism and translation/interpreting are heterogeneous, even hybrid, their participation is
unstable, and their principles and practices are constantly evolving. Activism does not escape
from the interplay between dominance and resistance, between principles and practices, politics
and logistics, and is configured around power asymmetries. The diversity and contentious nature
of the ethical principles and praxis developed in activist contexts configure ethics doxa, at their
core, and ethics heterodoxa at their margins. The former stabilises an ethics of impartial, expert
service provision within a view of volunteer activist translation as a mere act of solidarity and
selflessness. The latter champions an ethics of agency and intervention in ways that prefigure the
social justice advocated for. Using prefiguration as a yardstick to explore activist translation and
interpreting both at the macro-level and at the micro-level of communication promises to renew
ethics in translation and social movement studies.

Translator ethics; professional translator ethics; conference interpreter ethics; the ethics of public
service interpreting; ethics of volunteering in translation and interpreting; feminist translation
ethics.
Note
1 Throughout this chapter, we will use the term “translation” to refer to both (audiovisual) translation and
interpreting, and the term “interpreting” when referring to interpreting only.
References
Agrikoliansky, Éric. 2007. “L’altermondialisme En Temps de Crise. Réflexions Sur Un Déclin Annoncé.”
Mouvements 2, no. 50: 33–41.
Angelelli, Claudia. 2004. Revisiting the Interpreter’s Role: A Study of Conference, Court, and Medical Interpreters
in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. New York: John Benjamins.
Baker, Mona. 2005. “Narratives in and of Translation.” SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 1, no.
1: 4–13. www.skase.sk
Baker, Mona. 2006. “Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community.” The Mas-
sachusetts Review 47, no. 3: 462–84.
Baker, Mona. 2007. “Reframing Conflict in Translation.” Social Semiotics 17, no. 2: 151–69.
Baker, Mona. 2010. “Narratives of Terrorism and Security: ‘Accurate’ Translations, Suspicious Frames.”
Critical Studies on Terrorism 3, no. 3: 347–64.
Baker, Mona. 2013. “Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action.” Social Movement Studies 12,
no. 1: 23–47.
Baker, Mona. 2014. “The Changing Landscape of Translation and Interpreting Studies.” In A Companion
to Translation Studies, edited by Sandra Bermann, and Catherine Porter, 15–27. Oxford: John Wiley &
Sons.
Baker, Mona. 2016a. “Beyond the Spectacle: Translation and Solidarity in Contemporary Protest Move-
ments.” In Translating Dissent : Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution, Critical Perspectives on Citizen
Media, edited by Mona Baker, 1–18. London, New York: Routledge.
Baker, Mona. 2016b. Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution. Edited by Mona Baker.
London, New York: Routledge.
257
Baker, Mona. 2019. “Audiovisual Translation and Activism.” In The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual
Translation, edited by Luis Pérez-González, 453–67. London, New York: Routledge.
Baker, Mona, and Carol Maier. 2011. “Ethics in Interpreter & Translator Training: Critical Perspectives.”
Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1: 1–14.
Benford, Robert, and David Snow. 2000. “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and
Assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology 26: 611–39.
Boéri, Julie. 2008. “A Narrative Account of the Babels vs. Naumann Controversy: Competing Perspectives
on Activism in Conference Interpreting.” Translator 14, no. 1: 21–50.
Boéri, Julie. 2010. “Emerging Narratives of Conference Interpreters’ Training: A Case Study of Ad Hoc
Training in Babels and the Social Forum.” Puentes 9: 61–70. www.ugr.es/~greti/puentes/puentes9/08-
Julie-Boeri.pdf
Boéri, Julie. 2012a. “Ad Hoc Interpreting at the Crossways between Natural, Professional, Novice and
Expert Interpreting.” In Interpreting Brian Harris: Recent Developments in Natural Translation and in Inter-
preting Studies, edited by Amparo Jiménez Ivars, and Maria-Jesús Blasco Mayor. Bern: Peter Lang.
Boéri, Julie. 2012b. “Translation/Interpreting Politics and Praxis: The Impact of Political Principles on
Babels’ Interpreting Practice.” The Translator 18, no. 2: 269–90.
Boéri, Julie. 2013. “Le Défi de La Traduction Dans Les Forums Sociaux : Plusieurs Langues Pour Un
Autre Monde.” Le monde diplomatique 715 (October): 9. www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2013/10/
BOERI/49730
Boéri, Julie. 2014a. “Interpretación y Formación Ad Hoc. Una Aproximación Contextual y Ascendiente
a La Noción de Calidad.” Quaderns 21: 211–23.
Boéri, Julie. 2014b. “Vers Une Approche Communicationnelle de l’Engagement : Les Récits Des Tra-
ducteurs-Interprètes Du Réseau Babels Dans Le Mouvement Altermondialiste.” Revue Française des
Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication 5. http://rfsic.revues.org/1172
Boéri, Julie. 2015. “Key Internal Players in the Development of the Interpreting Profession.” In Routledge
Handbook of Interpreting Studies, edited by Holly Mikkelson, and Renée Jourdenais, 29–44. London,
Boéri, Julie. 2016. “Activist Approach.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies, edited by Franz
Pöchhacker, 6–7. London, New York: Routledge.
Boéri, Julie. 2019. “Activism.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker,
and Gabriela Saldanha. London, New York: Routledge.
Boéri, Julie. 2020. “Diversity.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media, edited by Mona Baker, Luis Pérez
González, and Bolette B. Blaagaard. London, New York: Routledge.
Boéri, Julie, and Stuart Hodkinson. 2005. “Babels and the Politics of Language at the Heart of the Social
Forum.” Znet, Woods Hole, MA.
Boéri, Julie, and Carol Maier. 2010. Compromiso Social y Traducción/Interpretación–Translation/Interpreting and
Social Activism. Edited by Julie Boéri, and Carol Maier. Granada: ECOS.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1994. Raisons Pratiques Sur La Théorie de l’action. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Cronin, Michael. 2002. “The Empire Talks Back: Orality, Heteronomy, and the Cultural Turn in Inter-
pretation Studies.” In Translation and Power, edited by Maria Tymoczko, and Edwin Gentzler, 45–62.
Amherst, Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.
Delgado Luchner, Carmen. 2018. “Contact Zones of the Aid Chain: The Multilingual Practices of Two
Swiss Development NGOs.” Translation Spaces 7, no. 1: 44–64.
Delgado Luchner, Carmen. 2019. “‘A Beautiful Woman Sitting in the Dark’: Three Narratives of Inter-
preter Training at the University of Nairobi.” Interpreting 21, no. 1: 91–114.
Delgado Luchner, Carmen, and Leïla Kherbiche. 2018. “Without Fear or Favour? The Positionality of
ICRC and UNHCR Interpreters in the Humanitarian Field.” Target 30, no. 3: 409–29.
Delgado Luchner, Carmen, and Leïla Kherbiche. 2019. “Ethics Training for Humanitarian Interpreters
Working in Conflict and Post-Conflict Settings.” Journal of War and Culture Studies 12, no. 3: 251–67.
Della Porta, Donatella, and Mario Diani. 2006. Social Movements: An Introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell
Publishing Ltd.
De Manuel Jerez, Jesús, Juan López Cortés, and María Brander de la Iglesia. 2004. “Traducción e Interpre-
tación, Voluntariado y Compromiso Social.” Puentes 4: 65–72.
Drugan, Joanna, and Rebecca Tipton. 2017. “Translation, Ethics and Social Responsibility.” The Translator
23, no. 2: 119–25.
258
El Tarzi, Salma. 2016. “Ethical Reflections on Activist Film-Making and Activist Subtitling.” In Translating
Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution, Critical Perspectives on Citizen Media, edited by Mona
Baker, 88–96. New York, NY, London, UK: Routledge.
Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Gambier, Yves. 2007. “Réseaux de Traducteurs/Interprètes Bénévoles.” Meta: Journal des traducteurs 52,
no. 4: 658–72.
Gentile, Adolfo, Uldis Ozolins, and Mary Vasilakakos. 1996. Liaison Interpreting: A Handbook. Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press.
Guo, Ting. 2008. “Translation and Activism: Translators in the Chinese Communist Movement in the
1920s-30s.” In Translation and Its Others, Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in Translation Stud-
ies 2007, edited by Pieter Boulogne, 1–25. www.arts.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/files/guo.pdf
Hokkanen, Sari. 2012. “Simultaneous Church Interpreting as Service.” Translator 18, no. 2: 291–309.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2005. “Mediating Zones of Uncertainty.” The Translator 11, no. 1: 69–85.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2010. “You Don’t Make War without Knowing Why.” The Translator 16, no. 2: 175–96.
Juris, Jeffrey. 2005. “Social Forums and Their Margins: Networking Logics and the Cultural Politics of
Autonomous Spaces.” Ephemera 5, no. 2: 253–72.
Kassiem, Gava. 2017. “Translation and Identity: Translation of the Freedom Charter Into Afrikaans as a
Case in Point.” Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 35, no. 3: 271–84.
Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International
Politics. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press.
Koskinen, Kaisa, and Päivi Kuusi. 2017. “Translator Training for Language Activists: Agency and Empow-
erment of Minority Language Translators.” Trans-kom 10, no. 2: 188–213.
Labbé, Jérémie, and Pascal Daudin. 2016. “Applying the Humanitarian Principles: Reflecting on the
Experience of the International Committee of the Red Cross.” International Review of the Red Cross 97,
no. 897/898: 183–210.
Lampropoulou, Anastasia. 2010. “Babels’ Interpreting Policy in the Athens European Social Forum: A
Socio-Political Approach to Interpreting.” In Compromiso Social y Traducción/Interpretación–Translation/
Interpreting and Social Activism, edited by Julie Boéri, and Carol Maier, 28–37. Granada: ECOS.
Lewis, Adam Gary. 2012. “Ethics, Activism, and the Anti-Colonial: Social Movement Research as Resis-
tance.” Social Movement Studies 11, no. 2: 227–40.
Maeckelbergh, Marianne. 2007. “Decentralized Network Democracy: Prefiguring Horizontality and
Diversity in the Alterglobalization Movement.” PhD thesis. University of Sussex, Falmer.
Maeckelbergh, Marianne. 2009. The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement Is Changing the
Face of Democracy. London: Pluto Press.
Martin, Anne. 2016. “Interpreting and Ideology: Research Trends and Methods.” In Addressing Method-
ological Challenges in Interpreting Studies Research, edited by Claudio Bendazzoli, and Claudia Monacelli,
225–44. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Mason, Ian. 2009. “Role, Positioning and Discourse in Face-to-Face Interpreting.” In Interpreting and Trans-
lating in Public Service Settings, edited by Raquel De Pedro Ricoy, Isabelle Perez, and Christine Wilson,
52–73. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Mohamed, Deena. 2016. “On Translating a Superhero: Language and Webcomics.” In Translating Dissent:
Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution, 137–47. London, New York: Routledge.
Moskalenko, Sophia, and Clark McCauley. 2009. “Measuring Political Mobilization: The Distinction
between Activism and Radicalism.” Terrorism and Political Violence 21, no. 2: 239–60.
Mosko, Melissa A. 2018. “Emancipatory Advocacy: A Companion Ethics for Political Activism.” Philosophy
and Social Criticism 44, no. 3: 326–41.
Naumann, Peter. 2005. “Babels and Nomad: Observations on the Barbarising of Communication
at the 2005 World Social Forum.” Communicate! http://aiic.net/page/1800/babels-and-nomad-
observations-on-the-barbarising-of-communication-at-the-2005-world-social-forum/lang/1
Pérez-González, Luis. 2010. “‘Ad-Hocracies’ of Translation Activism in the Blogosphere: A Genealogical
Case Study.” In Text and Context Essays on Translation and Interpreting in Honour of Ian Mason, edited by
Mona Baker, Maeve Olohan, and María Calzada Pérez, 259–87. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Pérez-González, Luis. 2014. Audiovisual Translation: Theories, Methods and Issues. London, New York:
Routledge.
259
Pérez-González, Luis. 2016. “The Politics of Affect in Activist Amateur Subtitling: A Biopolitical Perspec-
tive.” In Citizen Media and Public Spaces: Diverse Expressions of Citizenship and Dissent, edited by Mona
Baker, and Bolette Blaagaard, 118–35. London, Routledge: Routledge.
Piróth, Attila, and Mona Baker. 2019. “The Ethics of Volunteerism in Translation. Translators Without
Borders and the Platform Economy.” October 2019. https://www.sisubakercentre.org/2019/11/12/
new-publication-the-ethics-of-volunteerism-attila-piroth-and-mona-baker-october-2019/.
Polletta, Francesca. 1998. “‘It Was Like a Fever . . . ’ Narrative and Identity in Social Protest.” Social Problems
45, no. 2: 137–59.
Romanos, Eduardo. 2016. “Immigrants as Brokers: Dialogical Diffusion from Spanish Indignados to
Occupy Wall Street.” Social Movement Studies 15, no. 3: 247–62.
Sánchez Balsalobre, Leticia, Eloísa Monteoliva García, Jesús De Manuel Jerez, and Esther Romero Gutiér-
rez. 2010. “ECOS: 12 Years Breaking Down the Barriers of Silence and Languages.” In Compromiso
Social y Traducción/Interpretación–Translation/Interpreting and Social Activism, edited by Julie Boéri, and
Carol Maier, 7–18. Granada: ECOS.
Schäffner, Christina. 2003. “Translation and Intercultural Communication: Similarities and Differences.”
Studies in Communication Sciences 3, no. 2: 79–107.
Selim, Samah. 2016. “Text and Context: Translating in a State of Emergency.” In Translating Dissent: Voices
from and with the Egyptian Revolution, 77–87. Abingdon, New York: Routledge.
Simon, Sherry. 2005. “Presentation.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction. Special issue of Traduc-
tion engagée/Translation and Social Activism 18, no. 2: 9–16. http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/015743ar
Strowe, Anna. 2017. “‘This Show Does Not Represent the View of the Artists’: Translation, Non-Transla-
tion, Activism and Access in the Homeland Graffiti Hack.” Translation Studies 10, no. 1: 22–37.
Talens, Manuel. 2010. “The Languages of Tlaxcala: A Short History of a Long Walk.” In Compromiso Social
y Traducción/Interpretación–Translation/Interpreting and Social Activism, edited by Julie Boéri, and Carol
Maier, 19–24. Granada: ECOS.
Tesseur, Wine. 2017. “The Translation Challenges of INGOs. Professional and Non-Professional Transla-
tion at Amnesty International.” Translation Spaces 6, no. 2: 209–29.
Thomson, Patricia. 2012. “Field.” In Pierre Bourdieu Key Concepts, edited by Michael Grenfell, 65–80.
Durham: Acumen Publishing Limited.
Tipton, Rebecca. 2008. “Reflexivity and the Social Construction of Identity in Interpreter-Mediated
Asylum Interviews.” The Translator 14, no. 1: 1–19.
Tymoczko, Maria. 2000a. “Translation and Political Engagement: Activism, Social Change and the Role
of Translation in Geopolitical Shifts.” The Translator 6, no. 1: 23–47.
Tymoczko, Maria. 2000b. “Translation and Political Engagement.” The Translator 6, no. 1: 23–47. http://
isg.urv.es/library/papers/tymoczko.rtf
Tymoczko, Maria. 2006. Translating Others. Edited by Theo Hermans, 13–32. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome.
Tymoczko, Maria. 2010. Translation, Resistance, Activism: Essays on the Role of Translators as Agents of Change.
Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
van Arsdale, Peter W., and Regina A. Nockerts. 2008. “A Theory of Obligation.” The Journal of Humanitar-
ian Assistance. https://sites.tufts.edu/jha/archives/138
van Wyke, Ben. 2010. “Ethics and Translation.” In Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Yves Gambier,
and Luc van Doorslaer, 111–15. Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Von Flotow, Luise. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism. Manchester: St. Jerome
Publishing.
Wadensjö, Cecilia. 1998. Interpreting as Interaction. London, New York: Longman.
Further reading
Baker, Mona.2016b. Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution. Edited by Mona Baker.
London, New York: Routledge.
In addition to academic contributions, this edited volume features texts written by activists involved
in translating the Egyptian Revolution, and provides readers with unique perspectives which push the
boundaries of our field and its traditional understanding of ethics.
260
on Activism in Conference Interpreting.” Translator 14, no. 1: 21–50.
This paper offers a contrastive analysis of the ethical principles guiding Babels volunteers and profes-
sional conference interpreters, and thus illustrates the two sets of doxa presented in this chapter.
Boéri, Julie. 2019a. “Activism.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker,
and Gabriela Saldanha. London, New York: Routledge.
This entry is dedicated to research into activism within translation studies, thus encompassing its various
strands of research such as (audiovisual) translation and interpreting.
Della Porta, Donatella, and Mario Diani. 2006. Social Movements: An Introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell
Publishing Ltd.
In this monograph, the authors present the historical roots and key features of contemporary social
movements. As such, it allows translation studies scholars with an interest in activist translation to better
understand the context within which this practice is embedded.
Tymoczko, Maria. 2010. Translation, Resistance, Activism: Essays on the Role of Translators as Agents of Change.
Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
This collection of papers covers a broad range of examples of activist translation practices distributed
across time and space. Although not explicitly focusing on ethics, the chapters in this volume enrich
our understanding of the history of activist translation.
261
18
Translation technology and ethics
Lynne Bowker
1 Introduction
Relatively little has been written on ethics and translation technology, though this is beginning
to change. For example, as more general debates on the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) and
machine learning are coming to the fore in other fields of knowledge as well as in the popular
media, ethical questions are being broached in the context of recent approaches to machine
translation (MT), such as neural machine translation, which utilizes machine learning tech-
niques. Evidence of more attention being paid to the ethics of translation technology can be
seen on online discussion forums and blogs for translators, such as posts made by Love (2019)
and Pilinu (2019), who explore questions such as “Is MT being funded? Why and by whom?”
and “Some ethics for MT related to endangered languages.”
While it is encouraging to see translators begin to engage with questions about translation
technology and ethics, the published literature on this topic is partial and fragmented. For
instance, while there is a considerable body of work on the ethics of translation, as well as one on
computer-aided translation (CAT) and MT, relatively little scholarly literature directly addresses
the intersection of the two, though this is starting to change.
Translation has been practised for thousands of years, but only in recent decades have com-
puter tools become heavily integrated into this profession. While MT research efforts date to
World War II, it was only when desktop computers became available in the 1980s that transla-
tors started actively using technology by accessing electronic term banks or creating their own
term records with early terminology management software (Bowker 2003). However, the use of
technologies by translators really began to take hold in the 1990s, with the introduction of com-
mercial translation memory (TM) systems. Momentum continued to grow, and now translators
have access to tool suites that integrate a range of technologies from word processors to MT
systems. In addition, the advent of free online MT systems, beginning with Google Translate in
2006, means that translation technology is now used regularly by people outside the translation
profession (e.g. Bowker and Buitrago Ciro 2019).
Nevertheless, when it comes to technology, the focus in Translation Studies for many years
was largely placed on describing tool function and design and on creating “how to” guides. Until
relatively recently, there had been less emphasis on the deeper implications of these technologies,
262
including how they fit within the wider spectrum of cultural, social, political, professional and
ethical concerns, and this in spite of the fact that
[m]any of these questions about ethical aspects of new [translation] technologies are difcult
to separate from broader sociocultural issues. Technological developments have occurred
alongside, and played a part in, major ongoing shifts in social structures, migration patterns,
trade, information and employment.
(Drugan 2019, 250)
Consequently, as translation technology becomes both increasingly widespread and progressively

more embedded in the translation profession and society at large, questions about ethics and
technology use are garnering more attention and the associated body of literature is developing.
This chapter takes stock of issues pertaining to ethics and translation technologies that have been
discussed to date, while also looking to the future by considering some emerging questions.
2 Historical trajectory and tool types

In recent years, translation technology has sparked discussions about ethical questions that touch
various aspects of the translation profession, including translators’ professional identity, profes-
sional relationships and business decisions. For clarity and ease of discussion, I have tried to
separate out different technology-related ethical concerns in the following sections, though in
reality, many overlap or are intertwined, such that the same issue may be discussed from multiple
perspectives. Additionally, while I have tried to address a range of pertinent questions relating to
ethics and translation technology, it would be impossible to provide comprehensive coverage of
any given issue in this short chapter. Rather, I aim to provide a glimpse into these important yet
still evolving matters, and I hope that this will spur readers to dig deeper and to conduct their
own investigations into this relatively under-researched area.
Before discussing the ethical concerns, I give a brief introduction to CAT and MT to help
situate readers and allow them to better understand how features of these tools have opened the
door to some of the ethical questions that have emerged. Then I present the ethical issues as they
relate to translation technologies. With regard to organization, I attempt to present the issues in
a roughly chronological order. Ironically, although MT was the earliest translation technology
to be developed, it was in relation to the increasing integration of CAT tools in the translation
profession that ethical issues were first discussed in earnest. With regard to MT, ethical questions
have begun to be raised more frequently in relation to the more recent corpus-based approaches,
though as noted earlier, there is certainly overlap and intertwining of many issues.
2.1 Computer-aided translation

CAT tools form a spectrum. At one end, we see office software and basic resources such as term
banks, which translators can consult as needed. Towards the other end, we find more sophisti-
cated and comprehensive tool suites (sometimes called workbenches or Translation Environment
Tools [TEnTs]), whose components may include term extractors, terminology management
systems, concordancers, translation memory systems and sometimes even MT tools, which
attempt to automate some part of the translation process and actively suggest options to transla-
tors (Bowker and Fisher 2010).
Although these tools are often bundled together and are increasingly able to interact with one
another, the core of any such package is arguably the TM system (Bowker and Fisher 2010). A
263
Lynne Bowker
TM allows users to store previously translated texts and then easily consult them for potential
reuse. To permit this, a collection of electronic source and target texts is stored in a TM database
in the form of an aligned bitext. This bitext is created by first dividing the texts into segments –
usually sentences – and then linking each segment from the source text to its corresponding
segment in the translation.
When a translator has a new text to translate, the TM system first divides it into segments
and then compares each segment against the contents of the TM database. Using pattern-
matching, the TM system tries to identify whether any portion of the new text has been previ-
ously translated as part of a text stored in the TM database. When the TM system finds one or
more matches (either exact or fuzzy) for a given segment or subsegment, it presents them to the
translator. The software does not force the translator to accept the displayed matches; these are
offered only for consideration and can, in principle, be accepted, modified or rejected by the
translator. Of course, the client or employer may require translators to accept matches, which is
an issue that will be discussed later.
Readers looking for an introduction to the most typical CAT tools may consult Bowker and
Fisher (2010). For a more wide-ranging exploration of issues related to CAT tools, delve into
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Technology (Chan 2015) or The Routledge Handbook of
Translation and Technology (O’Hagan 2020).
2.2 Machine translation

As noted previously, though machine translation was the first type of translation technology
to be developed, its early incarnations did not generate much discussion about ethical issues.
Early approaches to MT are characterized as being “rule-based” because these initial rule-based
machine translation (RBMT) systems attempted to process language in a way that resembles how
linguists approach the study of language – by following lexical and grammatical rules. Hutchins
and Somers (1992) provide a more thorough description of RBMT, but in general, these sys-
tems contained large bilingual dictionaries and detailed instructions about how to combine
linguistic items to form sentences. Although it was time-consuming and expensive – requiring
the development of different MT engines for each language pair and direction – the rule-based
approach to MT was the dominant paradigm for nearly fifty years. Only with the advent of
corpora (i.e. large collections of machine-readable text) in the 1990s did researchers seriously
begin to consider other ways of tackling MT. Having a general understanding of corpus-based
or “data-driven” approaches, and how they differ from the rule-based approach, will help read-
ers to better understand why and how these corpus-based systems have sparked conversations
about ethics and MT.
An early corpus-based approach to MT was example-based MT or EBMT, which operated
in a way similar to the TM systems described previously (Wong and Webster 2015). Essentially,
an EBMT system would search a large bilingual parallel corpus to find examples of how par-
ticular phrases had been translated previously; it would then recombine the various matches
to create a target text. Meanwhile, statistical machine translation (SMT), which became the
dominant paradigm in the early 2000s, also used corpora – both monolingual and bilingual – to
identify previous translation solutions and to calculate probabilities that a past solution could be
appropriate for inclusion in a new translation (Liu and Zhang 2015). Carl and Way (2003) and
Koehn (2010) provide more detailed information about EBMT and SMT respectively.
In 2016, another paradigm shift occurred which has seen artificial intelligence and machine
learning techniques applied to MT in an approach known as neural machine translation (NMT)
(Castilho et al. 2017a). An artificial neural network is an information processing system that is
264
inspired by the way that biological nervous systems, such as the brain, process information. It is
composed of a large number of highly interconnected processing elements that work in unison
to solve specific problems. Saffran, Senghas, and Trueswell (2001), who investigate child lan-
guage learning, have observed that children discover the rules that generate an infinite set using
only a finite sample as a reference. Artificial intelligence-based machine-learning techniques
face a similar challenge in that artificial neural networks learn by example. An artificial neural
network is configured for a specific application, such as pattern recognition, through a learning
process. Artificial neural networks are organized in layers, and these layers are made up of a num-
ber of interconnected nodes which contain an activation function. Patterns are presented to the
network via the input layer, which communicates to one or more hidden layers where the actual
processing is done via a system of weighted connections. The hidden layers then link to an out-
put layer where the answer is shown. Artificial neural networks contain some form of learning
rule which modifies the weights of the connections according to the input patterns with which
it is presented. In this way, artificial neural networks learn by example. The more examples that
an NMT system has available for reference, the better the quality of its output; therefore, training
corpora are ideally very large (i.e. hundreds of millions of words of parallel text). Language pairs
for which relatively few parallel corpora are available are described as low resource languages,
and NMT systems built using small corpora tend to produce lower quality texts.
A main difference between NMT and SMT is that when researchers present training material
(i.e. corpora) to the deep learning algorithms in an artificial neural network, they do not neces-
sarily tell the algorithms what to look for. Instead, the NMT system finds patterns itself, such as
contextual clues around the source sentence. Forcada (2017) provides an accessible introduction
to NMT in which he likens the process to predictive text completion: for each word from the
source text, the most likely output word is predicted while the target text is being constructed.
Now that I have briefly introduced CAT and MT tools, let us consider some ethical questions
that have arisen in relation to them.

As technologies continue to occupy greater space in translation classrooms, workplaces, and
research agendas, they have generated or been accompanied by a complex web of ethical issues,
such as ownership of translation resources, privacy and confidentiality of translation data, pro-
fessional identity of translators, productivity and payment, translators’ codes of ethics, and the
potential contribution of tools to linguistic hegemony or linguistic diversity.
3.1 Sharing and commoditization of translation resources

An early discussion of ethics and translation technologies comes from Topping (2000), who
wrote about a practical issue arising as a result of TM use: the question of whether TM data-
bases should be shared. The debate at that time involved three groups: individual translators,
translation agencies and clients. As Topping (2000) reports, some translators wished to maxi-
mize productivity by expanding their TM database collection as quickly as possible and so they
advocated for TM database exchange. Meanwhile, agencies argued that sharing TMs would
be unethical since clients would not want to have their documentation rendered using a style
and terminology similar to that of their competitors. Finally, clients who purchased translation
services wanted to protect their intellectual property and investments.
The issue arose again when Zetzsche (2005) observed that TM and terminology databases had
acquired the status of “assets.” In particular, clients had become aware of the value of controlling
265
Lynne Bowker
these databases: they would not be locked into working with a single language services provider,
they could ensure consistency and they could curb costs by paying less for translating segments
with database matches. Increasingly, clients began requiring translators to pass on these TM and
terminology databases as part of the project deliverables, as well as to insist that these databases
be used for future jobs within their own company. However, translators were not permitted to
use these databases to do work for other clients.
Twenty years later, Moorkens and Lewis (2020) observe that in many cases, translators’
still do not have any significant control over TM resources. While translators do have legal
rights and copyright ownership of both target texts and aligned TM databases, translation
industry employment practices often make it challenging for translators to assert their rights.
What’s more, the lawyers who drafted the copyright legislation did not predict that transla-
tions would go on to be reused to such a large extent, whether in TM tools or as MT training
data. Parallel corpus data is now being repurposed in ever-increasing amounts, but broken
down to word and even sub-word levels, which are not clearly covered by copyright legisla-
tion. Although copyright law continues to evolve, Moorkens and Lewis (2020) note that, to
date, there has been no significant impact on the reality of translation data ownership: many
freelance translators still feel pressure to hand over their TM databases to agencies or clients
because not doing so might affect the translator’s standing with that service provider and
cause payment problems.
3.2 Privacy and confidentiality of data

A related problem is that of confidentiality of information when using some translation tech-
nologies. According to Kamocki and O’Regan (2016, 4461), using free online MT may entail
privacy risks of which users may be unaware and of which MT service providers may be tempted
to take advantage. For instance, users may imagine that data entered into a free online MT ser-
vice simply disappears once the translation process is completed. However, MT service providers
may keep this data and reuse it (e.g. as training data). As the capacity and availability of free MT
tools expand, so too will the amount of inadvertently disclosed sensitive data. Depending on the
nature of their text, users of free online MT sites may need to be concerned about the potential
loss of personal or proprietary data or of intellectual property.
Common Sense Advisory, an independent market research firm focusing on language ser-
vices, has explored the risks associated with entering sensitive information into free online trans-
lation tools. According to DePalma (2014), sensitive data can leak in two ways: in transit or at the
site. First, the “wrong” people can see information in transit. This issue is not restricted to MT
but is a symptom of increasing reliance on web-based services and the cloud. Users make MT
requests over unencrypted connections or use open Wi-Fi hotspots that anyone could monitor.
This exposes potentially sensitive information to whoever is listening in.
Less often considered is what online MT providers do with the data that users enter. These
free online MT providers can use data in ways that users did not intend. While content owner-
ship remains with the creator, free online MT providers may claim usage rights under their terms
and conditions. For example, as DePalma (2014) reports, Google notes that it does not claim any
ownership in the content that users submit or in the translations of that content that are returned
by the MT system. However, by following the policy links, one learns that:
When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those
we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store reproduce, modify, create derivative
works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so
266
that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform,
publicly display and distribute such content.
(cited in DePalma 2014)
Moreover, the license to use the data continues even after a user ceases to use the service.
3.3 Fidelity and collaboration

Another early discussion that focused on how translation technologies are impacting ethics in
translation was initiated by Pym (2003), who observes that one significant way in which tech-
nologies have changed the translation profession is by facilitating group work. Thanks initially
to email and file transfer tools, and then later networked and cloud-based systems, translation
projects are increasingly team-based, where shared TM and terminology databases impose col-
lective consistency. Meanwhile, in corpus-based MT, the corpora consist of translations that have
been previously produced by other translators. According to Pym (2003), this erodes the very
notion of fidelity (to source text, to source author, to the intention of the text or author, etc.) on
which a traditional ethics of translation is founded because the team work, or the reuse, means
that an individual translator is no longer responsible in any sovereign way.
Crowdsourcing raises similar questions. Although crowdsourcing is not a type of technology
per se, it is technology-enabled and cloud-based, and so it merits a brief discussion. Jiménez-
Crespo (2018) describes crowdsourcing as outsourcing problem-solving activities and cognitive
tasks to large crowds of participants. This has been made possible by new technologies and plat-
forms that allow large groups of people to cooperate at a scale that was previously unimaginable.
Early explorations of translation crowdsourcing focused on obtaining translations for free from
bilinguals who were not professional translators (see also Chapter 16 “Ethics of volunteering in
translation and interpreting” in this volume). However, the use of non-professionals can present
problems since unpaid participants have been shown to skip difficult or uninteresting content.
Attention next turned to paid crowdsourcing, which Garcia (2015) perceives as a new business
model in the translation industry. As with the collaboratively produced TM and MT resources
described earlier, crowdsourced translations are the product of multiple contributors and so the
ethical question raised by Pym (2003) applies here also.
Pym (2003) argues that technology exacerbates this situation in another way too. While
most contemporary theories of ethics require translators to consider a wide range of factors (e.g.
source text, target audience, purpose of the translation), tools such as TMs, and to some extent
MT, reward consistency and efficiency and instead force translators to reduce translation to the
most primitive sense of fidelity imaginable: fidelity to words at the sentence or even the sub-
sentence level (because of the segmentation applied to bitexts, as explained previously). A related
twist associated with TM and corpus-based MT use is that translators are rewarded for making
choices that will not only work (at least to some extent) for the current text but that will also
maximize the potential for future reuse (e.g. matches in the TM database) because reuse could
increase translators’ productivity.
3.4 Professional identity, autonomy and job satisfaction

Several authors, including Stupiello (2008) and Dos Santos (2016), highlight a major risk asso-
ciated with using CAT tools: the concealing, overshadowing or downgrading of the transla-
tor’s contribution. Rather than seeing a translator who interprets a source text’s meaning and
intention and renders these in an appropriate target text, clients may perceive the language
267
Lynne Bowker
professional as a copy editor who simply makes minor revisions to the “real” work that has been
largely done by a machine, which has retrieved the correct solutions from its database or corpus.
Stupiello (2008) calls for translators to think carefully about hidden ethical costs before leaping
to embrace the promises of increased productivity and consistency touted by CAT tools vendors,
asking whether speed and consistency are worth the price of having the translator’s perceived
contribution downgraded to copy editor of the target text rather than having the translator be
recognized as the one who is actually bringing forth the source text’s meaning.
Meanwhile, Kenny (2011) raises a related point in connection with SMT (though her com-
ments apply equally to NMT), noting that, in addition to relying on human translations for
training data, SMT also relies on human translation for its legitimacy: the reason that developers
train SMT systems with parallel corpora that have been produced by professional translators is
because these corpora are assumed to contain good solutions. Moreover, they are assumed to
contain good solutions precisely because they contain translations performed by humans. But
what exactly is the ethical issue here? The problem lies in the fact that human contributions
to the MT process go largely unnoticed. As Kenny (2011, 2) describes, this technology “relies
on the ingenuity of both human translators (who produce vital data) and statistically-minded
computer scientists (who work out clever ways of using these and other data), and both sets of
protagonists might expect to be acknowledged in discussions.”
Meanwhile, Biau Gil and Pym (2006) observe that the way TM systems are being designed
by the industry, in an effort to reduce the cost and time required to produce translations, calls to
mind the concept of translation as being merely a word-replacement activity. Biau Gil and Pym
(2006, 12) argue that translators are often “invited to forget about the other elements configur-
ing the text” and to focus their attention on those segments that might be retrieved from or
contributed to TM or terminology databases. This raises an ethical concern about prioritizing
current (or future) productivity over quality. The translator’s interpretation of the source text
and personal choices made when formulating the target text might be at odds with content
management and consistency, even though the translator’s option could be more appropriate for
a given context than the option(s) presented by the TM or terminology database. Should the
translator prioritize message clarity over the client’s instructions to use the tools and resources?
The issue becomes more complex when, instead of translators actively choosing to use TM
(or MT), their agency is denied and they are required by a client or employer to use a tool (or
its output). According to LeBlanc (2017, 45), when it comes to translation technology, transla-
tors are unsettled not by the tool’s inherent design, but by the shifts in business and administra-
tive practices that sometimes accompany tool implementation. In some cases, the integration
of technologies into the workplace has led translation services and service providers to impose
guidelines that disquiet translators. For instance, LeBlanc (2013) relays some extreme cases where
translators have been instructed by translation agencies or clients not to touch TM matches even
if they are erroneous, causing an ethical dilemma that LeBlanc (2017, 45) summarizes as follows:
In the eyes of many translators, some of the new guidelines – most notably, those pertaining
to the establishment of productivity requirements and the enforced recycling of previous
translations – represent a radical departure from what was done beforehand, and, more
importantly, may have an effect on translators’ professional autonomy and their overall
professional satisfaction.
Kenny (2019, 437) raises another point worthy of consideration from an ethical perspective.
She notes that MT systems have moved from the relatively transparent rule-based approaches,
through the diminished transparency of SMT (which though difcult for non-statistically
268
oriented researchers to understand was still comprehensible in its inner workings), to the total
opacity of NMT. Increased opacity is a concern for people that are required to work with NMT
systems because it can limit their ability to intervene in translation workfows, thus undermining
agendas of translator empowerment (Kenny and Doherty 2014).
With the general improvement in MT output quality that has come with corpus-based
approaches to MT, the possibility of post-editing has become increasingly appealing to clients
and employers, who often assume that this will be faster and cheaper than translating from
scratch. As a result, technology use has emerged as a sort of indicator for dividing the translation
market along lines of quality into “premium” and “bulk” translation services (Durban, Hendzel,
and Jemielity 2014). The general premise is that premium services, carried out principally by
skilled human translators, can command higher prices for their quality-focused work. Mean-
while, the bulk services carried out with the help of MT or CAT tools offer a comparatively
low-cost, quick-and-dirty solution that encourages technology-dependent translators to focus
on processing large volumes of text to earn a living. Though some take a relatively balanced view
that the quality of the translation product that is delivered needs to be fit-for-purpose and accept
that some purposes may warrant a lower quality (perhaps as a trade-off for speed or cost), others
have been less generous and, in reproaching bulk translation, have gone so far as to denounce
translation technology users in the process. For instance, Kelly (2014) refers to post-editing as
“linguistic janitorial work,” while Dyson (2003, 11) suggests that for translation tool users, “their
technology will label them as bottom feeders, not premium market contenders.”
Contrasting “premium” translators with “bulk” suppliers may come across as condescending
and does a disservice to colleagues who strive to deliver what a client has requested or what a
user needs. Should it be considered shameful to produce a translation that meets the specifica-
tions provided? Nevertheless, it is easy to see how a translator who is labelled as a “bottom
feeder” or “linguistic janitor” might have low job satisfaction and questions about their profes-
sional identity.
3.5 Lack of technology-related guidance in professional

associations’ codes of ethics
Another problem that touches on professional identity is related to the seeming absence of
technology-related guidance in professional associations’ codes of ethics. In many countries, pro-
fessional translators’ associations provide a code of ethics or professional conduct to which their
members should adhere (see also Chapter 20 “Ethics codes for interpreters and translators” in
this volume). Typically, this code aims to ensure that all members are adopting a common set of
ethical principles when they practice their profession. Online discussion forums for professional
translators show that they regularly encounter technology-related ethical issues for which they
seek peer advice. Perhaps one reason that discussion forums show considerable activity in this
regard is because the codes of ethics of many translators’ associations do not address technology-
related issues. An investigation by McDonough Dolmaya (2011) in which she examined codes
of ethics from seventeen professional translators’ associations from around the world, all of which
belonged to the International Federation of Translators, revealed that none of these address the
ethical use of technology in translation. According to McDonough Dolmaya (2011, 45), there is
work to be done in this regard: “None [of the seventeen codes of ethics] stipulate how translators
can make ethical choices with respect to the technology they might need in their practice, yet
translators are increasingly using and being asked to use CAT software.”
Although McDonough Dolmaya’s study was conducted before NMT was introduced, this
technology will undoubtedly give rise to additional gaps in these codes of ethics.
269
Lynne Bowker
3.6 Productivity, time and money

Translation technology and money are often discussed together. By speeding information
retrieval, reducing the need for revision to ensure consistency and thus increasing productivity,
CAT tools are lauded for helping translators to earn more and for helping clients to spend less.
Meanwhile increasing attention is being paid to the possibility of post-editing both TM and
MT output because studies show that, in some scenarios, post-editing can be more time- and
cost-effective than translating from scratch (e.g. Guerberof Arenas 2008). However, as Marsh-
man (2014, 381) points out,
while the claims of increasing language professionals’ income and reducing clients’ trans-
lation costs are both reasonable, they are also often mutually exclusive. For example, the
reduction in translation costs for clients often results from lower rates (or even no remu-
neration) for the translation of passages for which translated versions or similar translations
already exist.
To complicate matters further, time saved when translating is partially ofset by other investments
that translators must make. Many CAT tools are expensive and require an investment of time to
install and maintain the technologies and in learning how to use them efectively. Meanwhile,
professional MT packages (which allow engine tuning and overcome some privacy issues associ-
ated with free online systems) may be afordable to some organizations but are typically beyond
the reach of individual translators.
In general, the aggressive promotion of the advantages of CAT and MT tools has cre-
ated a perception that all translation work can be done quickly and cheaply, and it glosses
over the hidden costs to the translator. It ignores the fact that even texts with good quality
TM matches are likely to need proofreading and editing to be turned into polished transla-
tions. Meanwhile, NMT has been lauded for its fluidity, but this in turn masks potential
errors of meaning, which can only be caught through attentive reading and comparison
with the source text (Castilho et al. 2017b). Faced with this perception, translators may
try to explain to the customer that high-quality translation still requires time and money.
However, the risk is that the customer will simply seek someone who has fewer qualms
about delivering unpolished computer-aided translations for a cheaper price and in a
shorter turnaround time.
3.7 Cultural hegemony versus linguistic diversity paradox

As Kenny (2019, 428) notes, there is a long-standing paradox whereby MT appears simultane-
ously to support the cultural hegemony of English and to contribute to the maintenance of
(online) linguistic diversity. However, interest in this situation began to accelerate in the era of
corpus-based MT since these systems are easier to develop and deploy. Unlike rule-based MT,
which entailed the labour-intensive development of new lexicons and new sets of rules for each
language pair/direction, corpus-based MT systems are easier to adapt (essentially, just supply
new training material). Moreover, since the launch of Google Translate in 2006, an increasing
number of people have been able to access MT for free via the Internet, making translation faster
and more affordable. Of course, the more widely spoken European languages are well served by
these corpus-based MT systems, while some less widely used languages are not (i.e. if no suit-
able training corpora are available). However, development continues and new language pairs
and even new tools have appeared, such as Baidu Translate (mainly for Chinese) and Yandex.
270
Translate (primarily for Russian). But does the fact that we can easily access free MT technology
mean that we should do so without hesitation?
As Bowker and Buitrago Ciro (2019, 9) describe, in many spheres of activity, English has
emerged as the dominant lingua franca of our time. This, coupled with ease of access to free
online MT, means that more material is being translated both into and out of English. Bennett
(2013) draws attention to the bigger picture and the potential consequences of using English
as a lingua franca. Though she does not address MT use in particular, she argues that translation
in general has the potential to destroy the epistemological infrastructure of a source text. As
Bennett (2013, 171) points out, not only are certain concepts so local that there may not be a
translation readily available for them in English, the original text may also be structured accord-
ing to rhetorical norms that are unfamiliar to those operating in English. In fact, sometimes the
discourse used in the source text is embedded in an epistemological paradigm that effectively
cannot be mapped directly to the paradigm underpinning equivalent texts in English. In such a
case, translating the text inevitably destroys the entire epistemological infrastructure and replaces
it with another that is more in keeping with the Anglo-Saxon worldview. Bennett (2013, 171)
describes this process as “epistemicidal” because it essentially implies the obliteration of an alter-
native way of constructing knowledge.
But where is the paradox? Regarding the linguistic diversity and language preservation
argument, a new ethical dilemma has emerged in the age of corpus-based MT. As previously
explained, corpus-based approaches to MT tend to work better for languages that have large
parallel corpora available as training material. Typically, as the size of the training corpus
shrinks, the quality of the MT output goes down. Nevertheless, there is understandably an
interest in developing MT systems for less widely used languages, often with a view to help-
ing preserve these languages. Researchers working on developing MT systems for less widely
used languages are under no illusions about the challenges involved, but they still believe it is
a worthy goal and are eager to share their work (e.g. Mager, Gutierrez-Vasques, Sierra, and
Meza 2018).
In contrast, several bloggers (e.g. Měchura 2015; Pilinu 2019) have flagged concerns. For
instance, in a post entitled “Some ethics for MT related to endangered languages,” Pilinu (2019)
requests that MT systems not be made publicly available until they surpass a certain success rate
or quality threshold (Pilinu suggests 90% accuracy, though notes there is room for discussion).
The reason given for this suggestion is that, instead of helping, it could harm an endangered
language if poor-quality texts begin circulating. A similar point is made by Měchura (2015), who
describes the situation as follows:
the role of machine translation is often to “overcome” the perceived “barriers” posed by
linguistic diversity. In a minority-language setting, however, we often want the opposite: we
want to recreate and reinforce linguistic diversity. Machine translation is counter-productive
here: it brings lots of low-quality content into the language (= inadequate translations from
the majority language) and it allows original content authored in the minority language to
“escape” out of it with ease (= via translation to the majority language), leading to even
more domain loss for the minority language.
Pilinu (2019) also observes that many endangered languages have multiple variants, so MT
researchers should take care not to focus exclusively on the main variant (which would arguably
be the most well-resourced of the variants). “If we are to enhance endangered languages in order
to preserve language diversity, we should also take into account that diversity when concerned
with a single language,” argues Pilinu (2019).
271
Lynne Bowker
4 Emerging issues
As noted previously, questions regarding ethics and translation tools were largely overlooked for
many years, but they have now firmly caught the attention of the translation community. In this
section, I introduce some unfolding issues with regard to ethics and translation technologies.
4.1 Social responsibility

An important emerging ethical issue for various translation stakeholders addresses the theme of
social responsibility. As observed by Drugan and Tipton (2017, 119);
communication across languages and cultures clearly involves important questions for citi-
zens and society at large, and the various participants in translated encounters – interpreter/
translator, “client” and “user” – are confronted with broad issues of social responsibility.
These issues often arise unexpectedly and with little or no prior training, preparation or
opportunity to reflect on appropriate strategies to respond.
How does translation technology ft in? Some discussions from the preceding sections come
into play again. For instance, the current technological backdrop raises important questions for
translators’ identity and their stake in society. Drugan and Tipton (2017, 121) suggest that par-
ticipatory cultures enabled by new technologies have given a platform to enthusiastic amateurs,
socially committed professionals and (trained or untrained) activists, creating both opportunities
and uncertainties (see also Chapter 17 “Ethics of activist translation and interpreting” in this
volume). These technologies have also shaped the increasingly fuid professional identity that
is refected in many present-day translator profles, highlighting the competing tensions facing
individuals as they craft their own understanding of what constitute socially responsible working
practices in the broader context of their professional and personal life paths.
Moreover, in our information society, the volume and types of global communication needs
are pressing translators into service on an unmatched scale and in ways that frequently require
reactive, rather than planned, approaches to practice. This has benefits and drawbacks for the
profession, simultaneously raising its profile and leading to a proliferation of agents (professional
and non-professional, human and machine) that challenges the ethical landscape. As Drugan and
Tipton (2017, 121) note, although individuals are increasingly empowered through the availabil-
ity of translation tools to handle linguistic uncertainty, this entails risk. Citizen translators may
use online translation technologies to try to resolve an urgent interlingual crisis (e.g. in a hospital
or courtroom), but dispensing with human input in institutional interactions and instead turn-
ing to convenient, if imperfect, technology-aided translation solutions breeds new disciplinary
and professional imperatives to inform public understanding of the ethical bases of intercultural
and interlingual mediation and how these can be managed effectively. Similarly, Bowker (2019)
suggests that translators have a social responsibility to help those outside the profession become
critical users of free online MT systems.
Using corpora as training data for MT systems raises another question about social responsi-
bility. A recent concern regarding corpus-based MT is that these approaches could suffer from
so-called machine or algorithm bias, meaning that they can perpetuate different types of bias (e.g.
racial, gender, age) if the training data is not well chosen. As we saw previously, NMT sys-
tems “learn” from examples provided in the training corpus, and according to Vanmassenhove,
Hardmeier, and Way (2018, 3003), current NMT systems tend to perpetuate a male bias. As
summarized by Vanmassenhove et al. (2018, 3003–3004), human translators rely on contextual
272
information to infer the speaker’s gender and make the correct morphological agreement (e.g.
translating “I am happy” into French as either “Je suis heureux” or “Je suis heureuse” according
to whether the speaker is male or female). However, most current NMT systems do not take
context into account but instead exploit statistical dependencies on the sentence level that have
been learned from large parallel corpora. Moreover, sentences are translated in isolation, mean-
ing that information necessary to determine a speaker’s gender might get lost. In such cases, the
NMT system selects the option that is statistically the most likely variant; hence the importance
of using unbiased training corpora.
This issue was picked up by popular media, who reported that Google Translate’s free online
system produced translations that would generally skew toward masculine pronouns for words like
“strong” or “doctor” and feminine pronouns for “beautiful” and “nurse.” Google later published
two blog posts outlining their efforts to address the problem (Kuczmarski 2018; Johnson 2018).
4.2 Teaching ethics in translation technology courses

There are calls for increased attention to ethics in translation education in general; however, it
is unclear how extensively ethical issues are being addressed in translation technology courses.
According to Baker and Maier (2011), translation educators have long instructed students to
follow professional codes of ethics unquestioningly. Yet, we noted earlier that these codes lack
guidance related to technology use. Moreover, some educators have been slow to provide stu-
dents with the deep understanding of ethical issues that is now called for in this highly tech-
nologized profession.
Following the results of their survey revealing that on translation education programs in the
United Kingdom, ethics is typically not taught or is offered only in optional courses, Drugan
and Megone (2011) argue coherently for integrating ethics education across a translator training
program. More recently, Kenny and Doherty (2014) and Kenny (2020) signal a growing need
for technology-specific ethical issues to be addressed in translator education. Some discussion of
ethics could take place in core technology courses, but as tool use continues to spread beyond
technology courses and into translation practice courses, there is a need for technology-related
ethics to be addressed more systematically across the curriculum. Depending on course objec-
tives, this may include discussing whether tool use for coursework is appropriate.
4.3 MT and literary translation

For many years, MT and literary translation were rarely uttered in the same breath. However, as
MT quality continues to improve, some researchers are investigating the potential of this once
seemingly unlikely duo (e.g. Toral and Way 2018). As we wade into largely uncharted territory,
Taivalkoski-Shilov (2019) cautions that there are ethical considerations in relation to the appli-
cability of MT to literary translation, though she notes that some issues concern non-literary
translation too (e.g. reduced pay for post-editing).
Taivalkoski-Shilov (2019, 692) emphasizes that while “content” and “form” are commonly
considered as separate aspects when evaluating translation quality, in literary translation, form
is content, thus narrowing the quality scale. Moreover, owing to the inseparability of form and
content in literary language, Taivalkoski-Shilov (2019, 694) argues that a translation process that
combines MT with post-editing is not suitable for literary translation: because the translation
of narrativity requires understanding the source text as a whole as well as in relation to other
literary works, the segment-by-segment translation produced by the machine is bound to alter
the source text’s meaning and structure.
273
Lynne Bowker
Taivalkoski-Shilov (2019, 696) extends her argument, noting that that the inseparability of
the literary text’s “content” and “form of content” becomes explicit in relation to voice:
the omnipresence and complexity of voice in literary text creates a great challenge for MT
in literary translation. Voice and the way it is partially constructed “between the lines”
illustrates well the insurmountable challenges of fully automated, but at the same time high-
quality translation of literary text.
4.4 Funding MT research

To our knowledge, translation technology research funding has not been explored in the schol-
arly literature; however, it figures in a post on the New Zealand Society of Translators and
Interpreters’ blog (Love 2019). The post summarizes highlights from the 2018 National Con-
ference of the Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators at which speaker Sam Berner
gave a talk entitled “Ethical Questions for the Age of Intelligent Machines.” Love (2019) found
the questions as to whether, why and by whom MT is being funded to be particularly salient:
funding is being put into machine translation research, including by the very universities
and education institutes that teach languages and translation – why? Has nobody considered
the conflict of interests? In fact, this is against the backdrop of a widespread defunding of
language courses at universities and other education institutions.
4.5 Computer-aided interpreting

Finally, while CAT tools are now entrenched in the translation profession, tools to support
interpreters are newer. In the context of computer-aided interpreting (CAI), Fantinuoli (2018,
155) distinguishes between setting-oriented and process-oriented technologies, though he rec-
ognizes that these form a continuum. Along this continuum are tools such as booth consoles,
remote interpreting devices (e.g. tele- and videoconferencing tools) and training platforms, as
well as notetaking software and terminology management systems. Braun (2020) extends this
list to include more fully automated tools, such as speech-to-text and speech-to-speech machine
interpreting technologies. While the CAI literature is relatively recent, Drugan (2019, 250)
emphasizes that it will become increasingly important to investigate the ethical implications
of emerging technologies in relation to interpreting as tools such as speech recognition and
remote-video interpreting are used more widely. As an example, Drugan (2017, 136) cites that
challenging issues of judgement can arise when trying to decide if using remote interpreting
might be more advantageous than face-to-face encounters, and whether there are cases where it
is never appropriate. Finally, as we saw in the discussion of translators’ codes of ethics, the codes
of ethics for interpreters must also be amended to take into account new technologies and their
application to interpreting.
5 Conclusion
After being virtually ignored during the first fifty or so years of translation technology develop-
ment, questions addressing ethical concerns are now rapidly pushing to the forefront. While
discussions surrounding artificial intelligence and machine learning are among the most visible
concerns at the moment owing to wider societal interest in these issues, there are myriad mount-
ing anxieties coming from within the translation community itself which are jockeying for
274
attention and can no longer be easily dismissed. Among others, these include the focus on post-
editing of TM/MT output and associated questions of translation quality and remuneration,
which have ethical implications for a range of affected parties including translators, language-
service providers, tool developers and end-users; the appropriate use and limits of technologies
such as CAT, CAI and MT and the associated ethical dimension of human deskilling; the ways
in which different players in the production and use of translation have agency, influence or
power, and how the growing reliance on technologies is affecting this situation; questions of
privacy, confidentiality and ownership of intellectual capital or products; social responsibility
surrounding the development and use of translation technologies; and considerations about how
best to assist the next generation to engage with the broader question of ethics and translation
technologies.
Owing to the rapid development and advancement of new translation tools, coupled with
our somewhat late start in reflecting on ethical questions in relation to these technologies, we
have some catching up to do! There is no better time than now to begin, and I hope this chapter
has provided food for thought.

Professional translator ethics; literary translator ethics; translation and posthumanism; ethics
codes for interpreters and translators; ethics in translation industry; ethics in translator and
interpreter training.
References
Translator Trainer 5, no. 1: 1–14.
Bennett, Karen. 2013. “English as a lingua franca in academia: Combating epistemicide through translator
training.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 7, no. 2: 169–93.
Biau Gil, José Ramon, and Anthony Pym. 2006. “Technology and Translation (A Pedagogical Overview).”
In Translation Technology and Its Teaching, edited by Anthony Pym, Alexander Perekrestenko, and Bram
Starink, 5–19. Tarragona, Spain: Universitat Rovira I Virgili. www.intercultural.urv.cat/publications/
translation-technology/
Bowker, Lynne. 2003. “Terminology Tools for Translators.” In Computers and Translation: A Translator’s
Guide, edited by Harold Somers, 49–65. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Bowker, Lynne. 2019. “Machine Translation Literacy as a Social Responsibility.” In Proceedings of the
UNESCO International Conference on Language Technologies for All. Paris, December. https://lt4all.org/
media/papers/O7/145.html
Bowker, Lynne, and Jairo Buitrago Ciro. 2019. Machine Translation and Global Research: Towards Improved
Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing.
Bowker, Lynne, and Des Fisher. 2010. “Computer-Aided Translation.” In Handbook of Translation Studies,
vol. 1, edited by Yves Gambier, and Luc Van Doorslaer, 60–5. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
Braun, Sabine. 2020. “Technology and Interpreting.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Technol-
ogy, edited by Minako O’Hagan. London: Routledge.
Carl, Michael, and Andy Way, eds. 2003. Recent Advances in Example-Based Machine Translation. Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Castilho, Sheila, Joss Moorkens, Federico Gaspari, Iacer Calixto, John Tinsley, and Andy Way. 2017a. “Is
Neural Machine Translation the New State of the Art?” The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics
108: 109–210.
Castilho, Sheila, Joss Moorkens, Federico Gaspari, Rico Sennrich, Vilelmini Sosoni, Panayota Georga-
kopoulou, Pintu Lohar, Andy Way, Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone, and Maria Gialama. 2017b. “A
Comparative Quality Evaluation of PBSMT and NMT Using Professional Translators.” In Proceedings
275
Lynne Bowker
of the 16th Machine Translation Summit (MT Summit XVI), 116–31. http://doras.dcu.ie/23083/1/A%20
Comparative%20Quality%20Evaluation%20of%20PBSMT%20and.pdf
Chan, Sin-wai, ed. 2015. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Technology. London: Routledge.
DePalma, Donald A. 2014. “Free Machine Translation Can Leak Data.” TC World, July. www.tcworld.
info/e-magazine/translation-and-localization/article/free-machine-translation-can-leak-data/
Dos Santos, Luis Miguel. 2016. “Effect of Technological Developments on Ethical Position of Translator.”
English Language and Literature Studies 6, no. 3: 42–6.
Rawling, and Philip Wilson, 243–55. London: Routledge.
Disciplinary Approach.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1: 189–211.
23, no. 2: 119–25.
Durban, Chris, Kevin Hendzel, and David Jemielity. 2014. “Why Raising the Bar on Your Own Transla-
tion Quality Is about to Get Deadly Serious.” Presented at the 55th Annual Conference of the American
Translators Association, Chicago, November 5–8.
Dyson, Steve. 2003. “A Strategic Point.” Letters, Multilingual Computing & Technology 14, no. 3: 11.
Fantinuoli, Claudio. 2018. “Computer-Assisted Interpreting: Challenges and Future Perspectives.” In
Trends in E-Tools and Resources for Translators and Interpreters, edited by Gloria Corpas Pastor, and Isabel
Durán, 153–74. Leiden: Brill.
Forcada, Mikel L. 2017. “Making Sense of Neural Machine Translation.”Translation Spaces 6, no. 2: 291–309.
Garcia, Ignacio. 2015. “Cloud Marketplaces: Procurement of Translators in the Age of Social Media.” JoS-
Trans: The Journal of Specialised Translation 23: 18–38. www.jostrans.org/issue23/art_garcia.pdf
Guerberof Arenas, Ana. 2008. “Productivity and Quality in the Post-Editing of Outputs from Translation
Memories and Machine Translation.” Localisation Focus 7, no. 1: 11–21.
Hutchins, W. John, and Harold L. Somers. 1992. An Introduction to Machine Translation. London: Academic
Press.
Jiménez-Crespo, Miguel A. 2018. “Crowdsourcing and Translation Quality: Novel Approaches in the
Language Industry and Translation Studies.” In Translation Quality Assessment, edited by Joss Moorkens,
Sheila Castilho, Federico Gaspari, and Stephen Doherty, 69–93. Cham: Springer.
Johnson, Melvin. 2018. “Providing Gender-Specific Translations in Google Translate.” Google AI Blog,
December 10. https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/12/providing-gender-specific-translations.html
Kamocki, Pawel, and Jim O’Regan. 2016. “Privacy Issues in Online Machine Translation Services: Euro-
pean Perspective.” In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
(LREC 2016), edited by Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko
Grobelnik, and Bente Maegaard, 4458–62. Paris: European Language Resources Association. https://
ids-pub.bsz-bw.de/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/5043/file/Kamocki-ORegan_privacy_issues_in_
online_machine_translation_2016.pdf
Kelly, Nataly. 2014. “Why So Many Translators Hate Translation Technology.” The Huffington Post, June 19.
www.huffingtonpost.com/nataly-kelly/why-somany-translators-h_b_5506533.html
Kenny, Dorothy. 2011. “The Ethics of Machine Translation.” In Reflections on Language and Technology: The
Driving Forces in the Modern World of Translation and Interpreting: Proceedings of the 20th New Zealand Society
of Translators and Interpreters National Conference, June 4–5, edited by Sibylle Ferner, 121–31. Auckland,
New Zealand: NZSTI. http://doras.dcu.ie/17606/
Kenny, Dorothy. 2019. “Machine Translation.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy,
edited by Piers Rawling, and Philip Wilson, 428–45. London: Routledge.
Kenny, Dorothy. 2020. “Technology and Translator Training.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and
Technology, edited by Minako O’Hagan. London: Routledge.
Kenny, Dorothy, and Stephen Doherty. 2014. “Statistical Machine Translation in the Translation Cur-
riculum: Overcoming Obstacles and Empowering Translators.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 8,
no. 2: 276–94.
Koehn, Philipp. 2010. Statistical Machine Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kuczmarski, James. 2018. “Reducing Gender Bias in Google Translate.” The Keyword (Google blog),
December 6. https://blog.google/products/translate/reducing-gender-bias-google-translate/
276
LeBlanc, Matthieu. 2013. “Translators on Translation Memory (TM): Results of an Ethnographic Study in
Three Translation Services and Agencies.” Translation & Interpreting 5, no. 2: 1–13.
LeBlanc, Matthieu. 2017. “‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction!’ Should We Blame Translation Technologies or
Shifting Business Practices?” In Human Issues in Translation Technology, edited by Dorothy Kenny, 45–62.
London: Routledge.
Liu, Yang, and Min Zhang. 2015. “Statistical Machine Translation.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Transla-
tion Technology, edited by Sin-wai Chan, 201–12. London: Routledge.
Love, Guthrun. 2019. “Sam Berner on the Ethics of Machine Translation.” Word for Word (blog maintained
by the New Zealand Society of Translators and Interpreters), January 23. https://wordforwordonline.
nzsti.org/2019/01/23/sam-berner-on-the-ethics-of-machine-translation/
Mager, Manuel, Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques, Gerardo Sierra, and Ivan Meza. 2018. “Challenges of Lan-
guage Technologies for the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.” Proceedings of the 27th International
Conference on Computational Linguistics, Santa Fe, USA, August 20–26, 55–69. www.aclweb.org/
anthology/C18-1006
Marshman, Elizabeth. 2014. “Taking Control: Language Professionals and Their Perception of Control
When Using Language Technologies.” Meta 59, no. 2: 380–405.
McDonough Dolmaya, Julie. 2011. “Moral Ambiguity: Some Shortcomings of Professional Codes of Eth-
ics for Translators.” JoSTrans: The Journal of Specialised Translation 11: 28–49. www.jostrans.org/issue15/
art_mcdonough.php
Měchura, Michal. 2015. “Do Minority Languages Need Machine Translation?” Michal Měchura’s Blog,
November 13. https://michmech.github.io/minority-languages-machine-translation/
Moorkens, Joss, and David Lewis. 2020. “Copyright and the Reuse of Translation as Data.” In The Routledge
Handbook of Translation and Technology, edited by Minako O’Hagan. London: Routledge.
O’Hagan, Minako, ed. 2020. The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Technology. London: Routledge.
Pilinu (user handle). 2019. “Some Ethics for MT Related to Endangered Languages.” Okchakko Translator
Blog, May 24. http://okchakko.com/blog/some-ethics-for-mt-related-to-endangered-languages/
Pym, Anthony. 2003. “Translational Ethics and Electronic Technologies.” Proceedings of the VI Seminario
de Tradução Científica e Técnica em Língua Portuguesa A Profissionalização do Tradutor, Fundação Calouste
Gulbenkian, Lisbon, November 11. http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/translation/lisbon_ethics.pdf
Saffran, Jenny R., Ann Senghas, and John C. Trueswell. 2001. “The Acquisition of Language by Children.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 98, no. 23: 12874–5.
Stupiello, Érika N.A. 2008. “Ethical Implications of Translation Technologies.” Translation Journal 12, no. 1.
http://translationjournal.net/journal/43ethics.htm
Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina. 2019. “Ethical Issues Regarding Machine(-Assisted) Translation of Literary
Texts.” Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 27, no. 5: 689–703.
Topping, Suzanne. 2000. “Sharing Translation Database Information.” Multilingual Computing & Technology
11, no. 5: 59–61.
Toral, Antonio, and Andy Way. 2018. “What Level of Quality Can Neural Machine Translation Attain
on Literary Text?” In Translation Quality Assessment, edited by Joss Moorkens, Sheila Castilho, Federico
Gaspari, and Stephen Doherty, 263–87. Cham: Springer.
Vanmassenhove, Eva, Christian Hardmeier, and Andy Way. 2018. “Getting Gender Right in Neural
Machine Translation.” Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Pro-
cessing, Brussels, Belgium, October 31–November 4, 3003–8. www.aclweb.org/anthology/D18-1334
Wong, Billy Tak-ming, and Jonathan J. Webster. 2015. “Example-Based Machine Translation.” In The
Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Technology, edited by Sin-wai Chan, 137–51. London: Routledge.
Zetzsche, Jost. 2005. “Translation Memories: The Discovery of Assets.” Multilingual Computing and Technol-
ogy 16, no. 4: 43–5.
Further reading
Rawling, and Philip Wilson, 243–55. London: Routledge.
Given the difficulty of separating discussions of translation technology from their wider social context,
Drugan weaves commentaries about technological issues throughout a broader discussion of ethics in
translation.
277
Lynne Bowker
Kenny, Dorothy. 2019. “Machine Translation.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy,
edited by Piers Rawling, and Philip Wilson, 428–45. London: Routledge.
Kenny traces the history of machine translation, outlines the main underlying approaches to MT and
explores ethical concerns such as the increasing opacity of MT systems and the relationship between
human and machine translation.
Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina. 2019. “Ethical Issues Regarding Machine(-Assisted) Translation of Literary
Texts.” Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 27, no. 5: 689–703.
Taivalkoski-Shilov considers CAT and MT in relation to literary translation, addressing areas where the
tools are seen to be wanting, as well as a case where a poet prefers MT output to human translation,
thus challenging the traditional views on the voice of MT and its suitability for literary translation.
278
19
Translation and posthumanism
Michael Cronin
1 Introduction
Vernon Vinge, a mathematician and science fiction writer, delivered a paper to a NASA confer-
ence in 1993 entitled “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-
Human Era.” He predicted, “within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create
superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended” (Vinge 1993). As is
often the case with prophets of the future, the calendar has not been kind and the humans show
no signs of disappearing just yet. However, the future that Vinge was predicting has become our
present in the form of unprecedented growth in human technological capability, notably in the
area of artificial intelligence. Devin Wenig, CEO of eBay, contrasted past promise and present
performance when he claimed:
While the promise of AI has been known for years, the current pace of breakthrough is
stunning. Machines are to reach and exceed human performance on more and more tasks,
thanks to advances in dedicated hardware, faster and deeper access to big data, and new
sophisticated algorithms that provide the ability to learn and improve based on feedback.
(cited in Baldwin 2019, 186)
The conceptual response to this increasing human-machine interface has taken two divergent
forms – transhumanism and posthumanism – each with radically diferent endpoints but which
share a common preoccupation with the implications of machine intelligence for human iden-
tity (Besnier 2015, 105–110). Transhumanism defnes itself as a movement that seeks to use
technology to fundamentally change the human condition, improving our bodies and minds to
the point where we become something other and better than the animals we are. In the words
of Mark O’Connell (2017), “transhumanism is a liberation movement advocating nothing less
than total emancipation from biology itself ” (6). Radical extension of life spans, mind uploading,
increased mental capacity through pharmacological and technical means, artifcial intelligence
and the enhancement of the human body through prostheses and genetic modifcation are
among the topics that exercise the minds and inform the working practices of transhumanists.
Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google and one of the best known exponents of
279
Michael Cronin
transhumanism, is explicit in his championing of the role of intelligence as a way of wrong foot-
ing the limitations of biology:
As the most important phenomenon in the universe, intelligence is capable of transcending

natural limitations, and of transforming the world in its own image. In human hands, our
intelligence has enabled us to overcome the restrictions of our biological heritage and to
change ourselves in the process. We are the only species that does this.
(2014, 1)
The ultimate aim of transhumanism is to transcend human, biological mortality and create
the conditions for a technological, posthuman future that will see the end of human species
in its current form. In radical contrast to the discourse of human exceptionalism and techno-
determinism that informs transhumanism, critical posthumanism situates itself in a tradition
of anti-humanism that critiques the patriarchal, imperialist and ecocidal hubris of uncritical
Western humanism and techno-science. For Rosi Braidotti (2013), for example, the crucial task
is to embrace our animal embodiment as a move towards species awareness. Acknowledging
our biological status as animal is a necessary step in the move away from ecologically destruc-
tive forms of human exceptionalism and part of the necessary shift to post-anthropocentric
identity. Critical at the present moment is the de-centring of anthropos, “the representative of a
hierarchical, hegemonic and generally violent species whose centrality is now challenged by a
combination of scientifc advances and global economic concerns” (65). Of course, the critique
of humanism and anthropocentrism is not just a fact of environmental awareness. It is explicit
in the tradition of “anti-humanism” that Braidotti references, “feminism, de-colonization and
anti-racism, anti-nuclear and pacifst movements” (16) where the white, sovereign, male subject
of Western techno-imperialist thought was singled out for repeated critique.
Out of this vision comes a notion of relationality and ontological equality that does not
privilege one life form over another. For Braidotti (2013), subjectivity in the age of the Anthro-
pocene is always transversal, that is to say, the subject must always conceive of itself as inextricably
related in a non-hierarchical way to the organic and inorganic world in which it is embedded.
This transversal subjectivity has ethical ramifications, “[a] posthuman ethics for a non-unitary
subject proposes an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the
non-human or ‘earth’ others, by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism” (49–50).
The cluster of factors that structure this emergent posthuman subject are “the new proximity to
animals, the planetary dimension and the high level of technological mediation” (94). Human-
machine interactions are not simply a matter of convenient metaphor – the brain as a giant
computer – and involve unprecedented degrees of intimacy and intrusion:
The posthuman predicament is such as to force a displacement of the lines of demarcation

between structural diferences, or ontological categories, for instance between the organic
and the inorganic, the born and the manufactured, fesh and metal, electronic circuits and
organic nervous systems.
(89)
All technologies have a marked bio-political effect on the embodied subjects they interact
with whether they be jet-fighter pilots, top athletes or “the anonymous masses of the underpaid,
digital proletariat who fuel the technology-driven global economy without ever accessing it
themselves” (Braidotti 2013, 90). In this chapter we propose to consider the ethical implications
of translation’s engagement in various forms of the posthuman. Central to our argument is that
280
it is only a posthuman perspective – the type of transversal subjectivity envisaged by Braidotti

(2013) – that can provide a sustainable ethical framework for translation in an era of accelerated
technological development and climate change. Posthuman because posthumanism contains
a critical perspective which is frequently absent in transhumanism and posthuman because it
is not dependent for its validity on the techno-determinism that is in an intrinsic part of the
transhumanist movement.
2 Main issues: globotics

In this section we will look at the impact of various waves of automation on global workforces
and how language mediation and translation will become important issues for the nature and
future of work in a globalised world. Over the past three centuries, three economic transforma-
tions have radically shaped societies at different times across the planet. The first, described as
the “Great Transformation” by the political economist Karl Polanyi (2001), saw societies from
the 1700s onwards switch from agriculture to industry and from rural to urban. The second
beginning in the early 1970s is known as the services transformation, which saw the focus shift
from industry to services. The third, which began in the early 2000s and is ongoing, is what the
business theorist Richard Baldwin (2019) has called the “globotics transformation” (13). This
is basically the convergence of globalisation and artificial intelligence which will lead to radical
restructuring of employment markets across the globe. The first wave of automation was driven
primarily by the invention of the microchip in the 1970s and the second by the development
of machine learning from 2010 onwards. In the first wave, “computers could only do a highly
restricted type of thinking. In fact they weren’t thinking in any real sense; they were just follow-
ing an explicit set of instructions called a computer program” (15). In the second wave, however,
assisted by vastly increased computer power and hugely expanded data sets (“big data”), comput-
ers become better than humans in carrying out a number of unconscious, instinctual tasks like
recognising speech, translating languages and using X-rays to identify diseases (Baldwin 2019;
see also Chapter 18 “Translation technology and ethics” in this volume). At the core of the
globotics transformation described by Baldwin are the combined effects of remote intelligence
(RI) and artificial intelligence (AI) on global economies. By remote intelligence, Baldwin means
telemigration, the ability of workers in diverse parts of the world to work remotely in other
parts of the world.
The economic attractions for employers of sourcing employees globally are well known.
Salaries in the US and Europe are typically a dozen times what they are in developing nations,
and an accountant in China in 2016 earned on average one-twentieth of the salary of a US
accountant (Baldwin 2019, 116). The principal obstacle to telemigration is not distance but
language. If workers in Pakistani or Indian call centres service US or British markets, it is because
they have formal exposure to English from an early age. Language is important in the services
sector. Alastair Pennycook and Emi Otsuji (2015) show the omnipresence of language contact
in the hospitality industry and how customer satisfaction is predicated on appropriate linguistic
interaction. Mike Baynham and Tong King Lee (2019) draw attention to the presence of lan-
guage difference and strategies for overcoming this in everyday retail experiences (102–105).
The argument is that it is of little importance that you cannot communicate with the person or
persons who assembled your smartphone, but it is a major issue if you cannot talk to the person
who is making your travel arrangements or communicating your order to the restaurant kitchen.
The language obstacle is removed or greatly diminished if machine translation is brought into
the picture. Baldwin (2019) argues, “[i]nstant translation used to be the stuff of science fiction.
Today it is a reality and available for free on smartphones, tablets and laptops” (122). Baldwin
281
Michael Cronin
concedes, “machine translation is not as good as expert humans, but it is a whole lot cheaper and
a whole lot more convenient” (124). If competitive pressures on international labour markets in
the services sector are determined by language ability, machine translation can potentially have
dramatic consequences for workers in previously sheltered markets:
Machine translation means that all this foreign talent will soon speak English or other rich-
nation languages like French, German, Japanese or Spanish – not perfectly but well enough
to telemigrate for some jobs. The result will be a tsunami of global talent. All around the
world, special people will fnd themselves suddenly less special.
(Baldwin 2019, 127)
The development of statistical machine translation, the advent of neural machine translation, the
application of Google’s machine-learning technique, Deep Learning, to vastly expanded datasets
in Google Translate all have, without doubt, contributed to improved translation performance
(see also Chapter 18 “Translation technology and ethics” in this volume). It is, however, the
centrality of translation to what Baldwin (2019) predicts to be the third major transformation of
the global economy that is worthy of note. SayHi, WayGo, iTranslate Voice, Skype Translator,
Cortana and Amazon Translate are examples of the apps and add-ons that are increasingly an
integral part of digital environments. If they are combined with augmented reality and virtual
reality technologies such as holographic telepresence or holoportation which allow for a vivid
sense of co-presence of geographically dispersed participants (Microsoft 2019), then it is clear
that these emergent translation hybrids will have marked bio-political efect on the embodied
subjects with whom they interact. These high levels of technological mediation are clearly con-
tributing to an emerging posthuman subject in a world economic system which is likely to be
subject to this globotics upheaval.
What then about the ethical dimension to this enfolding of translation into new economic
paradigms? Where do we situate a posthuman ethics that “proposes an enlarged sense of inter-
connection between self and others”? There are two possible stances. On the one hand, the
connection between self and others is one of extension, extending economic opportunities to
inhabitants of the planet as a whole whose living standards can only be positively affected by
the liberating mediation of translation. This is, indeed, the classic defence of globalisation as
economic practice. Globalisation has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty over the last four
decades, and international trade and investment have been central to the rise of China and many
other emerging economies (Clausing 2019). On the other hand, there is the potential status of
these future telemigrants as machine translation expands the pool of outsourced labour. Baldwin
(2019), for example, notes, “[f]oreign freelancers also offer extreme flexibility. Thanks to the
freelancing platforms, they are easy to find, hire, manage, and fire – a feature which is a big draw
to employers” (120). Describing the world’s largest platform for matching workers and projects,
upwork.com, he claims, “firing a freelancer is simplicity itself. You click on a button labelled
‘End Contract’” (121). In this push-button world of instant translation, you have the push-
button reality of instant dismissal. The pay-per-view model of employment where workers are
hired for specific tasks and fired once they are done offers little in the way of guarantees or social
protection. A world of liquid labour favours employers but leaves employees routinely exposed.
Translation scholars as part of a project of posthuman ethics have to consider how translation-
mediated remote intelligence which forces “a displacement of the lines of demarcation between
structural difference” will impact the socio-economic futures of the planet’s inhabitants. It is
necessary not only to consider the fortunes of telemigrants but also to take into account the
political reactions of those whose jobs are likely to be outsourced. Estimates of job displacement
282
vary from one in ten jobs in the developed world to one in six, but the impact is certain to be
significant (Brynjolfson and McAfee 2016). Already, the huge losses in manufacturing jobs that
resulted from the first wave of automation have resulted in the rise of a belligerent populism
in the UK, the US, and parts of central and eastern Europe which rejects globalisation and is
deeply hostile to migration in any form (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017). If the first wave
decimated whole sections of the industrial working class, the second wave could have incalcu-
lable consequences for the services and professional middle class. The globotics upheaval with its
conjoining of RI and AI could have far-reaching effects on the political tenor of liberal democ-
racies and lead to a ready rejection of the perceived inhumanity of posthumanity. The future
desirability of translation might indeed emerge as an ethical issue as liberal democracies weigh
the necessary openness to (tele)migration against the political disenchantment and protectionist
and isolationist urges of economically bereft populations.
3 Main issues: labour extractivism

The ethical issues around the exploitation of labour relate not only to the role of translation in
the future facilitation of the flexibilisation and the casualisation of the global workforce, where
workers will no longer have job security or fixed, long-term contracts. There is the implicit
appropriation of translation labour in the advanced MT systems constitutive of posthuman real-
ity. Ethan Zuckerman (2013), the Director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, argues that
the practice of translation is central to the rewiring of the internet. If “we want a world that
values diversity of perspective over the certainty of singular belief, a world where many voices
balance the privileged few” (272), then translators must be part of the dialogue. There are two
ways in which this is to be achieved. Firstly, there is the use of volunteer translators to translate
content from different languages (see also Chapter 16 “Ethics of volunteering in translation and
interpreting” in this volume). Zuckerman cites, among others, the example of Zhang Lei who
in 2006 began the group translation website Yeeyan to translate key English-language media
into Chinese. The site eventually built up a group of 210,000 registered volunteer translators.
Another example of volunteer translation are the translations of the TED talks, where the aver-
age talk is translated into twenty-four languages within a few weeks (153–158).
The second tactic is the use of machine translation, and he gives much space to the progress
realised by statistical machine translation and the activities of Google in this area. Work in sta-
tistical machine translation can eventually be complemented by advances in “human computa-
tion.” Zuckerman (2013) refers in particular to the research projects of Luis von Ahn who is
best known for “reCAPTCHA.” The reCAPTCHA is familiar to internet users who are often
asked on sites to transcribe two words to show that they are human beings and not computer
programs. Users are not usually aware of this but they are helping to transcribe scanned book
pages, and already by 2008 reCAPTCHAs were transcribing the equivalent of 160 books per
day. Von Ahn wants to harness this collective computing power for translation by encouraging
users to learn a second language through Duolingo. As learners progress, they will be invited to
translate simple sentences at first before eventually being asked to translate sentences from live
web pages. The harnessing of this collective translational power through advanced technology is
Von Ahn’s answer to his initial question, “[h]ow can we get 100 million people translating the
Web into every major language for free?” (Von Ahn 2011).
The immediate problem in this digital utopia of cosmopolitan connectedness is that no
one gets paid. When Zuckerman (2013) argues, “[w]hat we really want are translations that
are as nuanced and accurate as those produced by TED or Global Voices and as fast as Google
Translate” (158), he might equally have added that what “we really want are translations for
283
Michael Cronin
which no money changes hands.” This demonetization of translation, stripping it of its value
as an economic activity, makes the activity and its practitioners particularly vulnerable in a
world where cash rather than compassion is generally needed to buy food or pay the rent.
In the dematerialized abstraction of high-tech digital cosmopolitanism, the resources con-
sumed are not only scarce metals and energy but also the human resources of translators who
become part of that infrastructural unconscious hidden from view by high-tech hyperbole.
This is, in effect, a dual form of extractivism where both human and non-human resources
are extracted with little concern for those who find themselves in the “sacrifice zones” of
depletion. The cyber-cosmopolitan vision is one which suffers from the inevitable consump-
tion bias of much commentary on technical innovation. More, faster and for free – this is
the dream of the flattered consumer. But what about the consequences for the producer?
If everything is free, who pays the supplier? Who bears the cost, if not the translators who
work for no pay or whose work is appropriated by the owners of services who ultimately
find ways to monetize them?
4 Main issues: data extractivism

If labour extractivism is central to the construction of MT technologies in the technologically
mediated age of the posthuman, there is the further ethical question with these technologies
of the expropriation of public goods for private gain. Richard Baldwin (2019), for example,
describes the turning point in the fortunes of Google Translate in 2016. Google in the area of
machine translation had the computer processing power; they had their machine-learning tech-
nique, Deep Learning. The missing link was the data; “[t]hat changed in 2016 when the United
Nations (UN) posted online a data set with nearly 800,000 documents that had been manually
translated into the six official UN languages: Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Russian and Chi-
nese” (128). The EU Joint Research Centre, the EU Parliament and the Canadian parliament
were equally forthcoming in putting large translation data sets on the internet. Google Translate,
which in 2016 already had 500 million users and was translating 100 billion words or the equiva-
lent of 128,000 Bibles every day (K International 2016), was able to harvest this publicly funded
data to provide a service for one of the most profitable companies on the planet. Neither the
UN nor the EU translators nor the public bodies that employed them were financially rewarded
for the uses to which their labour was put. In other words, this human resource extractivism
became a structural precondition for the enhanced performativity of a key component of the
projected globotics transformation.
This form of resource extractivism may imply the need to develop a new kind of ethics or
politics around the subject of translation data. TAUS, the language data network, for example,
which works across the academy and industry, is primarily focused on the way in which transla-
tion data can be harvested to improve metrics and outputs in the translation industry (TAUS
2019). Eric Posner and Glen Weyl (2018) in Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy
for a Just Society contend that a data-based economy evolved in a haphazard way, driven primar-
ily by a mixture of curiosity and greed. The result is the “data-as-capital” view, namely the idea
that internet giants and social media companies get to keep the data freely provided by users and
which they then monetise in a variety of ways. An alternative approach would be to advocate
for the notion of “data-as-labour” which is based on the premise that data that is generated by
users belongs to users. If the major tech companies wanted to use this data, they would have to
pay for it. It is in this context that we might attend to what McKenzie Wark (2015) has called
the “labor point of view.” The Australian theorist argues that there is a tendency for commenta-
tors to dwell on what he calls the “language of molar drama,” the large-scale stories of “Man
284
against Nature” or “Man against the Gods.” There is less interest in the “molecular,” the view
from below, on the ground:
For it is the molecular scale which corresponds best to the labor point of view. If nature
is that which resists labor, it does so in a granular way. The molar is the language of man-
agement. It’s the dialogue of ideas, in which the experience of those who organize labor
substitutes for the experience of those whose labor organizes the world directly.
(219)
If the labour of translators is what organises interlingual worlds of meaning, then this molecular,
labour point of view must be to the fore in the formulation of a posthuman translation ethics.
5 Main issues: patronage

Ethical questions around translation that arise in the transhumanist variation of the posthuman
are primarily to do with patronage, the bodies or institutions which finance the translation
activities (see also Chapter 30 “Ethics of collaboration and control in literary translation” in this
volume). If transhumanists are famously interested in extending human life as far as possible, they
are often funded by those interested in ending it as soon as possible. Transcending the physi-
cal vulnerability of the human body is especially of interest to the military. Intent on creating
a race of super soldiers, the vision of the cyborg, “was the human not simply as machine, but
specifically as war machine – a human body and mind in a symbiotic feedback loop with the
information systems of modern warfare” (O’Connell 2017, 143). Annie Jacobsen (2015), for
example, in her description of Michael Goldblatt, the Director of the Defence Sciences Office,
a branch of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the United States,
notes approvingly that Goldblatt was “a pioneer in military-based transhumanism – the notion
that man can and will alter the human condition fundamentally by augmenting humans with
machines and other means” (179). One of the fundamental “information systems” for humans
is, of course, language itself. If the project of transhumanism is to transcend the limits of the
human in the transition to the posthuman, one obvious limit is human language capacity, more
specifically the capacity to speak a number of languages. Richard Baldwin (2019), in a section
entitled “Machine Translation and the Talent Tsunami” observes enthusiastically,
In June 2017, the US Army paid Raytheon four million dollars for a machine translation
package that lets the soldiers converse with Iraqi Arabic and Pashto speakers as well as read
foreign-language documents and digital media on their smartphones and laptops.
(123–124)
Machine translation as an integral part of posthuman and transhuman projects casts a dark
ethical shadow in the persistent interest of the military in its development and applications. It was
DARPA that was centrally involved in the administration of the Information Awareness Office
exposed by Edward Snowden. This office was established in 2002 as a means of coordinating
computer and surveillance technology to identify potential terrorist threats inside and outside
the United States. They were involved in a mass surveillance operation that collected and stored
personal information (emails, phone records, social networking messages, financial transactions)
on every single resident of the United States and those of many other countries as well. They
did this in collusion with leading tech companies such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype
and Google (Greenwald 2015). In order to handle large quantities of data from non-Anglophone
285
Michael Cronin
countries, it is necessary to develop adequate translation systems, which explains the interest
of the military in the US and elsewhere in automated translation. The reason for this renewed
interest in machine translation as part of military transhumanism was articulated in a different
theatre of operations by Dominique Estival (2005) writing on the translation needs of the Aus-
tralian defence forces:
There have been many discussions for better and more timely intelligence since the intel-
ligence failures shown to precede the tragedy of 9/11 in the USA and requests for more
translators and tools to help translators have been widely publicised. Australia is in the same
situation as all other countries in this respect, although the Bali bombings in September
2002 and September 2005 and the bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta in Octo-
ber 2004 mean that there also specifc threats and concerns for Australia with particular
linguistic implications.
(178)
The response of the research wing of the Australian military, the Australian Defence Science
and Technology Organization (DSTO) was to develop a Language Translation Interface (LTI).
This brought together the resources of existing MT systems, including free, online transla-
tion services. According to Estival (2005), this move to the LTI was driven by the limitations
of human language acquisition. It takes one or two years (in the most optimistic scenario) to
train someone to function in a spoken foreign language (Phipps 2006), and another two or
three years to produce an efective translator/interpreter, depending on the language pair. He
claims, “it is very difcult to predict which languages are going to be of interest in a three-year
time frame and even more difcult to predict the extent of the potential demand for translation
for those languages” (180). Machine translation is a natural articulation of the desire to create
a linguistic invulnerability which matches the posthuman strength of the super soldier of the
future. Interrogating the ethical backdrop to the transhuman means challenging irenic versions
of cyberutopianism which promote (machine) translation as a kind of undoing of the divisive
curse of Babel. As Vicente Rafael (2015) has noted repeatedly, language and translation have
been central to US military counterinsurgency in the new millennium (Rafael 2015), and it
is only to be expected that translation in the posthuman context cannot be isolated from the
battlegrounds of the future and the real ethical issues that military intervention and intelligence
gathering raise. Mark O’Connell (2017), for his part, observes, “The rhetoric of Silicon Valley’s
geek establishment is steeped in a diluted solution of countercultural idealism – changing the
world, making things better, disrupting old orders and so forth – but its roots are deep in the
blood-rich soil of war” (130).
In a future determined in part by the fortunes of military transhumanism, the issue of who
finances machine translation research and to what end is likely to feature more and more promi-
nently as an ethical issue. Given the previous role of bodies like DARPA in technological inno-
vation and machine translation research, it would be unwise to believe that ethical issues are
somehow peripheral to MT research.
6 Main issues: definition of humanness

Brian Christian (2011) admits, in his exploration of what artificial intelligence tells us about
what it is to be human, that humans’ changing relationship with animals and machines makes
defining humanness increasingly tricky:
286
The story of the twenty-frst century will be, in part, the story of the drawing and redraw-
ing of these battle lines, the story of Homo sapiens trying to stake a claim on shifting ground,
fanked on both sides by beast and machine, pinned between meat and math.
(13)
Defining the posthuman implies, as a consequence, trying to arrive at a notion of what con-
stitutes the human, but as animal studies advances and artificial intelligence develops, the criteria
are constantly called into question. One way of approaching this question has been to consider
what the activities are that humans excel at and what tasks are better left to machines. In the
context of the globotics transformation, this has clear societal implications as some service jobs
are more likely to be automated than others are. In a report published by the McKinsey Global
Institute in 2017, the capabilities of AI in different communication skills were evaluated. In the
domain of natural language generation, craft non-verbal outputs (delivering outputs/visualisa-
tions across a variety of mediums other than natural language) and sensory perception (autono-
mously inferring and integrating complex external perception using sensors), AI was found to
be equal in ability to human subjects. Only in the area of natural language understanding was AI
found wanting (McKinsey Global Institute 2017). However, as Richard Baldwin (2019) points
out, “their communication skills are not why white-collar robots will be so disruptive to service
jobs. The really disruptive thing is their inhumanely good ability to recognize patterns based on
unimaginable amounts of experience (data)” (155). Data-based pattern recognition is not intel-
ligence despite the AI moniker.
White-collar robots that are trained by machine learning cannot reason, plan or solve prob-
lems they have not previously seen. They lack the capacity to think abstractly or comprehend
complex ideas that are more than patterns in the data (Whitney 2017). Data-based pattern recog-
nition does, however, constitute a considerable amount of what it is that professionals – doctors,
lawyers, journalists, accountants – have traditionally done. As more and more areas of human
activity are ceded to robotic process automation (RPA) in finance, accounting, supply-chain
management and customer service, where are specifically human qualities (however defined)
likely to be valued? The McKinsey Report previously cited found that AI-trained algorithms
had capabilities below that of the average person in different social skills such as social and emo-
tional reasoning, coordinating with many people, acting in emotionally appropriate ways and
social and emotional sensing (McKinsey Global Institute 2017). The jobs most likely to resist
competition either directly in the form of competition or indirectly via telemigration using
advanced technologies are what the economists Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger (2013) describe
as “have-to-be-there jobs,” jobs involving a high degree of face-to-face interaction (S97–S128).
Baldwin (2019) adds, “[h]umans are, and are likely to remain, better than white-collar robots
in activities that involve situations where the issues are unclear, success is hard to define, or the
outcomes are unclear” (242). Similarly, where data is scarce or hard to come by, AI is likely to
prove ineffective.
One of the potential implications for translation studies is the need for a greater focus on
those areas of translation activity which are engaged with “caring, sharing, understanding, creat-
ing, empathizing, innovating, and managing people who are actually in the same room” (Bald-
win 2019, 13). One obvious area is that of community interpreting, which draws precisely on
all those skills listed by Baldwin and which are classically part of human social cognition (see also
Chapter 15 “Ethics in public service interpreting” in this volume). In other words, if translation
studies has been overwhelmingly text-based in recent decades, there may be a sense in which
as MT systems improve in the area of pragmatic translation, the increasing focus of research in
287
Michael Cronin
translation ethics will be in those areas where human translation skills remain very much to the
fore (see Inghilleri 2017). The redefinition of the human or the reconfiguration of what it is
to be human will almost definitely alter the translation studies landscape as specific areas come
more sharply into focus.
What is true for community interpreting holds equally true for literary translation (see also
Chapter 13 “Literary translator ethics” in this volume). When Susan Bassnett (2002) in her foun-
dational Translation Studies sought to mark out territory for the emerging discipline of translation
studies, she identified the overbearing siblings of comparative literature and linguistics. She was
engaged
in an attempt to demonstrate that Translation Studies is indeed a discipline in its own right:
not merely a minor branch of comparative literary theory, nor yet a specifc area of linguis-
tics, but a vastly complex feld with many far-reaching ramifcations.
(11)
Part of the motivation for this move towards disciplinary distinctness was that translation studies
would be able to engage with modern languages and comparative literature on an equal footing.
Translation would no longer be a distant and vaguely patronised relative but a full member of
the family of literary enquiry. The optimism of the cultural turn in translation studies has not
always, however, been borne out by subsequent developments. From a relatively modest base
in the 1970s and 1980s there has been an exponential growth in the number of translation pro-
grammes, often under the aegis of modern languages departments and frequently at postgraduate
level. An explicit part of the rationale for many of these programmes is vocational relevance,
designed to convince university administrators of the continued value of modern languages in
the contemporary marketplace. The European Master’s in Translation label, sponsored by the
European Commission and currently recognizing eighty-three translation programmes across
Europe and one programme in Lebanon, is clear in the instrumentalist criteria it uses to evaluate
candidate programmes:
The main goal of EMT is fully in line with the EU priorities for higher education: improve
the quality of translator training in order to enhance the labour market integration of young
language professionals. The EMT translator competence profle, drawn up by European
experts, is at the core of the project. It defnes the basic competences that translators need
to work successfully in today’s market. More and more universities, also beyond the EU,
use it as a model for designing their programmes.
(European Commission 2018)
The emphasis is clearly on pragmatic translation (scientifc/commercial/legal texts), and litera-

ture or literary translation do not in any way feature as a priority. So although translation studies
has clearly acquired a status and an identity it did not have two decades ago, this has not led
to a major resurgence in interest in questions of translation and literature that one might have
expected or hoped for in the expanding institutional presence of translation studies. There may
be a sense, however, in which this excessive emphasis on pragmatic translation will be radically
undermined in the shift to a posthuman reconfguration of human/machine relationships. If
“high-end translation is likely to stay in the hands of humans” (Baldwin 2019, 125), then a
reorientation of translator education may be called for, one that exploits to the full the social
intelligence, emotional intelligence, creativity and innovativeness that is so explicitly on display
in successful literary translation (Scott 2018).
288
7 Main issues: transversality

As knowledge is always produced in a particular place, it bears the marks and conditions of this
locale, but crucially places are a polis that are made up of all kinds of human and nonhuman ele-
ments, and these elements are connected to far distant events and influences. The crucial ethical
thrust of this terracentric paradigm is best expressed by Félix Guattari (1995) in his Chaosmosis
when he states:
How do we change mentalities, how do we invent social practices that would give back
to humanity – if it ever had it – a sense of responsibility, and not only for its own survival,
but equally for the future of all life the planet, for animal and vegetable species, likewise
for incorporeal species such as music, the arts, cinema, the relation with time, love, and
compassion for others, the feeling of fusion at the heart of the cosmos?
(119–120)
Guattari is, in efect, articulating a notion of the posthuman as it has increasingly featured
in the ecological challenge to human exceptionalism. He is articulating in a diferent mode
the model of transversal subjectivity outlined by Rosi Braidotti. The ethical challenge of this
new form of posthuman thinking was apparent in an interview accorded prior to the COP21
conference in Paris in 2018 by a leading advocate for climate justice, Mary Robinson (quoted
in Canzi 2016), a former president of Ireland and former UN high commissioner for human
rights. She articulated what she saw as a key advantage of the concept, “Climate change can
be difcult to communicate. It is often seen as distant and highly technical. Climate justice
focuses our attention on people, rather than ice-caps and greenhouse gases. I think this makes
the threat of climate change more tangible.” What appears like a good communications strat-
egy is, however, deeply fawed as a form of interpretation and indeed may become complicit
in exacerbating the very problem it wants to address. From Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2009,
197–222) notion of deep history to Michel Serre’s (2003) idea of the grand récit, a common
thread in thinking in the age of the Anthropocene is the notion that the fates of the human
and the non-human worlds are inextricably bound up with each other. It is no longer possible
to postulate an anthropocentric, hierarchical order where the non-human world is passively
subject to the interventions and manipulations of the human subject. The non-human is strik-
ing back. The 20 warmest years since records began in 1850 have been in the past 22 years,
with the four years between 2015 and 2019 the warmest ever recorded. Vertebrate populations
on the planet have fallen by an average of 60 per cent since the 1970s. Extinction rates for all
species have increased to between 100 and 1,000 times the “background rate” of extinction.
At this stage, more than 75 per cent of the earth’s land is substantially degraded. Topsoil is now
being lost ten to forty times faster than it is being replenished by natural processes, and, since
the mid-20th century, 30 per cent of the world’s arable land has become unproductive due
to erosion; 95 per cent of the earth’s land areas could become degraded by 2050 (Laybourn-
Langton, Rankin, and Baxter 2019, 6–7).
Geological and human history converge. The Great Story that stretches from the Big Bang
to the emergence of Homo sapiens is not one that has the teleological purpose of human survival.
The more humans ignore the non-human world, the less likely it is to ignore them. The result
is that the earth will endure but that there is no necessary reason why earthlings – agents and
victims of increasingly destructive environmental behaviour – will. In other words, the difficulty
with the anthropocentric focus of climate justice is that it replicates the ideology of human
exceptionalism which is at the origin of the current ecological crisis. When the only things that
289
Michael Cronin
matter or are valued are those things that matter to humans, then the structures humans elaborate
will routinely ignore the non-human.
Thomas Berry (2000), the cultural historian notes, “our legal system fosters a sense of human
rights, with other-than-human beings having no inherent rights” (102). Thus, we have Human
Rights Watch but no organisation called Non-Human Rights Watch. If the American constitu-
tion, for example, guarantees humans participatory government, individual freedoms and the
right to own and dispose of property, there is no protection for the natural world. As Berry has
argued, “[o]nly a jurisprudence based on a concern for an integral Earth community is capable
of sustaining a viable planet” (74). Thinking of mountains, rivers or forests as independent legal
entities possessing inalienable rights poses considerable challenges for routine ways of conceiv-
ing of law and justice. In May 2015 at the initiative of Bruno Latour and Laurence Tubiana, a
simulation was enacted in the Théâtre des Amandiers in Paris. Anticipating the discussions in
Paris in December a group of students from around thirty different countries acted out roles as
part of different delegations. They were, however, delegations with a difference. There were, of
course, delegations from “France” and “India” and “Australia,” but there were also delegations
from “Forests” and “Oceans” and “Atmosphere.” Bruno Latour (2015) is aware of the difficulties
implicit in these experimental forms of jurisprudence but claims:
Si vous étonnez qu’on fasse parler “forêt”, alors il faut vous étonner aussi qu’un président parle
comme représentant de “France”. Personne morale pour personne morale chacune a beaucoup à dire et
ne s’exprime que par une vertigineuse série d’indispensables truchements. [If you are surprised that
someone can speak on behalf of “forest”, you should be equally surprised that a president
can speak as representing “France”. Each of these legal entities has much to say and does so
through a dizzying chain of necessary translations [my translation]].
(339)
The good governance of water, soil and air demands at the very least representative government,
and that representation implies “a dizzying chain of necessary translations.” Put simply, there is
no representation without translation. If a transversal form of post-anthropocentric subjectivity
is to emerge, it demands that we think about the languages, the forms of communication, the
signifying systems of the non-human and how we are to translate forms of intelligibility that
allow for shared sovereignty of the planet. If non-human presence has been spectacularly minori-
tised by Cartesian dualism and the Christian doctrine of the soul, notions of climate justice and
translation need to move beyond the strict purview of the human if they are not to be complicit
in ecologically damaging forms of subjection.
8 Conclusions
A final dimension to the posthuman ethical challenge of translation is the plight of living organ-
isms with whom we share the planet. We are living through what Elisabeth Kolbert (2014) has
called the sixth extinction, where animal species are being destroyed at an unprecedented rate.
The natural “background” rate of species extinction is about one to five species a year. However,
it is currently estimated that we are losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate.
This means that between 30 and 50 per cent of all species will be extinct by mid-century. The
situation of domesticated animals is scarcely better. There are one billion domesticated pigs,
1.5 billion cows and 20 billion chickens on the planet, and the vast majority are subject to the
brutalising regimes of industrialised farming. As the historian Yuval Noah Harari (2015) has
pointed out:
290
This is why the fate of farm animals is not an ethical side issue. It concerns the majority
of Earth’s large creatures: tens of billions of sentient beings, each with a complex world of
sensations and emotions, but which live and die on an industrial production line.
(104)
Again what is implicit in Harari’s comments is an ethics of translation. How are we to know
that our fellow creatures have a “complex world of sensations and emotions” if we do not
attempt to translate what they are experiencing into forms of meaning that are intelligible to
humans? If the majority of sentient beings on this planet find themselves ruthlessly minoritised
in industrialised routines of life and death, is it not time that we expand the remit of what is
understood by intersemiotic translation to include various forms of animal communication,
on which there is now an extensive body of research (see Slobodchikoff 2012)? If part of the
struggle for justice in the colonial period was to give voice through translation to the oppres-
sion of the subaltern, to turn the colonised from positivistic objects of commercial exploitation
and scientific enquiry to hermeneutic subjects of sentient experience and liberation (see also
Chapter 8 “The ethics of postcolonial translation” in this volume), then translation studies in a
posthuman moment might finally turn its attention to the minoritised languages of the majority
of beings on the planet.
John Gibbons (2019), an environmental writer and commentator, has argued, “Climate
breakdown has been labelled the ‘problem from hell’. Sphinx-like, it appears both remote and
abstract, yet simultaneously overwhelming and complex” (16). What climate breakdown signals
is our irremediably terrestrial condition. Transhumanism ignores the fact that we “are presiding
over a vast project of annihilation, an unprecedented destruction of the world we have come
to think as ours” (O’Connell 2017, 7). The desire to escape mortality in an increasingly unsus-
tainable future is part of a witting or unwitting desire to shirk ethical responsibility for a deeply
compromised present. If Vernon Vinge’s (1993) concern was with surviving in a posthuman
era, it is less likely that it is our technological singularity that will save us than the singularity
of our ethical ability as translators to conceive of a world where connection is everything and
difference is everywhere.

Translation technology and ethics; the ethics of postcolonial translation; literary translator eth-
ics; ethics of volunteering in translation and interpreting; ethics of collaboration and control in
literary translation; ethics in public service interpreting.
References
Baldwin, Richard. 2019. The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics and the Future of Work. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Bassnett, Susan. 2002. Translation Studies. London: Routledge.
Baynham, Mike, and Tong King Lee. 2019. Translation and Translanguaging. London: Routledge.
Berry, Wendell. 2000. Life Is a Miracle. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press.
Besnier, Jean-Michel. 2015. “‘Posthumain’ in Hottois, G., Missa.” In Encyclopédie du trans/posthumanisme,
edited by J.-N. Missa, and L. Perbal, 105–10. Paris: Vrin.
Blinder, Alan S., and Alan B. Krueger. 2013. “Alternative Measures of Offshorability: A Survey Approach.”
Journal of Labor Economics 31, no. S1: S97–S128.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Brynjolfson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. 2016. Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.
New York: W.W. Norton.
291
Michael Cronin
Canzi, Germana. 2016. “Q&A with Mary Robinson: What Is Climate Justice?” In The Road to Paris. Accessed
April 25, 2019. http://roadtoparis.info/2015/07/29/qa-with-mary-robinson-what-is-climate-justice/
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35: 197–222.
Christian, Brian. 2011. The Most Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us about Being Alive. London:
Penguin.
Clausing, Kimberly. 2019. Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration and Global Capital. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Estival, Dominique. 2005. “The Language Translation Interface: A Perspective from Users.” Machine Trans-
lation 19, no. 2: 175–92.
European Commission. 2018. “European Master’s in Translation.” Accessed April 20, 2019. https://ec.europa.
eu/info/resources-partners/european-masters-translation-emt/european-masters-translation-emt-
explained_en
Gibbons, John. 2019. “Media Failing to Halt Climate-Change ‘Meteor’.” The Irish Times, April 26: 16.
Greenwald, Glenn. 2015. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State. London:
Penguin.
Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Harari, Yuval Noah. 2015. “Industrialised Farming One of the Worst Crimes in History.” The
Guardian, September 25. Accessed April 22, 2019. www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/25/industrial-
farming-one-worst-crimes-history-ethical-question
Inghilleri, Moira. 2017. Translation and Migration. London: Routledge.
Jacobsen, Annie. 2015. The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military
Research Agency. New York: Little, Brown.
K International. 2016. “11 Google Translate Facts You Should Know.” Accessed April 22, 2019. www.
k-international.com/blog/google-translate-facts/
Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. London: Bloomsbury.
Kurzweil, Ray. 2014. How to Create a Human Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. London:
Duckworth.
Latour, Bruno. 2015. Face à Gaïa. Paris: La Découverte.
Laybourn-Langton, Laurie, Lesley Rankin, and Darren Baxter. 2019. This Is a Crisis: Facing Up to the Age
of Environmental Breakdown. London: Institute for Public Policy Research.
McKinsey Global Institute. 2017. “A Future That Works: Automation, Employment and Productivity.”
Accessed April 26, 2019. www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/featured%20insights/Digital%20
Disruption/Harnessing%20automation%20for%20a%20future%20that%20works/MGI-A-future-that-
works-Executive-summary.ashx
Microsoft. 2019. “Holoportation.” Accessed April 22, 2019. www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/
holoportation-3/
Mudde, Cas, and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
O’Connell, Mark. 2017. To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists
Solving the Modest Problem of Death. London: Granta.
Pennycook, Alastair, and Emi Otsuji. 2015. Metrolingualism: Language in the City. London: Routledge.
Phipps, Alison. 2006. Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival: Languaging, Tourism, Life. Clevedon: Multilin-
gual Matters.
Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd edition.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Posner, Eric, and Glen Weyl. 2018. Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society.
Rafael, Vincente. 2015. Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Scott, Clive. 2018. The Work of Literary Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Serres, Michel. 2003. Hominescence. Paris: Livre de Poche.
Slobodchikoff, Con. 2012. Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Languages of Animals. New York: St Martin’s
Press.
TAUS. 2019. “Mission.” Accessed September 16, 2019. www.taus.net/about/mission
Vinge, Vernon. 1993. “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.”
Accessed April 21, 2019. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19940022856
292
Von Ahn, Luis. 2011. “Massive-Scale Online Collaboration.” TED Talk, April. Accessed April 22, 2019.
www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html
Wark, McKenzie. 2015. Molecular Red Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso Books.
Whitney, Lance. 2017. “Are Computers Already Smarter Than Humans.” Time, September 29.
Zuckerman, Ethan. 2013. Digital Cosmopolitans: Why We Think the Internet Connects Us, Why It Doesn’t, and
How to Rewire It. New York: Norton.
Further reading
Braidotti, R. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Braidotti offers one of the most sophisticated and intelligible description of what constitutes the posthu-
man and pays particular attention to ethical questions.
Cronin, M. 2017. Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. London: Routledge.
This work focuses on translation from the point of view of the posthuman standpoint of contemporary
political ecology. The four main areas that are investigated in the volume are food, interspecies com-
munication, technology and travel literature.
Kato, D., and B. Allen. 2014. “Toward an Ecocritical Approach to Translation: A Conceptual Framework.”
Accessed April 20, 2019. file:///Users/michaelcronin/Desktop/State%20of%20the%20Discipline%20
Report%20-%20Ecocritical%20Approach%20to%20Translation.webarchive
A very useful introduction to a number of the pioneering voices in comparative literature and transla-
tion studies that have begun to address the notion of the posthuman in the context of eco-criticism.
Marais, K. 2019. A (Bio)Semiotic Approach to Translation: The Emergence of Socio-Cultural Reality. London:
Routledge.
Marais uses the framework of Peircean semiotics to expand the remit of translation to include forms of
translation that go beyond the interlingual. He is particularly attentive to the work that has been done
in animal studies on various forms of intra- and interspecies communication.
293
Part III
20
Ethics codes for interpreters
and translators
1 Introduction
Ethics codes have the potential to shape the ideologies and practices in a field of professional
practice, its material and institutional environment, and its parallel conceptual world as a result.
The relevance of ethical documents in any profession is difficult to overstate, especially when
the profession is in a process of establishing itself or in a stage of rapid change, as is the case of
the translation and interpreting (henceforth T&I) profession(s). The climate of increasing global
exchanges gives central prominence to communication facilitation in and across linguistically
and culturally diverse societies. A sufficient understanding of the ethical underpinnings of pro-
fessional T&I, as codified in written form, is therefore necessary. This chapter summarizes the
state of the art of ethics codes in T&I by defining these documents, presenting a typology of
existing documents and their main contents and giving a brief overview of their evolution over
time and a review of main topics and research issues around them.
Ethics codes are designed to fulfil several functions, which may be situated in two fields: pro-
fessional normative ethics and sociology of the professions. From a professional ethics standpoint,
the main purpose of codes is to encourage the practitioner’s moral autonomy (Lozano Aguilar
2004, 181). Their secondary goals are regulative (i.e. offering guidelines, providing some kind of
social contract and establishing punitive measures) and ideological (i.e. laying down basic beliefs
and attitudes, expressing the will not to overstep their boundaries, committing to transparency to
enable “informed autonomy” and recognizing their obligation to “distributive justice”) (Lozano
Aguilar 2004, 98–100).
As far as sociology of professions is concerned, professional communities strive to increase
their autonomy over their field or jurisdiction, in terms of, for example, regulating training,
entry and exit into the group or establishing concepts and terms, and professional guidelines
become discursive tools to materialize this goal (Baixauli-Olmos 2017). This control may be
gained following different strategies like increasing legitimacy in the eyes of other professionals
or society at large by presenting the values professed by the occupation, establishing basic com-
petences to be imparted upon new members, controlling entry into the occupation based on
knowledge, skills and attitudes, stipulating practice control and exit of the occupation if neces-
sary and fostering internal cohesion in terms of group identity.
297
There are different approaches to professional norms; these approaches connect to the goals
of those who produce the norms. Ethics codes may be written to increase productivity, to ensure
compliance, to offer a clear picture or to become a branding strategy of a company or service,
to become an inspiration for practitioners to excel or to champion the safeguarding of human
rights. Whatever the motivation, these varied understandings and goals of professional ethical
norms show political and therefore controversial statements that reflect different philosophical
schools of thought around the notion of duty and obligation; this theory or field of philosophy
is called “normative ethics” or “deontology.”
There exists no single definition that enjoys uncontested consensus of ethics codes because
their very definition is determined by the field or approach from which it is proposed, or even by
the type of document that is being defined. However, a few basic common traits are not prone
to controversy: ethics codes are written documents, they formulate the core moral concepts,
values or principles of a profession, they express an ideal of right behaviour and they contain
information to guide practitioners in aligning with that ideal and outsiders in understanding
what the profession does (or should do).
Although a more detailed discussion of type of texts is presented later, this paragraph offers
a few working definitions. Codes of ethics have been defined in the field of business ethics as
documents that aim to influence workers’ conduct (Stevens 1994) and contain moral standards
(Schwartz 2001; Stevens 1994), or as a set of institutionalized self-imposed obligations that pur-
sues the fundamental ethical goal of facilitating decision-making (Wittmann 1995); these obliga-
tions affirm a commitment to social values both internally and externally to the community that
is affected by these rules. Reinforcing this two-fold intention, Lozano Aguilar (1997) explains
that a professional code of ethics formulates an internal reflection about the shared responsibili-
ties of an organization toward the criteria, values and ends that identify that organization. In T&I
Studies (TIS), these documents have been described as “a set of objective rules or duties that
decide ethical behaviour irrespective of their consequences” (Pym 2001, 134) and “provide[s]
guidelines for practitioners on how to conduct themselves ethically for the benefit of the clients
they serve, the profession they represent and themselves as practitioners” (Hale 2007, 103). Defi-
nitions of these documents in TIS do not deviate from how applied ethics understands them.
2 Historical trajectory of the codes

The birth, evolution and distribution of ethics codes runs in parallel with that of the professional
activity these codes try to regulate and in a broader context of socioprofessional trends. We find
early antecedents of professional norms in the Hippocratic Oath (2nd–3rd century BC), which
contains fundamental principles still relevant for the modern-day practice of medicine. Specific
reflections about how best to translate in the early historical times also exist, like St. Jerome’s
letter 57 to Pammachius in AD 395 (Giambruno 2008, 27), where his method used to translate
texts is justified. Another pre-historic antecedent is found in Julius Caesar’s use of friends when
in doubt about the accuracy of his regular interpreters’ renditions (Mairs 2011, in Phelan 2019).
In spite of these references, no ancient historical records documenting the existence of explicit
written guidelines for T&I have been found.
However, early modern guidelines for interpreters have been documented. Giambruno
(2008) reports on the Title 29 of Book Two of the Leyes de las Indias, a piece of legislation
promulgated by the Spanish crown between 1529 and 1630, to regulate court interpreters’ pro-
fessional behaviour in the Spanish colonies. The law provides detailed guidelines on expected
practices and ethical principles, like impartiality (38). In any case, these normative documents
indicated previously predate the existence of actual professions as we understand them today
298
and therefore are not technically professional ethics codes. Professions in today’s sense started
during the industrial revolution, which created the necessary conditions for the promulgation of
modern ethics codes. The expansion of guilds, the division of labour, the specialization of occu-
pations and their knowledge, and the progressive formalization of those guilds into professional
bodies and training institutions are the basic socio-economic structures that gave rise to ethical
documents and informed their rationale, underlying ideologies, contents and even structure.
The first documented modern code of ethics, not surprisingly in the medical profession, was
published in 1803 by T. Percival in the UK (Riddick 2003).
The history of ethical codes is inextricably linked to the social needs that give rise to the orga-
nization of associations, from which codes most frequently emanate. The first professionalization
efforts in T&I started at the beginning of the 20th century, against a backdrop of international-
ization of political relations, when a few incipient nation-wide professional associations were set
up in the UK (Institute of Linguistics, 1910), Norway (Association of Government Authorized
Translators in Norway, 1913) and Austria (Austrian Association of Certified Court Interpreters,
1920) (Phelan 2019). The creation of the League of Nations after the First World War, when
different nations started to explore peaceful ways to resolve political disputes, brought about a
need for trained T&I professionals, and as a result the first modern-day school for T&Is was
established in Geneva in 1941. A couple years later, in 1943, the Swiss Association d’Interprètes
et de Traducteurs (1943) was founded (Phelan 2019). This is the context where the need for
clear and explicit expectations for professional T&I started to emerge.
It was only in the mid-20th century that the T&I profession starts to gain recognition and
to find ways to regulate its activities at a supranational level. Six national associations (represent-
ing Denmark, France, Italy, Norway, the Federal Republic of Germany and Turkey; FIT n.d.)
pioneered these efforts and in 1953 founded the International Federation of Translators (FIT),
which became the first international body for T&I. That same year the International Association
of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) was founded; this organization was the first one to develop a
code of ethics in 1957 (Boéri 2015). The year 1963 marks an important feat in T&I professional
deontology, because the Translator’s Charter (FIT 1963, 1994) was first published, making it
the first international document that regulates the translation activity, translators’ obligations and
rights, and their organization in professional bodies. During that same year, the US Registry
of Interpreters for the Deaf Code of Ethics (1963) saw the light of day. In 1976, the Nairobi
Declaration (UNESCO 1976) was passed to encourage state members to implement legal safe-
guards for translators, including facilitating the creation and development of those professional
organizations in charge of establishing norms and obligations. During the second half of the
20th century, with the increase of globalization processes, professional associations mushroomed
around the world and adopted a self-regulatory set of guidelines. By the end of the century,
“[v]irtually every professional association of interpreters has a code of conduct that its members
are expected to follow” (Mikkelson 2000, 50).
The first national document covering both T&I we have found was published in Australia in
1995 (AUSIT 1995, 2012, 3). A thorough search for translation-specific documents published
prior to the year 2000 yielded few results; many did not give a clear date of adoption or publica-
tion of the current or earlier versions of the guidelines. It is thus highly likely that previous codes
existed but remained undocumented.
The spoken language interpreting sector joined in these efforts at the national level later.
The introduction of the US Court Interpreters Act laid the groundwork for the publication in
1979 of a court interpreting code of professional responsibility (Salimbene 1997, 649), the first
spoken-language-interpreting-only text, followed by the UK’s public service interpreting code
(NRPSI 1995) and Sweden’s guidelines for certified interpreters (Kammarkollegiet 1996). This
299
trend then sprawled across other territories, and the first decade of the 2000s saw an interpret-
ing deontological boom. Quite a few new documents were created (e.g. ASTM 2001; APTIJ
2010; CHIA 2002; NCIHC 2004, 2005; HIN 2007; IMIA 2007) and some were reviewed
(ASTM 2007; NRPSI 2005). Although new documents keep being adopted (EULITA 2013),
in the second decade of the 2000s a second revision stage started, when a few organizations
renewed the existing professional guidelines (AIIC 2015, 2018; ASTM 2015; AUSIT 2012;
NRPSI 2016; CIoL 2017; Kammerkollegiet 2019). Parallel to the ethics codes, standardization
efforts for T&I also became more prominent. It seems to have happened in the last years of the
2000s (ASTM 2001, 2007) and during the 2010s, like the ISO for community interpreting
(ISO 2014), translation services (ISO 2015), interpreting services (ASTM 2015; ISO 2018), as
well as legal interpreting (ISO 2019). Although it is difficult to pinpoint the exact causes of this
synchronicity, one may hypothesize that the sector went from a more abstract to a more concrete
ethical approach: it first focused on the moral principles (“codes of ethics”), then on ways to
fulfil them (“standards of practice”) and finally on establishing clear and agreed upon industry
standards (“standards”).
In summary, a few mostly European national bodies broke ground at the beginning of the
20th century in the hitherto unexplored territory of professionalization in T&I. They then
joined hands, and this prepared the ground for the establishment, mid-century, of international
associations. This led to the development of professional guidelines for interpreters, first inter-
nationally and then nationally, and the passing of international regulations for the protection of
translators. In the last third of the 20th century many nations, mostly industrialized, developed
rules, often for translators first and then for interpreters. The end of the 20th and the beginning
of the 21st century have witnessed an increase in the number of documents, the renewal of texts
and the addition of industry standards.
Although an effort has been made to include texts from non-English-speaking territories,
our review of the evolution of the ethics codes for T&I is rather Anglo-centric. A broader over-
view of codes of ethics and standards of practice, limited to interpreting but illustrative of the
situation in all the continents, is presented in Bancroft (2005). It is found that ethical documents
are uncommon in Latin America; some countries like Brazil, Argentina and Colombia have
developed their own rules and some nations follow other codes, like AIIC’s. A similar tendency
is found in Asia, where documents are limited and in their absence practitioners fall back on
international texts, although there are exceptions such as Japan (JTA n.d.). In Africa professional-
ization efforts are still incipient; South Africa leads the way with an active professional association
with its own code of ethics (Bancroft 2005).

The study of codes of ethics and similar documents originates in the field of ethics (or “moral
philosophy”), more specifically in normative ethics, which searches for an ideal of proper (in
our case, professional) behaviour by focusing on how one ought (not) to act (Singer 2019).
Three main ethical theories are frequently used to answer the question of what good behaviour
is: (1) a duty-based or deontological theory, which “calls for doing certain things on principle
or because they are inherently right” and appeals to “concepts of obligation, ought, duty, and
right and wrong”; (2) an outcome-based or teleological approach, advocating “that certain kinds
of actions are right because of the goodness of their consequences” and stressing “the good,
the valuable, and the desirable” (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2016) and (3) a virtue-based ethics,
which emphasizes “virtue or moral character, in contrast to . . . rules . . . or . . . consequences”
(Hursthouse Rosalind and Pettigrove 2016).
300
These are three complementary perspectives that may be used to discern ethically acceptable
from unacceptable behaviour, to inform decision-making or to develop written norms for ethi-
cal behaviour. However, deontological theories seem more relevant than the others do for the
study of ethical codes in particular, since their central contents are ethical statements of profes-
sional duty. But duty towards what? There are again three foci of ethical interest: the agent’s (in
this case, translators’ and interpreters’) duties, the patient’s rights (users of T&I services) and the
agreement of the parties involved (T&I practitioners and users; also called “contractarian theo-
ries”). This distinction is relevant because it affects the standpoint from which moral statements
are formulated, and as a result the selection of contents and the way documents are created. The
most common approach to present professional rules, at least in T&I, focuses on the service
provider (e.g. “Translators and interpreters shall . . .”), and not so much on whom they serve
(e.g. “Users have a right to faithful translations”). This has been criticized in our field by Cokely
(2000), who calls for a more rights-based approach to professional conduct (“Because users have
a right to . . . translators and interpreters shall . . .”).
3.1 Typologies of ethics codes in T&I

Ethical concepts and documents in T&I are more difficult to define, describe and classify than
it seems at first. In order to provide an overview of ethical documents in the T&I profession,
broad typologies are proposed later according to various factors: text genre, publishing body,
geographical distribution, professional jurisdiction, ethics approach and development process.
Before delving into the different types of documents, a terminological clarification seems appro-
priate: so far, we have used the term “ethics codes” or “documents” to refer to a varied group
of texts (codes of ethics, codes of conduct, standards of practice or professional canons, among
others) intended to guide practitioners in understanding and applying their professional duties.
Even though these kinds of texts are often understood similarly, sometimes even interchangeably,
there are nuances worth exploring.
In terms of text genre, although “there is no clear demarcation line between codes of eth-
ics, codes of conduct and ‘standards of practice’” (Ozolins 2014, 350, paraphrasing Bancroft
2005), some trends may be identified to classify the documents. It is common that a profes-
sional organization decides to establish some shared values that bind the occupation together,
and these are reflected on a document; this document is often called “code of ethics” or “of
professional responsibility”; it is general, relatively short and contains basic values and principles
of the profession. In some cases, this organization later decides to make the text more specific
and proposes another text, usually more detailed and longer and sometimes called “standards
of practice,” “of conduct,” “guidelines” or similar (Boéri 2015; Mikkelson 2016, 75; Bancroft
2005; Baixauli-Olmos 2012). There is therefore a chronological and an applied normative
relationship between these genres: codes come out first and focus on what should be done,
and standards (sometimes) follow and explain how to do it by offering down-to-earth practical
advice (Bancroft 2005, 16). There are many more codes of ethics than standards of practice in
the T&I profession as a whole, and standards are almost exclusive of interpreting and of the
USA (Bancroft 2005, 15).
A third mixed-type category of documents does not technically fall within the scope of ethics
codes stricto sensu, although they may contain professional guidelines or inform the professional
normative ethics body of texts. These include texts emanating from international bodies – like
the FIT Translator Charter (FIT 1963) or the UNESCO Political Recommendation (UNESCO
1976) statutes regulating the behaviour of interpreters, more common in sworn T&I and in
court interpreting (Orden 1999) – professional oaths for T&Is and industry standards (ISO 2014,
301
2015, 2018, 2019). This last group of documents is more concerned with technical requirements
and specifications, but sometimes also includes a section on ethical obligations (ASTM 2015).
In terms of the entity that proposes the text, three types are identified: professional orga-
nizations, standardization agencies and public or private businesses. Professional associations
are the publishing entity by default, where an association usually decides to draft an ethical
code and then approves it. These organizations operate at various jurisdictional levels: some
are international professional associations (International Association of Conference Interpret-
ers, International Medical Interpreters Association) or federations of associations (International
Federation of Translators); others are supranational (European Association for Legal Interpreters
and Translators), national (Indian Translators Association, South African Translators’ Institute,
Asociación Argentina de Traductores e Intérpretes), and subnational associations (California
Healthcare Interpreting Association).
In some jurisdictions, other public or private organizations that are not designated as “asso-
ciations” devise their own set of guidelines and protocols to guide practitioners in domains of
practice were few or no rules exist (Minnesota Department of Education) or service providers
who wish to set clear expectations for professionals and the public in terms of quality and excel-
lence (Multilanguages Corporation 2017). Another instance in this subcategory is a government
agency that approves an ethical document for professionals to strictly abide by; this is the case, for
example, of court interpreting codes in the US, which are passed, often as legislation, by district,
state or federal judicial authorities. These documents, if legally binding, will automatically have
more power than non-government-approved rules.
Another distinction that may be drawn among ethics documents relates to the profession
or professions it tries to regulate: there are ethical documents only for translators, only for
interpreters or for translators and interpreters. Nations with T&I ethics codes have at least one
general code of ethics only for translators (like JTA), where references to interpreting are implicit
or non-existent; other texts mention interpreting but focus mostly on translation (URTI),
while others clearly integrate T&I by including both the “T” and the “I” (NAJIT, AUSIT) in
their titles. There exist documents for specialized domains of practice, like literary translation
(CEATL), audiovisual translation (ATRAE), judiciary T&I (NAJIT, APTIJ, EULITA) or medi-
cal interpreting (HIN, IMIA).
The translation professional domain seems to be more unitary in the sense that typically one
nation has one document for all translators (ATA). It seems like translation often conceptualizes
itself as one profession in spite of the many branches and specializations, and it therefore reflects
its own moral and ethical vision in one single document. A trend is identified, though, whereby
more specific guidelines are published by individual organizations or are specific to a domain or
specialization within translation. But in terms of codes of ethics there tends to be one document.
The case of ethics codes in interpreting is rather more diverse and even fragmented. There
seems to be one document per territory per setting, that is conference interpreting or medical
interpreting, or one document per professional organization. To illustrate this reflection about
fragmentation, the case of T&I ethics codes in the United States of America will be used. The
American Translators Association is the professional body for translators, and it publishes one
code of ethics that applies to the whole of the translation activity. However, in interpreting there
is one document for court interpreting at the federal level and then many court interpreting
ethics codes at the state level. At the same time, there is one ethics code for medical interpreters
(NCIHC 2014) and several standards of practice, one national (NCIHC 2015), one international
(IMIA) and several state-level (CHIA).
There are a few instances of a joint document for both translators and interpreters (AUSIT;
NAJIT; ITI), and some others include other professionals like proofreaders (ASETRAD) or
302
linguists in general (CIoL; URTI). AUSIT has a general section for T&Is and then an appendix
to include specific expectations for translators and interpreters separately (in line with NRPSI
2016 too), whereas SFT has a general code and then a small appendix for interpreters.
These differences may be due to historical factors and demographics, the different time and
also the pace at which the two (sub-)professions have fought to organize themselves, the way
the market and the industry have been regulated, and possibly the political climate in which the
profession evolves.
In terms of approach to ethics, T&I ethics codes follow most frequently a deontological
approach to normative ethics in professional contexts (Ozolins 2014, 349), as indicated earlier,
i.e. they set forth some ethical principles that reflect professional obligations of T&Is (see later);
this is the case of documents like NCIHC, CHIA or NAJIT. Other documents, like the Trans-
lator’s Charter, contain a rather balanced view in terms of ethics approach, with a section on
obligations and another section on rights.
The last typology of documents relates to how they were created or developed. Ethics codes
may be developed following different processes: an individual top-down approach, a group top-
down approach, a bottom-up approach (Cortina-Orts 2003, 36 calls these methods respectively
“monarchical,” “aristocratical” or “democratic”), or a combination of those methods. We find
examples of individual top-down authored professional guidelines in Chesterman’s oath (2001),
Corsellis and Fernández (1999) and Baixauli-Olmos (2012). These proposals, although they may
be used as the basis for an actual code of ethics or standards of practice, are not valid because they
have not been endorsed by a collective body.
The most common procedure to develop a code of ethics is for a professional association
committee (either a set-up ad hoc committee or task force, or an existing committee that is
tasked with this mission) to come up with a proposal that is then approved by the main leader-
ship (the board, the council or the directors), thus coming into force. This seems to be the case
of the ATA (2010), CIoL, NRPSI and many others.
Another approach aims to build an ethical conduct proposal from the grassroots up. The
IMIA Standards (IMIA 2007) explains that the text was produced by an organization that designs
educational programs following a process using focus group methods to figure out the main
duties and tasks of an occupation.
A combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches is found in the medical interpreting
CHIA Standards of Practice (2002), where a committee had been working on a draft and using
feedback from experts in the field to revise it, and then the draft was shared with experienced
practicing interpreters for them to share their perceptions. Another type of document, standard-
ization documents (ISO 2019; ASTM 2007, among others), tends to follow a structured process
that is well documented; in the case of all the ISO standards, T&I specific or of other domains,
the organization first identifies market needs, gathers expert opinion, builds multistakeholder
consensus and writes up the standards (ISO n.d.).
Although a clear effort to make the development process inclusive has been made, it is note-
worthy that only a few of the documents (e.g. RID 2005 and AUSIT 2012) explained how the
texts were approved or adopted by the membership. It is possible that logistic and financial con-
straints might make this process unviable for many professional associations, but the legitimacy
of the document itself would be enhanced by offering this information.
Texts and organizations influence each other in the professional normative ethics
domain. The intertextual dynamics that takes place among documents happens across dif-
ferent dimensions and in different directions. These moves might take place across geo-
graphic or institutional jurisdictions, both upwardly (where a national document informs an
international one; e.g. the ISO standard 20228 on legal interpreting [ISO 2019], which was
303
originally proposed by the supranational association European Legal Interpreters and Translators
Association, EULITA; or the ISO guidelines on community interpreting [ISO 2014], clearly
influenced by the Canadian standards for community interpreters [HIN 2007]) and downwardly,
where an international text (like the FIT Charter) influences national ones. This dynamics take
place horizontally too, where one domain’s text impacts another domain’s document. These
trends may also be traced historically (with Canada’s HIN 2007 questioning previous standards
instituting “cultural interpreting”).
3.2 Contents of T&I ethics codes

Contents of ethics codes for translators and interpreters are moderately varied. Some texts are one-
pagers with just a short statement of ethical professional behaviour, whereas others go into quite
some detail and present a glossary of terms, explain the necessary skills or outline the responsibili-
ties of each stakeholder toward the others. In spite of the considerable differences, ethics codes
are similarly structured into two main sections. One of them is a preamble and/or an appendix,
which tends to include information about the body publishing the code and offers some context
about the profession and why the document is needed; this section offers the context in which the
text is produced and therefore contains much socio-professional information. The other one is the
normative section, which is the central and perhaps most ethically relevant part of the document.
Translation- and interpreting-specific guidelines are most often presented under sections that
correspond either to ethical principles (“accuracy,” “impartiality”: AUSIT; HIN) or to a theme
relating to a rather general ethical professional principle (Article 3, Cancellation of Contract,
AIIC; Solidarity and Fair Conduct, EULITA). In the first group, information is sometimes
presented with an ethical principle, accompanied by a brief explanation of the principle and
specific illustrative behaviours (AUSIT; NCIHC), or else the purpose of that principle (HIN);
this is relevant because it shows that different ethical approaches (duty-, value- or goal-based)
do indeed coexist in professional guidelines. In the second group, documents tend to follow a
statutory text structure (preamble-article-guideline, AIIC; preamble, definitions, general frame-
work, NRPSI; ASETRAD; AATI), with a focus on the relationship with clients and with
other professionals (JTA, URTI), deciding when one is competent to do the job, protecting the
dignity and honour of the profession (AIIC) and integrity (ITI), rates, or the need to belong to
the association (ATIA). In a nutshell, there seems to be a trend whereby documents intended
for non-conference interpreting (including sometimes translation) are relatively consistent in
presenting their guidelines under ethical principles like “accuracy” or “impartiality” (APTIJ;
IMIA; NAJIT; NCIHC; HIN; NRPSI), whereas the others seem to focus on a variety of topics
often related to the status of the profession and not so much the actual fulfilment of the task.
In terms of ethical content, there is some consensus that the most common tenets in T&I eth-
ics codes are “accuracy,” “impartiality” and “confidentiality” (Baixauli-Olmos 2012, 2017; Ban-
croft 2005; Hale 2007; McDonough Dolmaya 2011; Schweda-Nicholson 1994; Stern 2011).
The following paragraphs contain a brief definition of these three principles, a discussion of how
they are presented in ethics codes and a reflection on the academic debate surrounding them.
3.2.1 Accuracy
The ethical principle of “accuracy” refers to the duty of translators and interpreters to render
messages equivalent in one way or another to the source text, and the corresponding right of
users to expect a certain level of equivalence. Even though the term “accuracy” is often used
interchangeably with “faithfulness” (or “fidelity”), the former focuses on the target language and
304
culture to determine whether a translation or interpreting decision is accurate, while the latter
bases that judgement on the correspondence to source. In any case, this distinction is not a focal
point in ethics codes or academic contributions.
Accuracy is of supreme importance in the professional practice of T&I, because it is in a way
the raison d’être of the profession (Rudvin 2015) and in the ethical domain, as a lot of energy
has been spent on setting out guidelines in ethics codes and on explaining its meaning and sig-
nificance in academic publications. This has been considered the central value this occupation
professes (Stern 2011, 6), its “internal Good” (Baixauli-Olmos 2012, 301). It is arguable that the
social need for accurate communication is the reason why the T&I profession exists. In terms
of its presence in deontological professional documents, “accuracy” is understood as the con-
veyance of meaning (ATA) without distortions, and the preservation of all the source message
contents, including register, tone and style (EULITA). Most of the surveyed documents in the
literature steer away from static formal equivalence-based understandings of accuracy (Hale 2007;
Schweda-Nicholson 1994; Baixauli-Olmos 2012, 2017). Many texts stress the need to avoid
literalness (Hale 2007, 113) and strive for naturalness, and to include whatever modifications are
necessary to strike an equivalence of impact (pragmatic equivalence; ATIA) in the context of a
specific communicative encounter as defined in a translation brief (AATI; functional equivalence).
From the point of view of the normative nature of “accuracy,” it has been described as an
individual and collective moral and legal obligation toward the meaning of the speaker’s message
(Mikkelson 2016; Rudvin 2015). Normative conceptualizations of accuracy are shaped by both
medium and institutional constraints. Translation-oriented documents tend to refer to the duty
to provide accurate and complete renditions but do not provide much detail on how to ensure
accuracy, and in some cases, this principle is taken for granted and remains implicit (URTI
2014). However, guidelines referring to interpreting pay considerable attention to auxiliary
strategies interpreters should use to overcome obstacles that may prevent the interpreter from
providing faithful rendering of the source text; this includes, for example, correcting one’s own
mistakes or requesting repetitions and clarifications when a message is not understood. In court
interpreting accuracy is relatively restrictive, in the sense that practitioners are supposed to repro-
duce the speakers’ style with utmost precision, including hesitations and pauses (NAJIT; APTIJ).
In conference interpreting, some recommended techniques (like omissions or improving source
text style) would squarely contravene court interpreting (Stern 2011). In medical interpreting,
then, an interpreter is expected to facilitate communication and improve comprehension, and
therefore a practitioner should point out when they feel the patient may not have understood a
message (IMIA), which is not a reasonable demand of court or conference interpreters.
Scholarly reflections about accurate cross-linguistic and -cultural message transfer are so
complex and go so far back that in a way condense the history of TIS as an academic field of
study. Early discussions about accuracy focused mostly on linguistic and semantic equivalence,
later expanding to explore meaning in the social context where it is communicated (pragmatic
equivalence; Hale 1996) or in the professional situation where translation or interpreting services
are produced (functional equivalence; Nord 2001) (Pöchhacker 2004). Other authors have con-
centrated on achieving some level of correspondence to the source message via either similarity
(Chesterman 2000) or alterity (Pym 2001).
3.2.2 Impartiality
The second ethical tenet we are focusing on is “impartiality.” It may be defined as “not to cheat,
manipulate or wilfully misrepresent, but also not to hide your influence on the process and the product,
opting rather to acknowledge your strategy overtly” (Turner 2007, 185, emphasis original), and “to
305
ensure that personal feeling opinions, beliefs or interests do not interfere with the main aim of
producing accurate renditions” (Hale 2007, 119–120). As is apparent in this last definition, the
duty to be impartial is seen as a means to the end of ensuring accurate renditions. However,
the duty to remain impartial is more multifaceted than “accuracy,” as it connects the profes-
sional not just to the source rendition, the translation brief or the target culture, but also to
the relationship of the professional with the other stakeholders. Especially if there are potential
legal ramifications, professional translators and interpreters are expected to disclose if they have
any vested interests or have had previous professional contact with the parties, and they should
even withdraw from the assignment if they consider their ability to remain, or be perceived as,
impartial is significantly hampered by these or any other factors.
The T&I profession performs its task in an in-between space, across languages and cultures,
and often requires satisfying requirements of different parties. This therefore makes the principle
of impartiality especially significant.
Impartiality is a nearly universal principle in T&I ethics codes. It is presented somewhat simi-
larly, although with varying degrees of detail. Most codes simply state the duty to remain impar-
tial, while others make explicit a list of requirements, like not giving advice, not expressing one’s
own opinion and disclosing any actual or apparent personal conflict of interest (MICT; AUSIT).
Although it has been found that no actual definition of the principle is offered in the codes, because
it is presented as a “a set of ‘don’ts’” rather than do’s, codes “expect them [practitioners] to be aware
of and to control their subjectivity so that they do not interfere with their ability to render the
utterance faithfully” (Hale 2007). Although there are few disagreements among codes, one that is
worth noting is situated in public service interpreting and refers to the duty to offer explanations
of not readily understandable cultural references. Whereas in medical interpreting one is expected
to check for understanding, and some documents do include this expectation (CHIA; NCIHC),
one text (HIN) that is applicable to all institutional settings explicitly excludes this function, adding
a justification that experience has shown that it leads to more problems than solutions.
Research on impartiality questions at times the value of such a principle, on the grounds
that it is presented as a universal tenet (Rudvin 2007, 58) that disregards disparate language use
or cultural expression and power imbalances in the interaction (Kaufert and Putsch 1997, 72).
These criticisms are based on the premise that if professionals are to avoid misunderstandings
or develop strategies to bridge cultural differences, as is often the case in public service inter-
preting, it is difficult for them to remain impartial (Angelelli 2006, 183). Extending this line of
thought, professionals with more agency (i.e. who are willing to intervene more) are prone to
be less partial and vice versa. It has also been proposed that neutral performance is illusory and
that codes emphasizing this principle only intend to increase service demand (Lambert 2018).
On the other hand, other authors recognize that total impartiality is impossible and that “what
constitutes unethical behaviour, according to the code, is the deliberate alteration of an utter-
ance to reflect the interpreter’s own beliefs, goals and purposes” (Hale 2007, 123–124). Another
line of argument underlines the importance of impartial performance, arguing that it allows
practitioners to put some emotional distance between them and the messages they have to ren-
der, their senders or their goals (Hale 2007, 122). Both the positive and negative views on this
principle point establish some kind of connection between impartiality and professional role.
3.2.3 Confidentiality
The ethical principle of confidentiality refers to the translator’s and interpreters’ professional duty of
keeping all information acquired in the course of one’s employment confidential. This obligation
is common to other professions with access to secret information. The power professionals yield
306
when privy to such information requires restraint of practitioners. Such restraint ensures that the
rights of service users are not infringed upon because of malpractice by the T&I professional com-
munity. This duty is legally binding in contexts where details shared in a communicative encounter
are protected by law (political negotiations, intellectual property, police interviews, closed door
court hearings, depositions by protected witnesses, or health care). There may be exceptions to
this requirement, after receiving explicit authorization from the parties involved or when mandated
by law, for example when required by court of law or when someone’s health may be at stake. An
illustrative example of such exception is found in medical interpreting; it would be acceptable for
an interpreter who is aware of a patient’s allergy to a drug that is going to be administered to the
patient to alert medical professionals if the patient cannot, or chooses not to, do it.
Confidentiality is the most recurrent principle in T&I codes of ethics (Hale 2007, 108;
Bancroft 2005, 16; Baixauli-Olmos 2012, 226). Moreover, contents do not diverge significantly
and in general “there is consensus on . . . confidentiality” (Bancroft 2005, 27). Codes for public
service interpreters only cover the topic in more detail than do texts regulating translation or
both T&I; ATA (2010) or AIIC (2010) simply state that professionals ought to refrain from
sharing confidential information, whereas CHIA (2002), IMIA (2007) and HIN (2007) address,
among other topics, the possibility of explaining what “confidentiality” means. Nevertheless,
there are different approaches and emphases in the presentation of the confidentiality principles.
As indicated earlier, setting-specific expectations of compliance with this rule may be different
for patent translators than for diplomatic or medical interpreters.
Although confidentiality has not been a major focus of interest in the specialized literature, a
debate that remains unresolved has to do with the limits of confidentiality in situations outside
the established exceptions outlined previously. Camayd-Freixas (2009, 2013) shares his personal
account as a court interpreter in a proceeding that he thought was conducted in the most unfair
way; he decided to publicly denounce this miscarriage of justice “to act [his] conscience as a
citizen” but he was also criticized by some who argued he should have withdrawn due to a
conflict of interest, thus referring to a lack of impartiality on his behalf. In his 2013 paper, he
discusses the topic at length from various ethical perspectives and points to limitations, both of
ethics codes and of professional associations’ leadership roles, and recommends normative modi-
fications to empower interpreters to speak up when rights violations take place.
The issue of T&I confidentiality has also received attention from mainstream media. In Jan-
uary 2019, the Washington Post reported that after a June 2018 meeting between Russia’s Presi-
dent Vladimir Putin and US President Donald J. Trump, the latter had taken possession of “the
notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with
other administration officials” (Miller 2019). This was followed by a request from US politicians
that the interpreter be subpoenaed to testify on the contents of the discussion, at which point
AIIC released a statement (AIIC 2018) reminding the public of the ethical duty of T&I profes-
sionals to keep information confidential.
The two events explained in the previous paragraphs go to show how critical confidentiality
can be in some settings, and also how great the tensions may become when opposing sources
of pressure put differing expectations on T&I professionals. This reflection also highlights the
fundamental role that ethics codes and professional bodies play in such situations.
4 Emerging issues
Even though professional ethics in TIS is an important focus of attention (Lambert 2018), espe-
cially in Interpreting Studies, reflection around normative written codes has not been a central
topic of research. Tangential references come up frequently, but monographic publications are
307
relatively rare (Angelelli 2006; Arrojo 2012; Asiri 2016; Baixauli-Olmos 2012, 2014a, 2014b,
2017; Bancroft 2005; Bell 1997; Cokely 2000; Hale 2007; Hebenstreit, Marics, and Hlavac
2017; Lambert 2018; Lobato Patricio 2007; McDonough Dolmaya 2011; Mikkelson 2016;
Ozolins 2014; Rudvin 2015; Salimbene 1997; Springer 2009; Valero-Garcés 2017).
As a first observation, it is noteworthy that public service interpreting has paid more atten-
tion to codes of ethics than has translation or conference interpreting, which it could be argued
speaks to the history and nature of each field. The written vs. spoken/signed and the monologic
vs. dialogic nature of rendered interactions fundamentally changes the ethical considerations of
each profession. PSI was the last occupation to start to develop, it is more evidently institution-
driven and with clear power imbalances, more interpersonal, with immediate response from the
audience, and where the target rendition accuracy frequently has life changing impacts on users.
This might explain the different degrees of attention, breadth of topics and emphases. It has also
been proposed that the existence or absence of socialization structures may have an impact on
the degree of detail and explicitness of documents (Ozolins 2014, 354).
In the following paragraphs an attempt is made to group the work on ethics codes done to
date into several themes and fields of study. But before discussing in more detail the content of
the expert literature on the topic, it must be noted that our compilation relies again mostly on
publications available in English.
Let us now discuss the methodologies used in the studies on ethics codes carried out to date
in TIS. All of the works we reviewed follow a predominantly qualitative research design. The
method of choice is a compilation of ethics codes and its subsequent analysis. The collected data
is made up of different kinds of ethics codes, with a sample size ranging from 145 documents
(Bancroft 2005) to just four documents (Baixauli-Olmos 2014b). Analysis is carried out through
content or thematic analysis, mostly centring on the ethical principles and strategies, sometimes
using quantitative criteria to explain the prevalence of tenets (Hale 2007) or prioritizing strate-
gies that help realize those ideals (Baixauli-Olmos 2012). Although none of the sources used
traditional corpus linguistics analytical tools, some do explore the terminological variation of
terms like “accuracy” or “impartiality” (Baixauli-Olmos 2012; Lobato Patricio 2007) via more
micro-linguistic analyses. Some contributions describe perceptions about professional guidelines
using focus groups (Angelelli 2006), surveys (Asiri 2016), reports of working group discussions
(Ozolins 2014) or interviews (Valero-Garcés 2017). Case studies, which focus usually on one
document, are also common. Some of them discuss the contents and the process of development
or rewriting the document (Ozolins 2014; Angelelli, Agger-Gupta, Green, and Okahara 2007;
Lank 2000), while others make a call for the re-examination of existing documents (Cokely
2000; Drugan 2013).
Theoretical contributions focus on reviewing literature (Rudvin 2015; Lambert 2018; Mik-
kelson 2016; Hebenstreit et al. 2017), commenting on the illusory nature of their precepts
(Arrojo 2012; Cokely 2000) or proposing a theoretical framework to describe them (Chester-
man 2001; Baixauli-Olmos 2017).
The range of themes touched upon and theoretical approaches is broad. Three main issues
emerge: critical assessment of the documents, debates around moral and professional autonomy,
and arguments on the of the validity of descriptivist vs. prescriptivist approaches. They are evalu-
ated in the next paragraphs following a dialectical argumentation.
4.1 Critical assessment of ethics codes in T&I

The tension between the strengths and weaknesses of ethical guidelines for T&I has received
considerable attention, as is the case of other professions (Center for the Study of Ethics in the
308
Professions n.d.). In our review of existing work on the topic, several topics emerge: applicabil-
ity, universality, realism, consistency and attitude towards oppression.
A fundamental criticism of ethics codes has to do with their applicability to real life and the
disparity of the guidelines and real-life practice (Angelelli 2006, 178). Some authors consider
the documents do not provide support for the practice of the profession (Lambert 2018, 271)
because they fail to address actual professional concerns, like rates or decisions about technologi-
cal tools (McDonough Dolmaya 2011, 45).
Although this is a fair concern about some documents being approved without consulting
practitioners on the field and therefore about their relevance, such content depth expectations
seem unrealistic and are based on misconceptions about ethics codes, as “a code of ethics is not
designed to provide an answer to every specific problem” (Mikkelson 2016, 84). Additionally,
both existing ethical guidelines and research point to strategies to bridge the theory-practice
gap, for example by identifying topics of interest among practitioners (Asiri 2016; Ozolins 2014)
and by offering guidance on the meaning and applicability of ethical principles (via standards of
practice or resolution of ethical dilemmas, as in CHIA 2002).
Another concern raised has to do with the fact that the tenets are not universal, that is, that
they are not applicable across all settings and cultures (Ko 2006). A related line argues that,
because some T&I work is carried out by non-professionals, codes that fail to include or con-
sider this reality lose some of their value and relevance (Drugan 2013).
Ethical codes are seen as unrealistic and used as a self-serving face-saving move. It has been
argued in the academic debate that codes of ethics and standards of practice often contain unreal-
istic ideals of detachment and objectivity when they “repress any possible sign of . . . interference
in the process of translation” (Arrojo 2012) in order to “sell translations” (Lambert 2018).
Another limitation that has been pointed out about ethics codes revolves around clarity and
coherence. Professional guidelines are sometimes incomplete or ambiguous, for example when
they fail to define accuracy (McDonough Dolmaya 2011) or professional role (Hale 2007).
Although professional guidelines have been found to reduce arbitrariness and incoherence
(Neumann Solow 1981), inconsistencies are unavoidable. There may be internal discrepancies,
for example when an interpreter is expected not to add anything but then ought to point to
a missed cultural assumption or a culturally based misunderstanding. As well as in-document,
there also exist external inconsistencies across documents, domains, jurisdictions and nor-
mative frameworks. Different texts in the same occupation may propose opposed strategies
(McDonough Dolmaya 2011, 45); these differences may happen as well across nations (Ozolins
2014, 353–356) or across domains (translation vs. interpreting, healthcare vs. legal interpreting)
or due to normative discrepancies between professional standards and competing institutional
policies or expectations (Angelelli 2006, 189; Ozolins 2014, 361). The presence of inconsisten-
cies is not necessarily a problem because codes are not supposed to be understood as recipes
to make decisions but rather as a framework of thought (Harris, Rabins, and Pritchard 1995).
One vivid debate on the codes of professional practice is concerned with oppression and
resistance to oppressive forces. Published ethical guidelines have the potential to reduce diversity
and reinforce supremacies (Suárez Villegas 2001, 13), both in terms of cultural homogenization,
political or ideological oppression, or cross-institutional impositions. For example when some
kind of intercultural moral clash takes place in situations of contact between individualist and
collectivist ethics (Rudvin 2007), the interpreter is often expected to comply with what the
code says, thus prioritizing the satisfaction of one duty. As regards professional ideology, when
a code recommends one specific strategy, it is giving privileged status to one type of ethics.
As an illustrative example, some PSI documents posit a detached professional role by expect-
ing interpreters to focus on message transfer rather than cultural nuance (HIN 2007), whereas
309
others (CHIA 2002) recommend a more involved strategy whereby interpreters carry out cul-
tural clarifications when needed. Therefore professional codes may also be used to underpin
“professional ideologies” (Angelelli 2006, 191), which, if misguided, may pursue oppressive or
irresponsible practices and beliefs. At the same time, it is possible that certain kinds of moralities
can be noncritically applied to all sub-settings, thus enforcing undue or unjustified impositions
on contexts where those rules may be inapplicable or may impact performance or satisfaction
negatively. Again, in interpreting, this may happen when conference or court (where profes-
sionals tend to be expected to show a more detached professional conduct than in social or
educational settings) are taken as the archetypic settings; some ethical guidelines that may seem
unfit may be considered the norm against which all professionals are measured.
Conversely, ethical documents have been understood to have the power to protect the inter-
ests of translators and interpreters (Neumann Solow 1981; Turner and Best 2017; Davis 2010)
and also of those who speak through them (Hale 2007, 104; Camayd-Freixas 2009; Davis 2010)
as well as the professional community and the institution (Rudvin 2015). Some documents
are clear on the rule that members are not allowed to engage in work when the content that
is being conveyed is illicit or the activity that is taking place is illegal (McDonough Dolmaya
2011), although it has been pointed out that not all documents protect interpreters and users in
this way (Camayd-Freixas 2009).
4.2 Moral and professional autonomy

A notion that connects with oppression is that of autonomy. Do ethics codes for T&I reduce
or increase the decision-making capacity of professionals when faced with oppressive circum-
stances? This key concept may be explored from a moral (“does the code inspire or constrain
practitioners?”) and from a socioprofessional (“do codes empower or hamper the professional
community’s ability to set its own agenda?”) perspective.
Some critics in applied ethics question the use of codes of ethics on the grounds that they
limit moral autonomy because they aspire to provide close-ended answers rather than to for-
mulate open-ended questions (Luegenbiehl 1983; Ladd 1991). In TIS, the same type of moral
question comes up in statements like “ethics in translation has been inextricably linked to the
neutral repetition of the same” (Arrojo 2012, 5946). Although practitioners relying too much on
guidelines is a real danger, it has been found that ethical codes did not recommend this unques-
tioning approach to decision-making: “There seems to be no evidence to support the Codes’
prescription of a robotic or mechanical role for interpreters either” (Hale 2007, 114).
On the other hand, professional ethics documents have also been said to boost moral auton-
omy, as they assist translation or interpretation practitioners in considering the ethical dilemmas
arising from the translation or interpretation process and addressing such dilemmas appropriately
(Asiri 2016, 14–15; Drugan 2013, 111–112). This is consistent with what normative ethics
understands the function of ethics codes to be: to help practitioners reflect on their task (Suárez
Villegas 2001, 108). In our own review of existing documents, some texts clearly express that
documents are to be judiciously applied; for example, one code states, “members . . . will apply
the provisions of the Code to the judgements they make concerning their competence to carry
out work they are offered and the compatibility of that work with the General Principles of
Professional Conduct” (CIoL 2017). In other documents, this is an implicit assumption, and in
none of the texts we reviewed was there an explicit reference to a rigid application of the tenets.
Moral autonomy is also achieved by deepening the understanding of the constellation of
strategies, principles and duties practitioners are expected to engage in. A meta-ethical reflec-
tion on how moral norms may be prioritized has found that ethics codes often seem to organize
310
moral norms rather similarly. Ethics codes structures the system of norms hierarchically: the top
priority across mediums and modalities of practice is facilitating communication, which repre-
sents the internal Good of the profession, i.e., its exclusive contribution to social needs; a second
level is inhabited by the occupation’s external Goods, i.e. institutionally determined goals shared
with other practitioners (e.g. patient’s well-being in health care, equal access to proceedings in
judiciary contexts). At a third level we find three components: duties or principles (like “accu-
racy” or “impartiality”), actions or strategies to materialize those duties (“preserve meaning,”
“avoid taking sides”) and the goals or objectives (“to enable users to communicate accurately,”
“to enable users’ autonomy”) (Baixauli-Olmos 2012, 300–303).
But after all, the documents guiding T&I professional practice are only texts and need to be
autonomously applied by individual practitioners; they are to be applied with professional judg-
ment, which is based on knowledge gained through formal training, professional experience
or in socialization with colleagues. “Much more than the mere existence of a code of ethics is
needed in order to ensure quality of interpreting services” (Hale 2007) because “codes speak but
we decide” (Baixauli-Olmos 2014b).
4.3 Socio-professional autonomy

In the different sociological conceptualizations about professionalization processes, proclaiming
a set of ethical principles is invariably seen as a mostly positive fundamental component (Tseng
1992). Ethical codes may help the professional community increase their control over different
areas or dimensions of their jurisdiction: social, symbolic, cultural (Baixauli-Olmos 2017) and
economic (Lambert 2018).
In the social dimension, ethical guidelines are seen as an internally cohesive force that gen-
erates a sense of collective belonging and identity around a set of ethical principles and social
values. The document may also regulate the relationship among the different stakeholders, for
example by stipulating rights and duties. Still in the sense of socio-professional control, codes of
ethics and standards of practice may establish mechanisms for entry into the professional group,
periodic assessment of performance and exit from the group.
In terms of the cultural dimension, standards may also outline the basic competences and
qualifications. And knowledge about the ethical standards may even become, in turn, one more
component of the knowledge requirements for entry; in fact, access to some organizations like
AIIC requires that practitioners are assessed not only on their general language skills and language
transfer skills but also on their knowledge of the ethics codes of the professional association.
Ethics codes are also powerful tools externally as a symbol, because they “testify to the claim
that the group recognizes an obligation to society that transcends mere economic self-interest”
(Luegenbiehl 1983). Therefore it is useful to earn legitimacy (Arrojo 2012) and public trust
(Mikkelson 2000), thus elevating the status of the profession (Hale 2007, 104).
But in reality, the strength of the document is, at least partially, determined by the orga-
nization that proclaims it and the professionals who apply it. In a way, an ethics code and the
institution that proposes it are interdependent (Tseng 1992, 49; Hortal Alonso 2007, 202).
What makes an ethics code relevant is the context that makes an organization propose it and
the purposes of that institution when undertaking this task. In some cases, the establishment of
standards of practice and codes of ethics is considered a chief accomplishment of the professional
body (Boéri 2015, 30). If a professional organization is recognized and supported by govern-
mental institutions (Angelelli 2006, 190), the ability of the document to inform effective change
increases significantly. In this connection, professional associations express their vision and their
identity via codes of conduct. This is also shown in institutional struggles. Codes of ethics have
311
also reflected internal control struggles between bodies within the same professional jurisdic-
tions; an illustrative example may be found in the USA in the 1980s, when the Registry for the
Deaf and the National Association of the Deaf, after years of disagreements, led to the existence
of different codes of ethics for the two organizations (Boéri 2015, 36).
4.4 Descriptivism vs. prescriptivism in the study of T&I ethics codes

Descriptivist approaches to the study of translator and interpreter behaviour (i.e. observing
what they do) have shaped the field of TIS in significant ways. Description and prescription
exist in a relation of ideological or even moral tension; description is considered a useful mis-
sion of academic work, whereas prescription (i.e. stating what someone ought to do) is often
considered an attitude researchers should keep away from. However, the field of TIS has come
to embrace a more deontic or deontologic (i.e. relating to moral obligations) approach to profes-
sional behaviour, because “No longer can we shun the deontic as if it were mere prescriptive”
(Pym 2001, 137).
As mentioned earlier, some contributions disapprove of professional guidelines because they
portray an illusion, or because they are ambiguous, or incomplete, irrelevant or rigid. We pro-
pose these positions stem from an ideological rejection of prescription in line with post-modern
thought (Arrojo 2012) that is based on the assumption that the guidelines should reflect more
closely what happens in real life. But this approach may be put into question because it applies a
descriptivist frame of thought onto purely normative texts, which are, by definition, prescriptive.
At the same time, codes of ethics and standards are intended mainly for practitioners, espe-
cially those who may not have a deep understanding of ethical obligations, as they are just a
general introduction into basic rights, duties and ways of materializing them (Ozolins 2014,
359). This means that the more trained and experienced a T&I is, the more nuanced their ethi-
cal decision-making skills and the less central the guidelines become (Baixauli-Olmos 2014b).
In addition to this, it has been argued that professional norms should not be developed fol-
lowing “professional ideologies” that are based on prescription but rather “in accordance with
research and scientific evidence” (Angelelli 2006, 191), i.e. using scientific findings, around
ethics or role for instance, and compiled after collecting and analyzing data. This seems to
propose a dichotomy between research-based and ideology-based codes. This call for more
research-based codes is relevant, as many do not seem to be based on research, at least not
judging by the preambles and other meta-texts that typically remain silent, for example, about
their development process. However, these documents are situated in institutional and market
struggles and as a result they necessarily reflect ideologies, like any other document, especially
if of a prescriptive nature. Sanctioning a text like a code of conduct is a meta-ethical action
that happens against a backdrop of institutional situatedness; who dictates the text, what the
intended readership is, and when, where and for what reason it is published, are basic and
critical factors that will allow the observer to pinpoint specific socio-professional political or
ideological stances. Choices are made by the body that sanctions the text all along the way
from deciding to undertake the task of drafting a professional document, to deciding how
that process happens and funding it, to the decision to have the text translated or not, to the
final approval or modifications. At a more discursive level, professional ideologies are reflected
in the choice of principle names (accuracy vs. fidelity), the guidelines format (principle-
guideline vs. principle-purpose-guideline-example), the specific language used (shall do vs.
shall endeavour to do vs. does vs. intends to), and of course the role a practitioner plays in
the exchange (more vs. less agency and power; with attributes like power relations leveller vs.
communication facilitator).
312
T&I ethics codes reflect the socio-professional context in which they are developed and
therefore they reflect professional ideologies. It is arguable that a more transparent approach
regarding the prescriptive nature of ethics codes would enrich the discussion around these
documents.
5 Conclusion
Ethics codes in T&I have had a great impact on the profession, as they crystallize professional-
izing efforts across time and space. They adopt different shapes and forms and intend to fulfil
various goals by including specific contents. A common thread that connects all of them is
that they are inserted in a communicative, social and institutional context that determines their
nature and real implications.
A large part of the academic discussion has focused on stressing the right or wrong attributes
of ethical codes. As a critical assessment of the work done and their stance about the good or the
bad of codes of ethics, contributions focusing on the topic contain a rather balanced descriptive
view of these texts, whereas papers touching on the topic in passing offer a starkly positive or
negative perspective of them. It seems the debate would be greatly enriched by paying atten-
tion first to the who, the when or the how, and then, even more crucially, to the why and the
what for.
As a meta reflection about the role of ethics codes in T&I as a professional and academic
field, these documents are the subject of critical discussion. In turn this makes the research and
practitioner communities reflect upon professional rights, duties and the collective perception of
what good conduct is and its reflection on ethics codes, and how this perception changes over
time as a result of institutional, social, political or personal factors. Questioning the ethical status
of these codes is an important step to take for the profession (Lambert 2018, 283), because this
kind of critical evaluation of normative texts takes the discussion to a meta-ethical level and also
encourages moral autonomy.
Further avenues of research will open up as this subfield evolves. A natural expansion of the
knowledge developed in this area may come from broadening the methodological approaches to
the study of professional guidelines for translators and interpreters. Corpus-based studies would
focus on quantitatively exploring language (interpreter vs. interpreters; impartiality vs. conflict
of interest; shall, must, do, strive to do) and meta-language choices (canons, tenets, principles)
and their philosophical and ideological underpinnings. Studies of market impact (job descrip-
tions, working conditions, impact on quality of service) before and after the sanctioning of an
ethics code would help to deepen the understanding of economic factors derived from and
motivating the adoption of professional codes of ethics and standards of practice for T&Is. The
potential of ethics codes in the teaching of translators and interpreters is also under-researched
and worth exploring further.
Although we have tried to demonstrate the breadth of topics scholars have touched upon
when discussing ethics codes, there are numerous areas of interest that have not received consid-
erable attention. This would include, for example, exploring how the professional role of transla-
tors and interpreters, which has been a central point of scholarly attention in TIS, is depicted in
ethics codes; or whether professional norms address the use of technology, and how it modifies
behaviour and whether there are limits to its use; and building on previous efforts, mapping
settings and domains that pose particular moral challenges, like the military (Lipkin 2008) or
prisons (Valero-Garcés 2017), or where existing guidelines seem inapplicable or pose unresolved
dilemmas. In this vein, a reflection that is still relevant, although covered at length, has to do
with the recognition that interpreters’ and translators’ personal morals sometimes conflict with
313
professional obligations (Camayd-Freixas 2009; Morris 2010). Some calls for more guidance
to resolve dilemmas have been made, for example via exemplified applications of the codes (in
an appendix, for example) or trainings to develop professional judgement and decision-making
skills (Mikkelson 2016, 83).

Virtue ethics in translation; functional translation theories and ethics; ethics of volunteering in
translation and interpreting; ethics of activist translation and interpreting; translation and post-
humanism; linguistic first aid.
References
AIIC Executive Committee. 2018. “The Principle of Confidentiality for Professional Interpreters.” Aiic.net,
July 19. Accessed April 14, 2020. http://aiic.net/p/8618
Angelelli, Claudia V. 2006. “Validating Professional Standards and Codes: Challenges and Opportunities.”
Interpreting 8, no. 2: 175–93. https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.8.2.04ang
Angelelli, Claudia V., Niels Agger-Gupta, Carola E. Green, and Linda Okahara. 2007. “The Califor-
nia Standards for Healthcare Interpreters: Ethical Principles, Protocols and Guidance on Role and
Intervention.” In The Critical Link 4, edited by Cecilia Wadensjö, Birgitta Englund Dimitrova, and
Anna-Lena Nilsson, 167–77. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.70.19ang
Arrojo, Rosemary. 2012. “Translators’ Code of Ethics.” In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. New
Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
Asiri, Eisa Ahmad S. 2016. “Developing a Code of Ethics for Professional Translation in Saudi Arabia: A
Survey of Translators’ Perceptions.” MA thesis, Macquarie University, Sydney.
Baixauli-Olmos, Lluís. 2012. La interpretació als serveis públics des d’una perspectiva ética: La deontologia professional i
l’aplicació al context penitenciari. Universitat Jaume I. http://repositori.uji.es/xmlui/handle/10234/74752
Baixauli-Olmos, Lluís. 2014a. “Redescubriendo Los Códigos de Conducta Para La ISP Médica: Cultura,
Dilemas y Papel Profesional.” Panace@: Revista de Medicina, Lenguaje y Traducción 16, no. 39.
Baixauli-Olmos, Lluís. 2014b. “Los Códigos Hablan, Pero Nosotros Decidimos. Aportaciones a La Práctica
de La MILICS Desde La Deontología Profesional.” In La Practica de La Mediación Interlingüística e Inter-
cultural En El Ámbito Sanitario, edited by Grupo CRIT, 13–49. Málaga: Comares.
Baixauli-Olmos, Lluis. 2017. “Ethics Codes as Tools for Change in Public Service Interpreting: Symbolic,
Social and Cultural Dimensions.” Journal of Specialised Translation, no. 28: 250–72.
Bancroft, Marjory. 2005. The Interpreter’s World Tour: An Environmental Scan. Los Angeles: The California
Endowment.
Bell, Sherrill J. 1997. “The Challenges of Setting and Monitoring the Standards of Community Interpret-
ing.” In The Critical Link: Interpreters in the Community, edited by Silvana E. Carr, Roda P. Roberts,
Aideen Dufour, and Dini Steyn, 93–108. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://
doi.org/10.1075/btl.19.12bel
Boéri, Julie. 2015. “Key Internal Players in the Development of the Interpreting Profession.” In The
Routledge Handbook of Interpreting, edited by Renée Jourdenais, and Holly Mikkelson. https://doi.
org/10.4324/9781315745381.ch2
Camayd-Freixas, Erik. 2009. “Interpreting after the Largest ICE Raid in U.S. History: A Personal Account.”
In Behind Bars: Latino/as and Prison in the United States. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101470
Interpreting in a Changing Landscape: Proceedings of the 6th International Critical Link Conference, edited by
Christina Schäffner, Krzyizstof Kredens, and Yvonne Fowler. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Ben-
jamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.109.04cam
Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions. n.d. “Why Ethics Codes?” Accessed April 19, 2019.
http://ethics.iit.edu/ecodes/introduction
Chesterman, Andrew. 2000. “On Similarity.” Target 8, no. 1: 159–64. https://doi.org/10.1075/target.
8.1.10che
doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2001.10799097
314
Cokely, Dennis. 2000. “Exploring Ethics: A Case for Revising the Code of Ethics.” Matlock: Direct Learn.
Accessed April 8, 2019. www.directlearn.co.uk/conference/materials/ethics_keynote.pdf
Corsellis, Ann, and Leandro Félix Fernández. 1999. “Code of Ethics and Conduct and Guidelines to Good
Practice.” In Aequitas: Access to Justice across Language and Culture in the EU, edited by Erik Hertog. Ant-
werp: Lessius Hogeschool. https://eulita.eu/wp/wp-content/uploads/files/Aequitas_Acces%20to%20
Justice%20across%20Language%20and%20Culture%20in%20the%20EU.pdf
Cortina-Orts, Adela. 2003. “El quehacer público de las éticas aplicadAs: ética cívica transnacional.” In
Razón pública y éticas aplicades: Las caminos de la razón prÁctica en una Sociedad pluralista, edited by Adela
Cortina-Orts, and Domingo García-Marzá, 13–44. Madrid: Tecnos.
Davis, Michael. 2010. “Thinking Like an Engineer: The Place of a Code of Ethics in the Practice of a
Profession Most Discussions of Engineering Ethics Dismiss the Idea of Codes of Ethics.” Philosophy and
Public Affairs 20, no. 2: 150–67.
tice Apply to Non-Professionally Produced Translation?” Linguistica Antverpiensia 10, no. 1: 111–27.
Encylopaedia Britannica, the Editors of. 2016. “Normative Ethics.” In Encyclopædia Britannica. www.britan-
nica.com/topic/normative-ethics
FIT [Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs]. n.d. “FIT Timeline.” Accessed April 20, 2019. www.
fit-ift.org/fit-timeline/
Giambruno, Cynthia. 2008. “The Role of the Interpreter in the Governance of Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Century Spanish Colonies in the “New World”: Lessons from the Past for the Present.” In Crossing
Borders in Community Interpreting: Definitions and Dilemmas, edited by Carmen Valero-Garcés, and Anne
Martin, 27–49. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.76.03gia
Hale, Sandra Beatriz. 1996. “Pragmatic Considerations in Court Interpreting.” Australian Review of Applied
Linguistics 19, no. 1: 61–72.
Hale, Sandra Beatriz. 2007. “Analysing the Interpreter’s Code of Ethics.” In Community Interpreting, 101–36.
London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593442_4
Harris, Charles E. Jr., Michael J. Rabins, and Michael S. Pritchard. 1995. Engineering Ethics: Concepts and
Cases. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing.
Hebenstreit, Gernot, Alexandra Marics, and Jim Hlavac. 2017. “Unit 5: Professional Ethics and Professional
Conduct.” In Handbook for Interpreters in Asylum Procedures, edited by Austria UNHCR, 70–84. Vienna:
UNHCR Austria. www.unhcr.org/dach/at/trainingshandbuch
Hortal Alonso, Augusto. 2007. Ética profesional de traductores e intérpretes. Bilbao: Desclée de Brouwer.
Hursthouse, Rosalind, and Glen Pettigrov. 2016. “Virtue Ethics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/ethics-virtue/
InBox Translations. n.d. “Professional Associations of Translators and Interpreters Around the World.”
https://inboxtranslation.com/resources/professional-associations-translators-interpreters/
ISO [International Organization for Standardization]. n.d. “How We Develop Standards.” Accessed April
20, 2019. www.iso.org/developing-standards.html
Kaufert, J.M., and R.W. Putsch. 1997. “Communication Through Interpreters in Healthcare: Ethical
Dilemmas Arising from Differences in Class, Culture, Language, and Power.” The Journal of Clinical
Ethics 8, no. 1: 71–87.
Ko, L. 2006. “Fine-Tuning the Code of Ethics for Interpreters and Translators.” Translation Watch Quarterly
2, no. 3.
Ladd, John. 1991. “The Quest for a Code of Professional Ethics: An Intellectual and Moral Confu-
sion.” In Ethical Issues in Engineering, edited by Deborah G. Johnson, 130–6. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.
tions.” Journal of Specialised Translation 30, no. 30: 269–90.
Lank, Steve. 2000. “ASTM Standard for Language Translation.” Journal of Specialised Translation 4, no. 1.
https://translationjournal.net/journal/11astm.htm
Lipkin, Shira L. 2008. “Norms, Ethics and Roles among Military Court Interpreters: The Unique Case of
the Yehuda Court.” Interpreting 10, no. 1: 84–98. https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.10.1.06lip
Lobato Patricio, Julia. 2007. “Aspectos deontológicos y profesionales de la traducción jurídica, jurada y
judicial.” PhD diss., Universidad de Málaga, Málaga.
Lozano Aguilar, José Félix. 1997. “La Ética En La Dirección Empresarial: Participación y Responsabilidad.”
In Rentabilidad de La Ética Para La Empresa, edited by Adela Cortina, 88–103. Madrid: Argentaria/Visor.
Lozano Aguilar, José Félix. 2004. Códigos éticos para el mundo empresarial. Madrid: Editorial Trotta.
315
Luegenbiehl, Heinz C. 1983. “Codes of Ethics and the Moral Education of Engineers.” Business and Profes-
sional Ethics Journal 2, no. 4: 41–61. www.jstor.org/stable/27799806
Mairs, R. 2011. “‘Translator, Traditor’: The Interpreter as Traitor in Classical Tradition.” Greece & Rome
58, no. 1: 64–81. www.jstor.org.dcuidm.ocic.org/stable/41306148
McDonough Dolmaya, Julie. 2011. “Moral Ambiguity: Some Shortcomings of Professional Codes of Eth-
ics for Translators.” The Journal of Specialised Translation, no. 15: 28–49.
Mikkelson, Holly. 2000. “Interpreter Ethics: A Review of the Traditional and Electronic Literature.” Inter-
preting 5, no. 1: 49–56. https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.5.1.05mik
Mikkelson, Holly. 2016. “The Code of Ethics.” In Introduction to Court Interpreting, 75–96. SAGE Publica-
tions. https://doi.org/10.1177/203228441100200410
Miller, Greg. 2019. “Trump Has Concealed Details of His Face-to-Face Encounters with Putin from
Senior Officials in Administration.” The Washington Post, January 13. Accessed April 14, 2020.
www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-has-concealed-details-of-his-face-to-
face-encounters-with-putin-from-senior-officials-in-administration/2019/01/12/65f6686c-1434-
11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html
Morris, Ruth. 2010. “Images of the Court Interpreter: Professional Identity, Role Definition and Self-
image.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 5, no 1: 20–40. https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.5.1.02mor
Multilanguages Corporation. 2017. “Code of Ethics: Interpreters.” https://multi-languages.com/
interpretations-shtml/interpreters_ethics-shtml/
Neumann Solow, S. 1981. Sign Language Interpreting: A Basic Resource Book. Silver Spring, MD: National
Association of the Deaf.
ORDEN de 23 de agosto de 1999 por la que se desarrolla el Real Decreto 1665/1991, de 25 de octubre,
en lo que afecta a la profesión de Intérprete Jurado. 1999. Spain: Ministry of the Presidency. www.boe.
es/boe/dias/1999/08/27/pdfs/A31768-31771.pdf
Ozolins, Uldis. 2014. “Rewriting the AUSIT Code of Ethics: Principles, Practice, Dispute.” Babel 60,
no. 3: 347–70. https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.60.3.05ozu
Phelan, Mary. 2019. “Codes of Ethics.” In Ethics in Public Service Interpreting, edited by Mary Phelan, Mette
Rudvin, Hanne Skaaden, and Patrick Kermit. London: Routledge.
Pöchhacker, Franz. 2004. Introducing Interpreting Studies. London, New York: Routledge.
Pym, Anthony. 2001. “Introduction.” In “The Return to Ethics in Translation Studies.” Special issue of
The Translator 7, no. 2, edited by Anthony Pym, 129–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2001.1
0799096
Riddick, Frank A. 2003. “The Code of Medical Ethics of the American Medical Association.” The Ochsner
Journal 5, no. 2: 6–10. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22826677
Rudvin, Mette. 2007. “Professionalism and Ethics in Community Interpreting: The Impact of Individualist
Versus Collective Group Identity.” Interpreting 9, no. 1: 47–69. https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.9.1.04rud
Rudvin, Mette. 2015. “Etica, filosofia e mediazione lingüística: Sall’etica della filosofia al codice deon-
tologico della mediazione linguistica.” Lingue e Linguaggi, no. 16: 393–412. https://doi.org/10.1285/
i22390359v16p393
Salimbene, Franklyn P. 1997. “Court Interpreters: Standards of Practice and Standards for Training.” Cornell
Journal of Law and Public Policy 6, no. 3, Article 3. http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cjlpp/vol6/iss3/3
Schwartz, Mark. 2001. “The Nature of the Relationship between Corporate Codes of Ethics and Behav-
iour.” Journal of Business Ethics 32: 247–62.
Schweda-Nicholson, Nancy. 1994. “Professional Ethics for Court and Community Interpreters.” In
Professional Issues for Translators and Interpreters, edited by Deanna L. Hammond, 79–98. Amsterdam,
Philadelphia: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/ata.vii.10sch
Singer, Peter. 2019. “Ethics.” In Encyclopædia Britannica. www.britannica.com/topic/ethics-philosophy
Springer, Rafał. 2009. “The Role(s) of a Community Interpreter versus Professional Standards and Ethics.”
MA thesis, University of Warsaw, Warsaw.
Stern, Ludmila. 2011. “Courtroom Interpreting.” In The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by
Kirsten Malmkjær, and Kevin Windle. Great Britain: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/
oxfordhb/9780199239306.013.0023
Stevens, Betsy. 1994. “An Analysis of Corporate Ethical Code Studies: Where Do We Go from Here?”
Journal of Business Ethics 13, no. 1: 63–139.
Suárez Villegas, Juan Carlos. 2001. Principios de ética profesional. Madrid: Tecnos.
Tseng, Joseph. 1992. “Interpreting as an Emerging Profession in Taiwan: A Sociological Model.” MA
thesis, Fu Jen Catholic University, New Taipei City, Taiwan.
316
Turner, Graham H. 2007. “Professionalisation of Interpreting with the Community: Refining the Model.”
In The Critical Link 4, edited by Cecilia Wadensjö, Birgitta Englund Dimitrova, and Anna-Lena Nilsson,
181–92. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.70.21tur
Turner, Graham, and Brett Best. 2017. “On Motivational Ethical Norms: From Defensive Interpreting to
Effective Professional Practices.” In The Changing Role of the Interpreter: Contextualising Norms, Ethics and
Quality Standards, edited by M. Biagini, M.S. Boyd, and C. Monacelli. London: Routledge.
UNESCO. “Recommendation on the Legal Protection of Translators and Translations and the Practical
Means to Improve the Status of Translators, adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO at its nine-
teenth session, Nairobi, 26 October to 30 November 1976.” https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/
pf0000138157?posInSet=3&queryId=N-EXPLORE-71dbf1e9-31ac-4801-9064-8d62c8ee2652
Valero-Garcés, Carmen. 2017. “Ethical Codes and Their Impact on Prison Communication.” In Ideology,
Ethics and Policy Development in Public Service Interpreting and Translation, edited by Carmen Valero-Garces,
and Rebecca Tipton, 105–30. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Wittmann, Stephan. 1995. Ethik-Kodex Und Ethik-Kommission: Ansätze Zur Institutionalisierung von Unterne-
hmensethik. Beiträge Und Berichte, Nr. 69. St. Gallen: Institut für Wirtschaftsethik. T&I Ethics.
Further reading
Phelan, Mary. 2019. “Codes of Ethics.” In Ethics in Public Service Interpreting, edited by Mary Phelan, Mette
Rudvin, Hanne Skaaden, and Patrick Kermit. London: Routledge.
This chapter covers codes of ethics in public service interpreting, including codes published by associa-
tions and companies, their contents and how the principles may be applied in real-life examples. This
contribution explores some of the most hotly debated topics in public service interpreting ethics, like
advocacy and intercultural mediation.
Hale, Sandra Beatriz. 2007. “Analysing the Interpreter’s Code of Ethics.” In Community Interpreting, 101–36.
London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593442_4
This chapter analyses 16 codes of ethics, compares notions like “accuracy,” “impartiality” and “role,” and
discusses views in favour and against the code of ethics.
Ozolins, Uldis. 2014. “Rewriting the AUSIT Code of Ethics: Principles, Practice, Dispute.” Babel 60,
no. 3: 347–70. https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.60.3.05ozu
This article reflects upon the process of rewriting the AUSIT Code of Ethics, including a look at other
territories, traditions and contents. Actual drafts from the code rewrite are discussed in light of the
concerns raised and relevant scholarly contributions on the topic.
Baixauli-Olmos, Lluis. 2017. “Ethics Codes as Tools for Change in Public Service Interpreting: Symbolic,
Social and Cultural Dimensions.” Journal of Specialised Translation, no. 28: 250–72.
This article stresses the potentially transformative power of ethics codes by analysing seven standards of
practice for public service interpreters. This contribution includes an outline of the contents of these
texts and discusses how those contents operate in the social, cultural and symbolic dimensions.
Bancroft, Marjory. 2005. The Interpreter’s World Tour: An Environmental Scan of Standards of Practice for Inter-
preters. Los Angeles: The California Endowment.
This report looks at codes of ethics and standards of practice for interpreters around the world. It
contrasts nations, interpreting mediums, text types and domains. This work also identifies areas of
consensus, difference and dissent in broad and also very specific terms.
Codes references
Due to space limitations, it is not possible to include a thorough list of the ethics codes for
T&Is that were reviewed during the preparation of this chapter. The ones that are referenced
in the text appear in the following list. Other lists of documents may be found in the following
publications: Bancroft (2005), Hale (2007), Lobato Patricio (2007), Mikkelson (2016), Ozolins
317
(2014); and by visiting professional associations’ websites. (A compilation of T&I professional

associations sites may be found in InBox Translation [n.d.].)
AATI [Asociación Argentina de Traductores e Intérpretes]. 2018. “Código de Ética.” www.aati.org.ar/
es/aati
AIIC [International Association of Conference Interpreters]. 2015. “Professional Standards: Version 2015.”
https://aiic.net/page/6746
AIIC [International Association of Conference Interpreters]. 2018. “Code of Professional Ethics: Version
2018.” https://aiic.net/page/6724/code-of-professional-ethics-2018-version/lang/1
APTIJ [Asociación Profesional de Traductores e Intérpretes Judiciales y Jurados]. 2010. “Code of Ethics for
Court and Sworn Interpreters and Translators.” www.aptij.es/img/doc/CD%20APTIJ.pdf
ASETRAD [Asociación Española de Traductores, Correctores e Intérpretes]. n.d. “Código Deontológico.”
Accessed April 20, 2019. https://asetrad.org/la-asociacion/codigo-deontologico
ASTM [ASTM International]. 2001, 2007, 2015. ASTM F2089: Standard Practice for Language Interpreting.
West Conshohocken, PA: ASTM International. www.astm.org/Standards/F2089.htm
ATA [American Translators Association]. 2010. “American Translators Association Code of Ethics and
Professional Practice.” www.atanet.org/governance/code_of_ethics.php
ATIA [Association of Translators and Interpreters of Alberta]. 2015. “Code of Ethics.” www.atia.ab.ca/
about/code-of-ethics
ATRAE [Asociación de Traducción y Adaptación Audiovisual de España]. n.d. “Código deontológico.”
Accessed October 9 2019. http://atrae.org/codigo-deontologico/
AUSIT [Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators]. 1995, 2012. “AUSIT Code of Ethics and Code
of Conduct.” https://ausit.org/AUSIT/Documents/Code_Of_Ethics_Full.pdf
CEATL [Conseil Européen des Associations de Traducteurs Littéraires]. 2011. “Hexalogue or Code of
Good Practice.” www.ceatl.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CEATL-HEXALOGUE-EN.pdf
CHIA [California Healthcare Interpreting Association]. 2002. “California Standards for Healthcare Inter-
preters Ethical Principles, Protocols, and Guidance on Roles and Intervention.” 2002. www.chiaonline.
org/resources/Pictures/CHIA_standards_manual_%20March%202017.pdf
CIoL [Chartered Institute of Linguists]. 2017. “Code of Professional Conduct.” www.ciol.org.uk/sites/
default/files/Code_5.pdf
EULITA [European Association for Legal Interpreters and Translators]. 2013. “EULITA Code of Profes-
sional Ethics.” https://eulita.eu/wp/wp-content/uploads/files/EULITA-code-London-e.pdf
FIT [Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs]. 1963, 1994. “Translator’s Charter.” www.fit-ift.org/
translators-charter/
HIN [Healthcare Interpretation Network]. 2007. “National Standard Guide for Community Interpret-
ing Services.” https://criticallink.org/s/National_Standard_Guide_for_Community_Interpreting_
Servicesv3_new_format_Sep_2011-7fis.pdf
IMIA [International Medical Interpreters Association]. 2007. “Medical Interpreting Standards of Practice.”
www.imiaweb.org/standards/standards
MICT [Mechanisms for International Criminal Tribunals]. 2017. “Code of Ethics for Interpreters and
Translators Employed by the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals.” www.irmct.org/sites/
default/files/documents/171102-mict-20-code-of-ethics-for-interpreters-translators.pdf
ISO [International Organization for Standardization]. 2014. Interpreting: Guidelines for Community Interpret-
ing. ISO 13611:2014. www.iso.org/standard/54082.html
ISO [International Organization for Standardization]. 2015. Translation Services: Requirements for Translation
Services. ISO 17100:2015. www.iso.org/standard/59149.html
ISO [International Organization for Standardization]. 2018. Interpreting Services: General Requirements and
Recommendations. ISO 18841:2018. www.iso.org/standard/63544.html
ISO [International Organization for Standardization]. 2019. Interpreting Services: Legal Interpreting: Require-
ments. ISO 20228:2019. www.iso.org/standard/67327.html
ITI [Institute of Translation and Interpreting]. 2013. “Code of Professional Conduct.” www.iti.org.uk/
attachments/article/154/Code%20of%20professional%20conduct%2008%2009%202013_Final.pdf
JTA [Japan Translation Association]. n.d. “Code of Ethics for Translators.” Accessed April 21, 2019. www.
jta-net.or.jp/english/code_of_ethics_for_translators.html
Kammarkollegiet (The Swedish Legal Financial and Administrative Services Agency) God tolksed –
Vägledning for auktoriserade tolkar (Guidance for Good Practice for Certified Interpreters). 1996. Stock-
holm: The Legal Financial and Administrative Services Agency and C E Fritzes AB.
318
Kammarkollegiet (The Swedish Legal Financial and Administrative Services Agency). 2019. God tolksed:
Kammarkollegiets råd till auktoriserade tolkar. www.kammarkollegiet.se/download/18.27f1fe4c168c1d817
515205f/1551777027993/God_tolksed_mars2019.pdf
Minnesota Department of Education. 2014. “Code of Ethics and Standards of Practice for Education and
Special Education Interpreters of Spoken Languages.” https://umtia.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/
Code-of-Ethics-Standards-of-Practice-for-Educational-Interpreters-of-Spoken-Languages.pdf
Multilanguages Corporation. 2017. “Code of Ethics: Interpreters.” https://multi-languages.com/
interpretations-shtml/interpreters_ethics-shtml/
NAJIT [National Association of Judiciary Interpreters & Translators]. n.d. “Code of Ethics and Professional
Responsibilities.” Accessed April 21, 2019. https://najit.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/NAJIT-
CodeofEthicsFINAL.pdf
NCIHC [National Council on Interpreting in Health Care]. 2004. “A National Code of Ethics Inter-
preters in Health Care.” www.ncihc.org/assets/documents/publications/NCIHC%20National%20
Code%20of%20Ethics.pdf
NCIHC [National Council on Interpreting in Health Care]. 2005. “National Standards of Practice for
Interpreters in Health Care.” www.ncihc.org/assets/documents/publications/NCIHC National Stan-
dards of Practice.pdf
NRPSI [National Register of Public Service Interpreters]. 1995, 2016. “NRPSI Code of Professional
Conduct.” www.nrpsi.org.uk/for-clients-of-interpreters/code-of-professional-conduct.html
RID [Register of Interpreters for the Deaf]. 1963, 2005. “Code of Professional Conduct.” www.rid.org/
ethics/code/index.cfm
SFT [Société française des traducteurs]. n.d. “Le Code de déontologie général des adhérents de la SFT.”
www.sft.fr/code-de-deontologie-des-traducteurs-et-interpretes.html
URTI [Union of Russian translators and interpreters]. 2014. “The Language Professional’s Code of Ethics.”
http://translation-ethics.ru/code_en/
319
21
Ethics in the translation industry
1 Introduction
This chapter considers ethical aspects related to the contemporary translation industry, about
which little, to our knowledge, has previously been written to date. Many publications con-
cerning ethics in translation have theorised on whether the translator should be constrained
by fidelity to the source text or should be permitted to refuse to translate material that they
consider unethical (Chesterman 1997; Van Wyke 2012), or on how translators negotiate a
liminal space between cultures (Pym 2012) without consideration of the ethical issues related
to the translation industry and the way it relates to its main stakeholders. Exceptions include
work by Tymoczko (2007) and Abdallah (2010) on asymmetries of power and Drugan’s (2017)
consideration of social responsibility and responsibility to clients, which harks back to a discus-
sion of ethical dimensions of functionalism by Nord (1997) and the need to balance fidelity to
the source, target, and facilitation of intercultural communication. In this chapter, we focus on
ethical concerns experienced by (and directed at) different stakeholders in the translation indus-
try at various levels in translation production. These stakeholders’ responsibilities and priorities
may differ depending on the organisation’s size, geographical location, and length of experience
of the actors, and this in turn will affect the level of trust in the interrelationships (Pym 2004).
These factors have been heavily influenced by globalisation, a process enabled by translation and
that influences the increasingly distributed production networks that carry out translation work
(Cronin 2012). The work of Abdallah (2010, 2014) has been particularly important in establish-
ing the tensions, loyalties, and disparate levels of agency within a translation production network.
Relationships within these production networks are highly transactional and subject to the
competing imperatives of time, cost, and quality. In recent years, the agents involved at different
levels in the translation industry have been constantly and increasingly adapting the way they
work and communicate with each other in light of the massive introduction of technology
throughout different stages of the translation process: indeed, automation does not concern
solely the translation itself, but also project management processes and the platforms devoted to
the interaction between translators, companies, and clients.
Given the complexity of translation networks and the multi-level engagement of differ-
ent actors, the chapter is articulated as follows: we first review the historical trajectory of the
320
translation industry, highlighting how the perception of its social responsibilities has evolved in
recent decades, as is the case in many other industries. The following section introduces relevant
ethical issues specific to the translation industry, structuring them according to the ethical chal-
lenges experienced by its different stakeholders. Finally, the last section emphasises two emerging
ethical issues relating to the translation industry: environmental sustainability, and the challenge
of AI-based systems. The chapter shows that the translation industry, while sharing many of
the ethical issues of any other sector, needs to be sustained by the development of an ethical
reflection which is specific to the multifaceted reality of this rapidly changing and global sector.
2 A short history of ethics in the translation industry

This section places the growth of the translation industry in historical context. Globalisation
was made possible by technological advances and by the neoliberal consensus since the 1970s,
breaking down international trade tariffs. Translation was a key factor in facilitating globali-
sation, and its growth in the neoliberal era has influenced the key responsibility of language
service providers (LSPs): to be profitable. Although the first LSPs appeared in the 1990s as part
of a burgeoning translation and localisation industry (O’Hagan 1996), the almost exclusive
profit-orientation was in line with the 1970s business mantra that “the social responsibility
of business is to increase its profits” (Friedman 1970, 122). This in turn influenced translation
employment conditions to the extent that by 2012 freelance and contingent work practices
had long overtaken that of standard employment (Pym, Grin, Sfreddo, and Chan 2012). The
profit motive is limited by the law, and Carroll (1991) suggests that ethical responsibilities also
need to be fulfilled, obliging the company to behave fairly and to avoid harm. Interest in these
ethical responsibilities, and in business ethics as a field, has grown since the 1980s, calling
for management to “respect the rights of employees, consumers, and society in general” (De
George 2014, 502).
The literature on the social responsibilities of business evolved by extending the boundar-
ies of companies’ social engagement far beyond the satisfaction of their shareholders: since the
publication of Freeman’s stakeholder approach to strategic management (1984), any industry –
including the translation industry – needs to face a new paradigm and to take into account the
existence of different parties who can influence or are affected by the way a company sets and
achieves its purpose.
As Drugan (2018) reports, from the 1990s a growing number of professional bodies and
associations for translators were established, putting effort into creating codes of ethics for those
working in this field. Around this time, translation and localisation research contributed work
reflecting on their respective industries (e.g. O’Hagan 1996; Esselink 2000), although ethical
reflection has been infrequent in Translation Studies, and appears to be a low priority in the
translation industry.
Technological advances have meant that communication is increasingly digital, with more
content now being created than is possible for humans to translate (Reinsel, Gantz, and Rydning
2018). The move to digital texts has affected translators’ agency and ownership of resources,
databases, and translations produced (Troussel and Debussche 2014). At the time of writing,
there are a number of coexisting modes of work and value models within the translation indus-
try. While it is estimated that 70%–80% of translators work full- or part-time on a freelance
basis as part of what is known as the “vendor model” of translation (Moorkens 2017), many
still work as in-house translators, or translate as part of their role as what Pym et al. (2012) call
paraprofessional translators. Institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations
were considered particularly stable translation employers, but even the European Commission’s
321
Directorate General for Translation increasingly outsource work to the less-stable translation
marketplace (Moorkens 2017).
If a translation employer’s value proposition is based on lowering cost, this will mean that they
necessarily have a highly transactional relationship with their translators, usually choosing the
cheapest possible option. Bowker (2019, 459) has discussed the interrelated constraints of cost,
time, and quality within a translation project, one of which will “typically be compromised to
some degree.” Pym (2012), in particular, has considered this in his writing on translation eth-
ics, noting that an employer may consider it worthwhile to compromise on quality while still
producing a fit-for-purpose translation, moving any added cost in deciphering the text to the
end user; or the purpose may require a high-quality publishable text. In the latter case, there is
a greater trust relationship inherent in the reliance of the client on the translator to produce a
text that is consistently readable, accurate, and error-free (146).
The push to reduce the cost of translation on the part of some employers involves retention
of translation copyright ownership without payment for reuse, and maximising leverage using
machine translation (MT).1 Issues of ownership and copyright have long been part of translation
ethics discussions (Venuti 1998), more recently with regard to reuse of translations for purposes
that may not have been envisaged by the translator such as in training MT systems (Kenny 2011).
The use of MT in the translation industry appears to be growing since the advent of neural
MT, and Moorkens and Lewis (2019b) argue that widespread data dispossession and unilateral
imposition of MT post-editing with related discounts may threaten the long-term sustainability
of the translation industry in two ways: firstly, in assuming that the ongoing reuse of data for
which there can be several conflicting copyright claims can continue indefinitely, and secondly,
by employing work practices that may discourage current and future translators. This is discussed
further in section 3.
With regard to the future of the translation industry, this sector has been ahead of most others
in terms of casualisation, globalisation, and digitalisation. While in other industries this has led
to decreased employment, with technology gradually replacing some of the tasks that human
beings used to perform, the headline figures in the translation industry seem to be less affected.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2019), for example, estimates that the number of transla-
tors and interpreters employed in the USA will increase by 19% in the decade 2018–2028, a
growth rate beyond the predictions for many other industries. Practitioners in the field, such as
Rechtman (2018), propose some reasons why artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems will not
be able to replace human translators, citing subjectivity of language, artificial systems’ lack of
sense of humour, and automatic speech recognition technology’s inability to follow and translate
real-time speech.
In light of this historical review, the next section illustrates how one might perform an ethical
analysis of the translation industry and which specific ethical considerations need to be taken
into account.
3 Ethics and the translation industry: reviewing

ethical considerations
Conducting an ethical analysis of an industry requires one to consider the purpose of this
industry and whether the day-to-day company operations are aligned with or drift from
its purpose. According to Melé (2019), there are different ways of looking at the purpose
of a company: (a) it can be oriented to the mere satisfaction of shareholders’ interests
(shareholder approach); (b) it can enlarge its purpose taking into account the existence of
different agents having interests in the activity of that company (stakeholder approach);
322
(c) it can aim at contributing to the common good of society (common good approach). A
translation company setting its mission in line with the stakeholder or the common good
approach does not, of course, ignore the interest of shareholders. However, going beyond the
mere generation of profit helps with viewing the company as a community of people work-
ing together for a common purpose rather than a set of contracts that need to be respected.
It is interesting to explore the connection between the purpose of a company and ethics:
ethics can be defined as a guide for human excellence, and business ethics as a guide for
human excellence in business organisations (Melé 2019). In light of this definition, which
is shaped around an Aristotelian conception of ethics, people achieve excellence when they
are able to express their full potential as human beings, flourishing qua human beings; and a
business achieves excellence when, through its activity, it contributes to the good of society.
Any company operating in the translation industry enhances society by allowing people to
understand each other and to extend the use of goods and services to populations where
these goods and services would not be able to circulate without a common language used
between the provider of the good or service and different intermediaries or the final users.
The literature on ethical issues experienced in the translation industry tends to revolve
around the different actors who have an interest in the activity of the company rather than on
the overall contribution of the translation industry to the good of society. For this reason, this
section reviews existing literature related to different stakeholders of a translation company, and
it concludes by highlighting possible paths to engage in a “common good” approach to the
purpose of the translation industry.
A company operating in this sector may focus on one or many language pairs and usu-
ally has a centralised management structure to interact – usually virtually within a project-
specific network (Risku, Rossmanith, Reichelt, and Zenk 2013) – with a multitude of
clients and translators, functioning as a channel between those who request the service and
those who offer it. This means that a company in the translation industry has many stake-
holders, whose identification would help to methodically assess the ethical issues that the
industry faces.
Freeman (2010) defines a stakeholder in an organisation as “any group or individual who can
affect or is affected by the achievement of the organisation’s objectives” (46). For the scope of this
chapter, the most relevant stakeholders of a typical translation production network are taken into
consideration. We do not explicitly mention some stakeholders who are typical of a company in
any industry (such as people working in accounting or human resources) and restrict discussion
to the stakeholders particular to the translation industry. Figure 21.1 visually describes internal
and external stakeholders connected to an LSP.
The LSP stands at the centre, originating and connecting the network of internal and exter-
nal stakeholders. Internally, owners, project managers, and in-house translators have interests
in the activity of the LSP (together with other employees typical of any industry). Language
software developers, freelance translators, clients, end users, and society are the external stake-
holders of an LSP. The presence of society at large as an external stakeholder opens up the
possibility of looking at the industry’s contribution to the good of society, as we shall highlight
in section 4.
The following five sub-sections cover different aspects involving LSP stakeholders: (i) the
asymmetric relationship between translators and their employers, considering how that might
affect the end user, (ii) how this results in unequal ownership of resources, (iii) the importance
of sustaining translation as an attractive career option for translators and for society, (iv) resources
for translators’ ethical training, and (v) the importance of trust and accountability, drawing
mostly on literature from outside Translation Studies.
323
Figure 21.1 Internal and external stakeholders in a typical translation production network
3.1 Disparities of power

At one end of a translation production network is the translator, usually freelance, who provides
a service to the translation buyer that conforms to quality expectations, respecting the source
text, the translation brief (if provided), and target-language reader requirements. The tendency
towards freelance work in the translation industry has made translators reliant on ethical behav-
iour on the part of their employers due to the disparity in power inherent between organisa-
tions of different sizes. Outsourcing saves an employer the costs of statutory requirements such
as holiday or sick leave, training, as well as office costs such as light, heat, hardware, software,
324
desks, seating, and office space (Campbell, Watson, and Buchanan 2004). Freelance translators
are particularly vulnerable when they deal exclusively with a single translation agency, a situation
known as bogus self-employment. As such, they have little recourse if employers act in bad faith.
Berardi (2015) highlighted the difficulty of collective action among distributed digital workers,
although some groups have self-organised successfully, and others highlight poor or unethical
employment practices such as non-payment, late payment, low rates, unilateral imposition of
MT post-editing, and fake translation testing on online message boards, social media groups, and
mailing lists. Abdallah (2010) reported several ways in which translators can protect their agency
by attempting retribution or avoiding confrontation. This is unnecessary for many translators,
of course, who have built up long-term trust relationships with their employers whereby their
needs and concerns are considered and valued in a mutually beneficial relationship.
Where possible, Pym (2012) suggests that the translator should balance self-interest and coop-
eration, charging the “highest rate that the client can risk paying” (151), with the caveat that the
cooperation facilitated by the translator may tend to impoverish one party (and thus he suggests
loyalty to the weaker party), and that the cooperation may be so successful that the parties learn
a lingua franca, rendering the translator unnecessary. The freedom for a freelance translator to act
in their own best interests rather than within the constraints of bounded rationality depends on
their relationship with those that hire or engage them, usually mediated via a project manager.
The translation project manager may work on a freelance or in-house basis. Their role is to
agree the budget and timescale for a project, and to ensure that these are respected. While in
some cases project management may be automated, it is common for the project manager (or
a vendor manager reporting to them) to be the main point of contact for a translator and their
main advocate within the network, subject to loyalty to their employer. At a similar level in the
production hierarchy are direct employees who work in roles that relate to a project, without
necessarily directly contacting the translators. These stakeholders are constrained by the practices
of their employer when dealing with translators and clients.
Translation companies that outsource work vary massively in size from sole traders, coopera-
tives, or limited company operations employing a small number of people, where management
may have a direct hand in individual projects, to larger companies and conglomerates who must
focus on profit-making. This market fragmentation was highlighted by Dranch, Beninatto, and
Johnson (2019), who report that the top ten language service companies’ total combined turn-
over surpassed US$3.9 billion in 2018. If the company is publicly traded, their fiduciary respon-
sibility will be to reward shareholders within legal limits while minimising harms to employees
and society at large. They must minimise risk, perhaps ensuring that translators have indemnity
insurance, and retain both clients and preferred employees. In publicly traded companies that
provide language services, the shareholder may be large or small, and while they may encour-
age corporate social responsibility, they ultimately want return of investment and maximisation
of profit. This is typically considered in the short rather than long term by lowering costs. The
absence of a “just balance in development” between all stakeholders and long- and short-term
needs (Docherty, Kira, and Shari 2008, 4) may threaten the sustainability of the translation
industry and deprive the final stakeholder – society at large – of access to reliable multilingual
information.
3.2 Ownership of resources

The FIT (International Federation of Translators) Translator’s Charter (FIT 1963/1994) states
that a translation, as “a creation of the intellect, shall enjoy the legal protection accorded to
such works,” including the “same privileges as the author of the original work.” In practice,
325
however, the rights of translators over translated material and translation repositories are not
clear. In a review of translation copyright, Troussel and Debussche (2014) assert that transla-
tors have legal rights to copyright ownership, subject to the rights of original authors and
depending on the jurisdiction based on the Berne Convention, and within the European
Union, possible further rights as creators and maintainers of a database when using translation
memories (TMs). Depending on their creative input and the type of source text, such a claim
of ownership could be strengthened, and a further translation copyright may be asserted that
would require the translator’s permission (and possible royalty payments) for retranslation based
on their translated text.
However, it is common practice in the translation industry for translators to return TMs via the
project manager to their employers, retaining no ownership over the TM or the final translation.
This means that translators have no control over how their work is repurposed, nor for the type of
material translated while leveraging their work in secondary and tertiary use. New use cases con-
tinually appear for repurposing all data, translation data included, that were not previously envis-
aged (Moorkens 2017). The industry perspective continues to be that copyright is generally owned
by the end client, with TMs retained by the translation provider for leveraging by any translator
employed so as to minimise cost. Due to the growing and insatiable demand for human-created
data in translation and other areas for training data for machine learning, this data is increasing in
value. Moorkens and Lewis (2019b) note that in retaining the data, translation employers take on
responsibility for storage and data security, with operational and legal risks in case of a cyberattack.
However, they suggest a move to translator ownership of this data with royalty payments to trans-
lators as an option for improving the power balance and sustainability of the translation industry.
Even if the issues related to ownership of resources can seem to be of a legal nature, ethics
are very much involved, as a violation of rights or contracts is in clear contrast with the virtue
of justice, which can be defined as the consistent intention to give each person what is due to
them (Melé 2019).
3.3 Sustaining employment in the translation industry

In order to take ethical considerations into account and to improve the agency of translators,
Abdallah (2014, 13) puts forward a three-dimensional quality model, which could take into
account not only the product and process of translation, but also the social quality, which
includes translators’ “relations to the rest of society and their relations and interaction pertaining
to the work that is collectively produced.” She believes that by taking the relationship with the
rest of society into account and by maximising ethical employment practices, translation work
could be made more attractive and sustainable. This is a concern voiced more and more often
at translation conferences and events; various surveys and articles have highlighted translators
leaving the industry due to low rates, stress of tight deadlines, imposition of post-editing work
with low-quality MT with a mandatory discount, and difficulties in getting paid (Abdallah 2010;
EC/CIOL/ITI 2017).
Due to the high number of translators (Pym et al. [2012] estimated this to be 330,000
worldwide) and their varied modes of work, the number of people leaving the industry is dif-
ficult to estimate. Even without this information, the social quality of a translation production
network appears to be undervalued. Lagoudaki (2008) described how translators’ requirements
for translation editing interface design were subordinate to those of their employers, and ten
years later translators cited similar dissatisfaction with translation tools (Moorkens and O’Brien
2017). Without an obvious return of investment, the arguments to tailor tools or workflows for
translators tend not to filter through the production network.
326
A deficit of translators would also bring about a lack of translation data for training of MT
systems. Neural MT requires huge amounts of bilingual data for training, with updates needed
for changes in language and terminology. While the most widely translated languages are cur-
rently reasonably well served for data to maximise MT quality, the majority are still short of
enough translation data to create high-quality MT systems. Even the best-performing systems
have shown evidence of standardisation and a loss of linguistic diversity in their output (Van-
massenhove, Shterionov, and Way 2019). Research into unsupervised MT systems that can be
trained on monolingual data have shown some positive results (Artetxe, Labaka, and Agirre
2019), but nonetheless, the ongoing collection and reuse of translation data for MT training is
necessary for systems to produce current and maximum-quality results.
Moorkens and Lewis (2019b) consider whether the industry is following a sustainable tra-
jectory, or whether changes are necessary to improve translator wellbeing and to address issues
regarding ownership of translation resources (see section 3.2). They cite the International Labour
Organisation’s substantive elements of Decent Work (Ferraro, Pais, and Rebelo Dos Santos
2015) and argue that these are not reflective of the translation occupation for many freelancers.
Moorkens (2020) asserts the need to fulfil motivation and satisfaction factors within sustainable
work systems. If translators are exiting, yet the demand for translators is growing, sustainability
must be a concern. Cronin (2017) believes that, as translators’ work is not sufficiently valued or
remunerated, translators would be better to advocate the large-scale societal changes required
to facilitate global environmental sustainability (see Section 4.1). Pym (2004) wrote that the
argument for more translation is not always justifiable, such as when the target text is of insuf-
ficient worth to justify the effort, implicitly criticising the constant hunger for growth in the
translation industry.
At present, international and national translator organisations (such as FIT) perform valu-
able lobbying on the part of translators and work on protecting the sector. The FIT Translator’s
Charter (FIT 1963/1994) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Orga-
nization (UNESCO) Recommendation on the Legal Protection of Translators and Translations and the
Practical Means to Improve the Status of Translators (UNESCO 1976) recommend rates of pay and
employment protection for translators equivalent to other professions, along with copyright
ownership of translated works. These recommendations are more relevant than ever, although
their effectiveness is difficult to evaluate. Translator organisations also offer valuable fora for
discussion, advice, and professional development options for translators. The latter are discussed
in detail in the following section.
3.4 Resources for translators: ethical training as continuing

professional development?
National associations provide their members with opportunities for continuing professional
development (CPD), and often offer courses, readings, conferences, seminars, and workshops,
although few of these tend to focus specifically on ethics. A more systematic approach to the
professional development of the profession would make these standalone efforts part of an inte-
gral project. In other industries, a great deal of attention is given to ethical training of workers.
Many of the resources for CPD of translators are intended to develop their career as professional
translators and self-made entrepreneurs (e.g. McKay 2006). One exception is the American
Translators Association (ATA), which offers an online ethics module as an educational require-
ment (www.atanet.org/certification/online_ethics_overview.php).
There is debate in academia about the effectiveness of training in ethics: for example, in the
field of business ethics education, Hartman (2013) inquired, how can anyone “expect to make
327
a business student a good person with one course in one semester?” (189). The same can be
argued for ethical training for translators and the need for transformative change in the way that
ethics is perceived across this industry: ethics is not a mere list of dos and don’ts, nor is it the mere
application of a code of conduct, it is rather a guide for excellence in human behaviour (Melé
2019). If ethics is perceived in this way, translators should realise that training in ethics is not a
box to tick or an additional line to their curriculum but rather an instrument to fully develop as
excellent translators and excellent human beings.
In the case of the translation industry, it would be worth enhancing the development of
ethical training for two main reasons: firstly, it would help raise the ethical standards of the
profession on the side of both employers and freelancers. Secondly, it would provide translators
with the intellectual tools to understand how developing the virtues of a good translator will
also contribute to their own personal flourishing. Drugan and Megone (2011) comment on the
absence of systematic training in ethics at the level of academic education and suggest the inte-
gration of ethics across the Translation Studies curriculum, using case studies as a teaching tool
to stimulate discussion and to train learners in ways to solve concrete ethical dilemmas typical
of the profession.
At present, particularly in translator associations, the focus in CPD is on good business
practices and field specialisation, which has proved to be key for several very successful transla-
tors. Specialisation, however, needs to be combined with responsiveness, professionalism, and
trust-building in interactions with translation buyers (Durban 2011): this will help to enhance
the relationship between the LSP and its internal and external stakeholders, also cultivating
excellence within the profession.
3.5 Trust in the translation industry

In his work on translation ethics, Chesterman (1997) asks, “why should translators be loyal
to their profession, why should they be accountable to these various other participants in the
communication situation? My answer would be: because of the overriding value of trust” (181;
emphasis original).
Given the way the translation industry is currently structured, it is not only the individual
translators that need to ensure loyalty to their profession and accountability towards the other
agents involved in the translation network, as Chesterman affirms, but also the companies oper-
ating in this sector need to build trust for their business to be successful. The academic literature
on translation and trust from an organisational point of view is not as developed as the academic
literature that considers the relationship of trust between the translator and the other actors in
the translator network, in one-to-one relationships. This distinction between trust on a personal
level and on an institutional level is explored by Rizzi, Lang, and Pym (2019) with reference
to translation (also adding the perspective of “regime-enacted” trust). A seminal contribution
in the exploration of trust at an organisational level by Abdallah and Koskinen (2007) refers to
the translation industry as network-based. With the caveat of the lack of support from a more
extended body of literature, it can be argued that those relationships of trust highlighted by exist-
ing literature in Translation Studies from an individual point of view can be analysed, mutatis
mutandis, in the perspective of the organisation. Following the stakeholder approach that this
chapter suggests for the analysis of the translation industry, it can be argued that a company in
the translation industry needs to establish relationships based on trust with all the stakeholders
involved in its network.
328
From the point of view of an individual translator, Chesterman (1997) presents this multi-
stakeholder view on trust, listing the different actors involved in the trust relationship with the
translator:
The translator also needs to trust the original writer, and also the commissioner of the
translation: there must be a trust that the translation itself is worth doing. Translators must
also trust that their readers will read the translation in good faith, that their readers in turn
will trust that there is “something there” in the translation that makes it worth reading. It
is, in fact, not only the translator that must trust, but also the other parties to the translating
act: readers, plus of course the commissioner of the translation, the publisher, and also the
original writer (if still alive, of course). Translational trust works both ways.
(180)
Chesterman (1997) also argues that trust is “the value governing the accountability norm” (180).
He defnes this accountability norm, explaining that “a translator should act in such a way that
the demands of loyalty are appropriately met with regard to the original writer, the commis-
sioner of the translation, the translator himself or herself, the prospective readership and any
other relevant parties” (68).
In deploying all the multi-faceted relationships of trust implied in the work of the translator,
Chesterman’s contribution can be re-read as a building block of the contemporary translation
industry. Trust is at the basis of the relationship between all stakeholders, frequently mediated by
a company, which needs to enter these trust-based relationships and strengthen them. Adding
a layer to this process can actually add complexity, without adding economic expense if trust is
built (Pym 2004). Conversely, processes related to translation within a company become slower
and more expensive due in particular to lack of trust and information asymmetry (Chan 2008).
For example, clients with no expertise in the target language can either outsource to verify the
accuracy of a translation, or they can just trust the translator because of their reputation or the
reputation of the intermediary agency. As in any other industry, mistrust bears a cost, whereas
“to build trust is also to reduce transaction costs” (Pym 2004, 5). Pym links trust primarily to
its role of reducing complexity. Reduced complexity and increased trust contribute to lowering
overall costs, making trust the “highest virtue to be sought in translators” based on the value in
its “role as the prime mechanism for reducing complexity” (Pym 2004, 11).
Mistrust can also generate other costs related to the translators’ working conditions. The growing
fear of piracy and leaks, primarily of audiovisual and entertainment materials, adds constraints on
translators, who often find themselves outside of a circle of trust, having to work with pre-release
material. This may result in non-disclosure agreements and in working conditions where the need for
secrecy impinges on the ability to produce a high-quality target text. Hubscher-Davidson (see Chap-
ter 27 “Ethical stress in translation and interpreting” in this volume) notes the ethical stress for trans-
lators in situations when professional deontological ethics and business ethics are at cross-purposes.
With specific reference to the translation industry, Abdallah and Koskinen (2007) discuss how
trust can be managed within the industry, and they note this may be particularly complex due to
“the geographic distance between the intermediary agency and the translators, as well as by the
sheer number of translators needed for a steady output in several language pairs” (681). The level
of trust needs to be even higher when the end users of the products delivered by the translation
industry are especially vulnerable. With regard to translation and children’s literature, Oittinen
(2006) specifically addresses the ethical concerns related to the activity of the translator catering
for the youngest possible public of readers. She interestingly refers to an Aristotelian conception
329
of ethics and the way human beings strive to achieve personal flourishing (Aristotle 2000) in
order to assess the ethics of translation in this specific context, and discusses how the choice of a
foreignisation or domestication may be viewed as ideological imposition of the adult’s view on
children (Oittinen 2006).
Avenues for further research in trust and the translation industry might consider the applica-
tion to translation of a study conducted by van der Werff, Real, and Lynn (2018). The authors
compared traditional models of trust with trust in technology systems. Given the way that the
translation industry is structured with intertwined and overlapping contributions of human
translators and AI-based systems, it can be potentially argued that the translation industry cur-
rently combines the dimensions entailed in both the traditional trust model and the trust in
technology systems (van der Werff et al. 2018, 393). As reported by van der Werff et al. (2018),
the dimensions of traditional trustworthiness are ability, benevolence, integrity, competence,
benevolence, honesty/integrity, and predictability, while the dimensions entailed in technology
systems are performance, purpose/helpfulness, process/predictability, functionality, helpfulness,
and reliability. It would be worth exploring the combination of these dimensions in the transla-
tion industry, given the evolution of the translation industry business model – which in many
cases has completely shifted to the online market – and of the translation technique itself.
4 New frontiers for the ethics of the translation industry

This topical section reviews the way the translation industry addresses environmental concerns
and reflects on the ethical implication of the introduction of AI-based systems throughout dif-
ferent processes typical of the translation industry. Moreover, a special focus is dedicated to the
opportunity to develop those traits that are specifically human in the translation process, such as
human wisdom, considering the massive introduction of new technologies.
4.1 Environmental sustainability in the translation industry

Cronin (2017) highlights translation’s place in increasingly unsustainable energy dependency,
with localisation in particular associated with an “ideology of boundless growth” (6). Transla-
tion technology relies on the information and communication technology (ICT) industry, with
its use of mined rare metals and deserved reputation for poor recycling and polluting (Cronin
2017). Increased communication requires vast rollouts of fibre optic cabling and storage for
the estimated 175 ZB of data held by 2025, with 49% expected to be held in cloud comput-
ing environments (Reinsel et al. 2018). Neural MT is particularly computationally expensive,
requiring powerful GPUs (graphical processing units) for training and large amounts of power.
Strubell, Ganesh, and McCallum (2019) estimate that training one large transformer neural
network model will produce almost five times the CO2 output of a car (including fuel) during
its full lifetime.
Cronin (2017) believes that the only solution to this unsustainable consumption is a “Great
Transition” away from the ideal of continuous growth with translation central to such a move on
a societal scale, based on solidarity with global and future humans. He pushes against the utopian
idea of mutual intelligibility that was the basis of Weaver’s (1949) initial ideas for MT, suggesting
that diverse linguistic spaces are more resilient and viable. Following such a transition, transla-
tion would revert to a craft, facilitating artistic, literary, spiritual, or creative work, rather than
“the auxiliary of material goods based on wealth creation” (Cronin 2017, 117). With respect
to industry, this means taking a broad, imaginative, and ethical view of the enterprise landscape
that fits with the perspective of Docherty et al. (2008), who advocate work within sustainable
330
systems “aimed at the regeneration of . . . human, social, material and natural resources” (4) for
the benefit of future generations.
4.2 AI and the future of translation work: machine translation

and human wisdom
The hype about neural MT (Castilho et al. 2017) has brought existential angst to the fore
for translators (Vieira 2018). On the face of it, the large and growing amounts of transla-
tion required should mean that both human and machine translation have a strong outlook.
Employment in translation continues to grow (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2019) alongside
increased MT throughput (Google 2016), and MT continues to rely on humans for its data
and evaluation (Kenny 2011).
However, the translation industry has enthusiastically taken on MT as a productivity
tool (Lommel and DePalma 2016), with the technology often imposed on translators rather
than introduced in consultation (Cadwell, O’Brien, and Teixeira 2018), and new use cases
being found for successful integration of raw and post-edited MT where automation had
previously been considered unwise or risky (Moorkens 2017). This imposition of automa-
tion, along with digital dispossession and predictions of technological unemployment in
the media, tends to add to negative perceptions from translators – and trainee translators –
of their prospects. These perceptions are common to other sectors which are affected by
machine learning, where data is gathered at scale and repurposed for training. As newer
translation tools, whether locally installed or using a browser interface, use cloud-based
storage, there are additional concerns about workplace monitoring and aggregation of trans-
lation and personal data.
Workplace monitoring is becoming more prevalent in general to avoid misuse of company
time and resources. Moore and Robinson (2016) report the spread of monitoring to contingent
and creative workers, writing, “workers are now being asked to measure our own productivity
and health and well-being in art-houses and warehouses alike” (2774). User activity data may
now be recorded within several commercial translation tools. Product quality monitoring is still
more common in the translation industry, with samples of specialised translation work often
measured using error typologies (Lommel 2018). The sample size, or whether work is sampled
at all, may differ based on the trust relationship with the translator, and poor results in these
evaluations may affect future employment prospects (Koo and Kinds 2000).
With the aim of obtaining a smoother workflow – which can also be constantly tracked and
monitored – the translation industry is moving to cloud translation platforms that combine the
power of cloud computing with technology specialised in language processing. These interfaces
can “realise collaborative translation functions, organising multiple spatially distributed transla-
tors to complete one translation task” (Yan Ren 2015). The move to cloud computing systems
is likely to cause some of the ethical issues found in other industries using cloud computing
technology, such as the “problem of many hands,” when a single person cannot be identified
or held responsible when a problem occurs, or issues related to ownership and privacy that are
already problematic in the translation industry (Timmermans, Stahl, Ikonen, and Bozdag 2010).
Garcia (2015), on the other hand, believes that cloud-mediated interactions could help with
translator recruitment, and Benotmane (2019) predicts that the use of quality monitoring via
the cloud will have an equalising effect, highlighting the quality of good translators who may
not market themselves successfully, and assuring trust and quality in online marketplaces where
identity theft and lying about translation skills have previously caused problems (Pym, Orrego-
Carmona, and Torres-Simón 2016).
331
Online marketplaces include those where professional translators meet and jobs are
offered, the general purpose crowdwork platforms, and many in between. Crowdsourced
translation is community-based and works thanks to the existence of the internet. Unlike
machine learning, it does not need a specific technology designed for the purpose of
translation but only a functioning network. Katan (2016, 12) has predicted that by 2025
non-professionals will account for “most social media and much audiovisual transla-
tion,” and in his 2008 survey, amateur translators, especially those with subject-specific
knowledge from other fields, were considered the biggest threat to the profession by 388
professional and paraprofessional translator and interpreter respondents (Katan 2009).
Anastasiou and Gupta (2011) define crowdsourcing as “the process by means of which
organisations can tap into the wisdom of their dedicated external community and use the
wisdom for their benefit, i.e. with low cost, for more languages, and within the specified
time frame” (638). The use of the word “wisdom” is interesting here, as in the domain of
ethics and technology there is a debate about whether human wisdom can or cannot be
substituted and automated. Vallor (2016, 2017, 176), in light of the analysis of the com-
mon characteristics of wisdom in different ethical traditions, concludes that wisdom is
considered “as more than knowledge, intelligence, or expert skill.” Further research can
go in the direction of characterising “wisdom” as a specifically human contribution to the
activity of translation. Chesterman (2006) goes as far to include translation in the realm
of activities that the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (2007) describes as “practices.”
MacIntyre (2007) defines a practice as:
Any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity
through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of
trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially
definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve
excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically
extended.
(187)
As Chesterman notes, in this defnition cooperation prevails on competition, and the key
word that frames the context of the activity is excellence. Moreover, following MacIntyre
(2007), the practice is embedded in a tradition which the practitioners continue to enhance.
There is a narrative in which the translators participate as protagonists, bringing in their
desire to be excellent qua professionals and qua human beings. The assertion here is that,
even if automation will be able to replace some of the “tasks” of translators, it will never
replace this desire for personal fourishing and the professionalism and passion that each
translator adds to the long tradition of this persistently necessary job. These considerations
open avenues for further research in the ethics of the translation industry: it is worth explor-
ing the characterisation of the specifc goods that the translation industry brings to society
and of the virtues that human translators need to develop in the current heavily automated
scenario.
The question for the future of the translation industry is whether to retract as a move to
global environmental sustainability, to continue as at present, pushing more translators into
post-editing, or to aim for an empowering middle ground that follows the intention of Kay in
his Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language Translation (1980), wherein machines process
quantity while “human translators will make decisions, give advice, gain trust, and transmit
quality” (Pym 2012, 145).
332
5 Conclusion
This chapter reviews existing literature on the ethics of the translation industry, first placing
translation in the context of the global economy and growing consideration of corporate social
responsibility and business ethics at the end of the 21st century. The translation industry in
general appears to consider business ethics subordinate to the profit motive and receives little
push-back from translators, who are often not in a position to maximise their agency due to dis-
parities of power. In examining the relationships and motivations within a translation production
network, we identify a number of stakeholders and consider their concerns and responsibilities.
In analysing training options for translators, effective ethical training is lacking, but this could
contribute to the personal flourishing of a translator as a good professional and as a person and to
trust-building. Several freelance translators have built high-trust relationships with their employ-
ers and thus enjoy better conditions with respect to payment, monitoring, and data ownership
than many of their peers. For others, the various pressures of freelance translation work may
lead them to consider leaving the industry. This brings concerns about the sustainability of the
industry, prominently discussed by Cronin (2017), who believes that a major shift from industrial
translation is required as part of a global shift to cut consumption.
This is one option when considering the future of translation work, as AI, workplace moni-
toring, and crowdsourcing continue to change the nature of the role of a translator. Another
option is to continue along the current trajectory with more translators pushed into unsatisfying
work and struggling for secure payment. A third way follows the suggestion of Kay (1980), let-
ting machines do the heavy lifting while humans attempt to flourish with creative, interesting,
and curatorial work.

Virtue ethics in translation; professional translator ethics; translation technology and ethics; ethi-
cal stress in translation and interpreting.
Note
1 For a discussion of these topics, please see Moorkens and Lewis (2019a).
References
Abdallah, Kristiina. 2010. “Translator’s Agency in Production Networks.” In Translator’s Agency, edited by
Tuija Kinnunen, and Kaisa Koskinen, 11–46. Tampere: Tampere University Press.
Abdallah, Kristiina. 2014. “Social Quality: Key to Collective Problem Solving in Translation Production
Networks.” Proceedings of the 6th Riga Symposium on Pragmatic Aspects of Translation, 5–18. Riga, Latvia.
Abdallah, Kristiina, and Kaisa Koskinen. 2007. “Managing Trust: Translating and the Network Economy.”
Meta: Journal des traducteurs 52, no. 4: 673–687. https://doi.org/10.7202/017692ar
Anastasiou, Dimitra, and Rajat Gupta. 2011. “Comparison of Crowdsourcing Translation with Machine
Translation.”Journal of Information Science 37, no. 6: 637–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551511418760
Aristotle. 2000. Nicomachean Ethics. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge, UK, New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Artetxe, Mikel, Gorka Labaka, and Eneko Agirre. 2019. “An Effective Approach to Unsupervised Machine
Translation.” ArXiv:1902.01313 [Cs], February. http://arxiv.org/abs/1902.01313
Benotmane, D. 2019. “Translation Quality Is Risk Avoidance.” Paper Presented at Hello World, Germany’s
Software Localization Conference, Hamburg, Germany.
Berardi, Franco. 2015. And: Phenomenology of the End: Sensibility and Connective Mutation. Semiotext(e)
Foreign Agents Series. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e).
333
Bowker, Lynne. 2019. The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Technology, edited by Minako O’Hagan,
453–68. Abingdon: Routledge.
Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2019. Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2018–19 Edition: Interpreters and Transla-
tors. Washington, DC: US Department of Labor.
Cadwell, Patrick, Sharon O’Brien, and Carlos S.C. Teixeira. 2018. “Resistance and Accommodation: Fac-
tors for the (Non-) Adoption of Machine Translation Among Professional Translators.” Perspectives 26,
no. 3: 301–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2017.1337210
Campbell, Iain, Ian Watson, and John Buchanan. 2004. “Temporary Agency Work in Australia (Part I).”
In International Perspectives on Temporary Work, edited by John Burgess, and Julia Connell, 129–44.
Abingdon: Routledge.
Carroll, Archie B. 1991. “The Pyramid of Corporate Social Responsibility: Toward the Moral Manage-
ment of Organizational Stakeholders.” Business Horizons 34, no. 4: 39–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/
0007-6813(91)90005-G
Castilho, Sheila, Joss Moorkens, Federico Gaspari, Iacer Calixto, John Tinsley, and Andy Way. 2017. “Is
Neural Machine Translation the New State of the Art?” The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics
108, no. 1: 109–20. https://doi.org/10.1515/pralin-2017-0013
Chan, Andy Lung Jan. 2008. “Information Economics, The Translation Profession and Translator Certifi-
cation.” PhD diss. Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain.
Chesterman, Andrew. 1997. Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Benjamins Trans-
lation Library, Vol. 22. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins.
Chesterman, Andrew. 2006. “Questions in the Sociology of Translation.” In Translation Studies at the Interface
of Disciplines, edited by João Ferreira Duarte, Alexandra Assis Rosa, and Teresa Seruya, 9–27. Benjamins
Translation Library, EST Subseries, v. 68. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub. Co.
Cronin, Michael. 2012. “Translation and Globalization.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies,
491–502. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203378816
Cronin, Michael. 2017. Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. New Perspec-
tive in Translation and Interpreting Studies. London, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
De George, Richard T. 2014. Business Ethics, 7th edition, Pearson new internat. ed. Pearson Custom
Library. Harlow, Essex: Pearson.
Docherty, Peter, Mari Kira, and A.B. (Rami) Shari. 2008. “What the World Needs Now Is Sustainable
Work Systems.” In Creating Sustainable Work Systems: Developing Social Sustainability, edited by Peter
Docherty, Mari Kira, and A.B. (Rami) Shari, 1–22. Abingdon: Routledge.
Dranch, Konstantin, Renato Beninatto, and Tucker Johnson. 2019. “Nimdzi 100.” nimdzi Market Reports.
with and beyond the Professions.” The Translator 23, no. 2: 126–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/1355650
9.2017.1281204
Drugan, Joanna. 2018. “Ethics.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, 1st edition,
edited by Piers Rawling, and Philip Wilson, 243–55. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. https://doi.
org/10.4324/9781315678481-16
Disciplinary Approach.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1: 183–211. https://doi.org/10.108
0/13556509.2011.10798817
Durban, Chris. 2011. “Translation: Getting It Right: A Guide to Buying Translation.” www.atanet.org/
publications/getting_it_right.php
EC/CIOL/ITI. 2017. “UK Translator Survey: Final Report.” https://ec.europa.eu/unitedkingdom/sites/
unitedkingdom/files/ukts2016-final-report-web_-_18_may_2017.pdf
Esselink, Bert. 2000. A Practical Guide to Localization. New and totally revised edition. Language Interna-
tional World Directory 4. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Ferraro, Tânia, Leonor Pais, and Nuno Rebelo Dos Santos. 2015. “Decent Work: An Aim for All Made
by All.” International Journal of Social Sciences 4, no. 3: 30–42. https://doi.org/10.20472/SS2015.4.3.003
FIT. 1963, 1994. “Translator’s Charter.” www.fit-ift.org/?p=251
Freeman, R. Edward. 1984. Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Pitman Series in Business and
Public Policy. Boston: Pitman.
Freeman, R. Edward. 2010. Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139192675
Friedman, Milton. 1970. “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” The New York
Times Magazine, September 13.
334
Garcia, Ignacio. 2015. “Cloud Marketplaces: Procurement of Translators in the Age of Social Media.” The
Journal of Specialized Translation 23: 18–38.
Google. 2016. “Machine Learning Office Hours.” Google IO.
Hartman, Edwin. 2013. Virtue in Business: Conversations with Aristotle. Business, Value Creation, and Society.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Katan, David. 2009. “Occupation or Profession: A Survey of the Translators’ World.” Edited by Rakefet
Sela-Sheffy, and Miriam Shlesinger. Translation and Interpreting Studies 4. no. 2: 187–209. https://doi.
org/10.1075/tis.4.2.04kat
Katan, David. 2016. “Translation at the Cross-Roads: Time for the Transcreational Turn?” Perspectives 24,
no. 3: 365–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2015.1016049
Kay, Martin. 1980. The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language Translation (Report CSL- 80–11). Palo
Alto, CA: Xerox Corporation.
Kenny, Dorothy. 2011. “The Ethics of Machine Translation.” New Zealand Society of Translators and Interpret-
ers Annual Conference.
Koo, Siu Ling, and Harold Kinds. 2000. “A Quality-Assurance Model for Language Projects.” In Trans-
lating Into Success: Cutting-Edge Strategies for Going Multilingual in a Global Age, edited by Robert C.
Sprung, and S. Jaroniec, 11: 147–57. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.
org/10.1075/ata.xi.16koo
Lagoudaki, Elina. 2008. “Expanding the Possibilities of Translation Memory Systems.” PhD Diss., Imperial
College, London.
Lommel, Arle. 2018. “Metrics for Translation Quality Assessment: A Case for Standardising Error
Typologies.” In Translation Quality Assessment, edited by Joss Moorkens, Sheila Castilho, Federico
Gaspari, and Stephen Doherty, 1: 109–27. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.
org/10.1007/978-3-319-91241-7_6
Lommel, Arle, and Donald A. DePalma. 2016. Europe’s Leading Role in Machine Translation. Common Sense
Advisory Report. Boston, MA: CSA-Research.
MacIntyre, Alasdair C. 2007. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd edition. Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press.
McKay, Corinne. 2006. How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator, 1st edition. Boulder, CO: Two Rat Press.
Melé, Domènec. 2019. Business Ethics in Action: Managing Human Excellence in Organizations, 2nd edition.
London, UK: Red Globe Press.
Moore, Phoebe, and Andrew Robinson. 2016. “The Quantified Self: What Counts in the Neoliberal
Workplace.” New Media & Society 18, no. 11: 2774–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815604328
Moorkens, Joss. 2017. “Under Pressure: Translation in Times of Austerity.” Perspectives 25, no. 3: 464–77.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2017.1285331
Moorkens, Joss. 2020. “‘A Tiny Cog in a Large Machine’: Digital Taylorism in the Translation Industry.”
Translation Spaces 9, no. 1: 12–34. https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.00019.moo
Moorkens, Joss, and David Lewis. 2019a. “Copyright and the Reuse of Translation as Data.” In The
Routledge Handbook of Translation and Technology, edited by Minako O’Hagan, 469–81. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Moorkens, Joss, and David Lewis. 2019b. “Research Questions and a Proposal for the Future Governance
of Translation Data.” Journal of Specialised Translation 32.
Moorkens, Joss, and Sharon O’Brien. 2017. “Assessing User Interface Needs of Post-Editors of Machine
Translation.” In Human Issues in Translation Technology, edited by Dorothy Kenny, 109–30. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Nord, Christiane. 1997. Translating as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist Approaches Explained. Manchester:
St. Jerome Publishing.
O’Hagan, Minako. 1996. The Coming Industry of Teletranslation: Overcoming Communication Barriers Through
Telecommunication. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct
=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=16702
Oittinen, Riitta. 2006. “No Innocent Act: On the Ethics of Translating for Children.” In Children’s Litera-
ture in Translation: Challenges and Strategies, edited by Jan van Coillie, and Walter P. Verschueren, 61–78.
Manchester, UK: Routledge.
Pym, Anthony. 2004. “Propositions on Cross-Cultural Communication and Translation.” Target 16, no. 1:
1–28. https://doi.org/10.1075/target.16.1.02pym
Pym, Anthony. 2012. On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation between Cultures. Benjamins Translation
Library, Vol. 104. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co.
335
Pym, Anthony, François Grin, Claudio Sfreddo, and Andy L.J. Chan. 2012. The Status of the Translation
Profession in the European Union. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. http://
ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/publications/studies/translation_profession_en.pdf.
Pym, Anthony, David Orrego-Carmona, and Esther Torres-Simón. 2016. “Status and Technology in the
Professionalisation of Translators: Market Disorder and the Return of Hierarchy.” Journal of Specialised
Translation 25: 33–53.
Rechtman, Jonathan. 2018. “AI Won’t Replace Human Translators Yet. Here Are 3 Reasons Why.”
World Economic Forum Online, October. www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/3-reasons-why-ai-
wont-replace-human-translators-yet/
Reinsel, David, John Gantz, and John Rydning. 2018. “The Digitization of the World: From Edge to
Core.” IDC White Paper. www.seagate.com/www-content/our-story/trends/files/idc-seagate-dataage-
whitepaper.pdf
Risku, Hannah, Nicole Rossmanith, Andreas Reichelt, and Lukas Zenk. 2013. “Translation in the Net-
work Economy: A Follow-Up Study.” In Tracks and Treks in Translation Studies: Selected Papers from the
EST Congress, Leuven 2010, edited by Catherine Way, Sonia Vandepitte, Reine Meylaerts, and Magda-
lena Bartłomiejczyk, 29–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Rizzi, Andrea, Birgit Lang, and Anthony Pym. 2019. What Is Translation History?: A Trust-Based Approach.
London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20099-2
Strubell, Emma, Ananda Ganesh, and Andrew McCallum. 2019. “Energy and Policy Considerations for
Deep Learning in NLP.” Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Lin-
guistics (ACL). Stroudsburg, PA.
Timmermans, Job, Bernd Carsten Stahl, Veikko Ikonen, and Engin Bozdag. 2010. “The Ethics of Cloud
Computing: A Conceptual Review.” In 2010 IEEE Second International Conference on Cloud Comput-
ing Technology and Science, 614–20. Indianapolis, IN: IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/CloudCom.
2010.59
Troussel, Jean-Christophe, and Julien Debussche. 2014. Translation and Intellectual Property Rights (Report
by Bird & Bird for the European Commission DG Translation). Luxembourg: Publications Office of the
European Union.
Tymoczko, Maria. 2007. Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Pub.
UNESCO. 1976. Recommendation on the Legal Protection of Translators and Translations and the Practical Means
to Improve the Status of Translators. Paris: UNESCO.
Vallor, Shannon. 2016. Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Vallor, Shannon. 2017. “AI and the Automation of Wisdom.” In Philosophy and Computing, edited by
Thomas M. Powers, 128: 161–78. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/
978-3-319-61043-6_8
Van der Werff, Lisa, Colette Real, and Theodore Lynn. 2018. “Individual Trust and the Internet.” In
The Routledge Companion to Trust, edited by Rosalind Searle, Ann-Marie Ingrid Nienaber, and Sim
B. Sitkin, 391–407. Routledge Companions in Business, Management and Accounting. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Vanmassenhove, Eva, Dimitar Shterionov, and Andy Way. 2019. “Lost in Translation: Loss and Decay of
Linguistic Richness in Machine Translation.” Proceedings of MT Summit XVII, 222–32. Dublin, Ireland.
Van Wyke, Ben. 2012. “Translation and Ethics.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, 548–60.
Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203102893.ch40
Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation. Abingdon: Routledge.
Vieira, Lucas Nunes. 2018. “Automation Anxiety and Translators.” Translation Studies, November, 1–21.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2018.1543613
Weaver, Warren. 1949. “Translation: Rockefeller Foundation Memorandum.” www.mt-archive.info/50/
Weaver-1949.pdf
Yan Ren, Xiao. 2015. “An Interview of Cloud Translation Platform.” International Journal of Modeling and
Optimization 5, no. 5: 332–6. https://doi.org/10.7763/IJMO.2015.V5.484
Further reading
Although none of these contributions is specifically about ethics in the translation industry, each
touch on issues raised in this chapter.
336
Abdallah, Kristiina. 2010. “Translator’s Agency in Production Networks.” In Translator’s Agency, edited by
Tuija Kinnunen and Kaisa Koskinen, 11–46. Tampere: Tampere University Press.
Abdallah is key in identifying production networks as the prevailing working environment in the con-
temporary translation industry in her chapter focusing on translators’ agency.
with and beyond the Professions.” The Translator 23, no. 2: 126–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/1355650
9.2017.1281204
Drugan identifies a lack of ongoing support for individual translators and interpreters in the course of
their work.
Pym, Anthony. 2012. On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation between Cultures. Benjamins Translation
Library, Vol. 104. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Pym engages in a discussion of ethics from the perspective of the individual translator.
337
22
Ethics in translator and
interpreter education
Georgios Floros
1 Introduction
A relatively recent question around ethical issues in translation and interpreting concerns how to
teach ethics to future translators and interpreters. This question is perhaps as challenging as the
theoretical debate on ethics itself. As Donovan (2011, 123) put it regarding interpreter training,
“[e]thics is . . . far from absent from training programmes, although it is not always addressed
explicitly.” This chapter focuses precisely on the pedagogical aspect of ethics within academic
and professional training institutions. In other words, it focuses on those social structures which
play perhaps the most significant role in shaping, conditioning and disseminating conceptions
of the ethical behaviour of professional translators and interpreters. In the following sections,
an attempt will be made to briefly map the role academic and professional training institutions
have played over time and, more importantly, to explore the central questions of what theories
or approaches to ethics future professionals should be taught, how the “ethical” is to be critically
discussed in terms of topics and methods and which theoretical and methodological tools are best
suited for guiding “ethical” decision-making.
2 A brief overview of ethics in education

Ethics in translation and interpreting have been addressed in and by training institutions from
early on. Ethical questions and contemplations have almost always – and by the vast majority
of researchers and trainers – been recognised as lying at the core of translational thought and
practice, and as intrinsic to translation and interpreting activities (see Goodwin 2010). Admit-
tedly, it is impossible to trace strict boundaries in the evolution of thought on ethical issues in
translator and interpreter education; one cannot provide a precise historiography of research on
ethics in translator and interpreter education. Across time, however, certain differences can be
traced regarding where the focus was placed, the theoretical approaches to ethical questions and
the contexts – cultural and professional – in which ethical questions may appear. In other words,
the “ethical” has not always been examined in all its multifaceted aspects at the same time, and
this allows us to discern a more or less meaningful set of periods in the evolution of teaching
translation and interpreting ethics.
338
Ethics in T&I education
The asymmetries regarding focus, theoretical approaches and contexts under scrutiny in the
examination of ethical issues is to be expected, of course. There are so many areas and types
of translation and interpreting, e.g. literary translation, LSP translation, audiovisual translation,
conference interpreting, community interpreting, etc. and so many political, social, technologi-
cal, educational and other changes happening around us, especially since the emergence of insti-
tutionalised translator and interpreter education (i.e. after the first half of the previous century),
that it is not feasible to diachronically concentrate or predict all possible aspects of translation
ethics in training activities. For example, courses on literary translation have traditionally focused
on questions with respect to the author, interpretative possibilities and preservation of the aes-
thetic value of a literary work, while the – unfortunately – large number and variety of sites of
conflict today (war zones, sites of political turbulence or social upheaval, etc. see Baker 2006)
have inevitably evoked different ethical issues, such as “side-taking” or doing justice, both for
translators and interpreters involved in such conflict zones.
Generally speaking, the most prominent ethical questions in institutionalised education, from
the middle of the twentieth century and for a very long time afterwards, have focused on the
phenomenon of equivalence, the question of loyalty and how to achieve them (see Drugan and
Megone 2011, 184). Back then, scholars were mostly concerned with whom translators and
interpreters were supposed to be bound to – the author, the audience or the client (see also
Chapter 5 “Functional translation theories and ethics” in this volume). They were also con-
cerned with the extent to which the content of the original text could or should be altered to
satisfy specific user needs (see functional theories of translation emerging in the late 1970s and
early 1980s) or to better reproduce nuances, aesthetic devices (e.g. irony) or terminological
accuracy (cf. Mounin [1957] 1976, as well as Chesterman 1997 on the ethics of representation).
Neutrality and fidelity have thus become widespread ideals for any transfer activity, especially for
(written or oral) texts in which opposing views are presented or sensitive issues are touched
upon. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the professional codes of conduct and codes
of ethics that appeared, especially at the dawn of the new millennium, by various professional
organisations around the world reflect and reproduce the focus on equivalence, loyalty and
neutrality/impartiality as the most pertinent ethical injunctions for professional translators and
interpreters, next to “pure” business ethics (see Abdallah 2011; McDonough-Dolmaya 2011;
Lambert 2018). Examples include the codes of ethics by the American Translators’ Association
(ATA 2010), one of the oldest professional associations, and the Australian Institute of Interpret-
ers and Translators Inc. (AUSIT 2012), to name but a couple.
An extensive discussion of professional codes can be found in Chapter 20 “Ethics codes for
interpreters and translators” in this volume. For our purposes, it is important to note that the
impregnation of professional codes of ethics with the notions deemed important in training have
had a “washback effect” on translator and interpreter education. In other words, the influence
that institutional education exerted on the formulation of professional codes has had, in turn,
an impact on the priorities of training institutions. Thus, many training institutions today give
prominence to professional codes of ethics when called to provide ethical guidelines to future
translators and interpreters. This is particularly evident, for example, in the cases of the European
Master’s in Translation (EMT), the European Master’s in Conference Interpreting (EMCI) and
the Conférence Internationale Permanente d’Instituts Universitaires de Traducteurs et Inter-
prètes (CIUTI, the Permanent International Conference of University Institutes for Translation
and Interpreting). The specificity and importance of these institutions arise from the fact that
they are (a) overarching multinational or supranational organisations, that is, they are not organ-
isations embedded in an isolated or particular national context; (b) diverse, in the sense that they
have been established or are governed by individuals and other institutions from various parts of
339
Georgios Floros
Europe or the whole world, bringing together different traditions, approaches and understand-
ings of translator and interpreter education; and (c) they are not affiliated or dependent on any
professional organisation, but aim to put forward and disseminate quality training practices as
widely as possible. The way these institutions attempt to direct training is by favouring, explic-
itly or implicitly, the guidelines given in professional codes. So, for example, the competence
framework of the EMT calls for “[compliance] with professional ethical codes and standards”
(2017, 11), the EMCI requires teaching of professional ethics in the practice modules of master’s
courses (2017) and the CIUTI implicitly refers to professional codes of ethics when propagat-
ing training aims, models and methods with a strong professional orientation (2019). This way,
the aforementioned organisations become indicative of the high value placed by trainers on the
translation and interpreting industry and, at the same time, of the general tendencies of translator
and interpreter education at universities today. However, apart from favouring the interaction
between the educational and the professional world, and beyond manifesting and disseminating
general tendencies such as neutrality and fidelity in translation ethics, these organisations do not
really shape translator and interpreter education. The sort of normative attempt to promote spe-
cific theoretical thinking about ethical issues and the shaping of the ethical behaviour of future
translators and interpreters are still undertaken by researchers and teachers in higher education
institutions worldwide.
During the late 1990s, research started being directed towards postcolonial and postmodern
approaches to ethics and their implications for translation. Meanwhile, globalisation began hav-
ing an immediate impact on people’s everyday lives. Therefore, the examination of non-Western
discourses in literature and political thought on the one hand and the so-called sociological
turn in translation studies on the other hand brought to the fore the social status and power of
translations and translators, the ways translators interact with other professions and with society
in general, questions of economic and technological globalisation, and questions of agency. The
latter, perhaps the most inclusive of all, is to be understood as the ability to intervene or take
action within a given social context. It refers to the interactive engagement of various factors
and players within the social structure of a given group, for example, translators and interpret-
ers within the legal framework regulating their professions and with other agents regulating a
translation event (e.g. newspaper editors). These developments revived the (by then somewhat
stagnant) interest in ethical issues and favoured the emergence of a yet more elaborate theoretical
apparatus on ethics in transfer (see, for example, Arrojo 1995; Prunc 1997; Pym 1997; Spivak
1999; Kiraly 2000; Mikkelson 2000; Koskinen 2000. See also the so-called second wave of
approaches after 2000, including Baker 2006; Seeber and Zegler 2007; Tymoczko 2007; Floros
2011; Inghilleri 2012). The appearance of a special issue of The Translator by Pym (2001) was
not a coincidence. The contributions in this volume are geared towards returning to questions
of ethics in light of significant developments in the era of globalisation.
In addition to looking into ethics from the point of view of socio-political and economic
developments, the 2010s were a period when research made a systematic attempt to examine
the ways in which ethics could best be incorporated in translator and interpreter education.
The discussion shifted towards teaching methods, tools and approaches to support practice-
oriented preparation for future translators and interpreters. Again, a special issue of The Interpreter
and Translator Trainer (Baker and Maier 2011) and Baker (2016) on rethinking the pedagogical
landscape of ethics in the translation and interpreting curriculum aptly signalled the new trend.
All contributions in this volume examine various factors and contexts that influence training,
as well as tools for directing and improving training. An important remark is that ethical issues
are discussed in the classroom still in a rather “incorporated” manner, i.e. largely within various
theoretical or practical courses in translation and interpreting, not in dedicated courses on the
340
ethics of transfer practices (see, for example, Donavan 2011; Drugan and Megone 2011). It is
true, however, that the importance of teaching ethical issues has been highlighted within univer-
sity programmes, mainly through exposing students to and discussing a vast variety of case studies
from lesser-known or particularly sensitive contexts of conflict, which complement theoretical
discussion (see Baker 2016).
Case studies, as methodological tools for both research and training, have gained impor-
tance in discussing ethical issues, mainly because they are grounded in the real world, are easily
integrated in courses and provide opportunities to test various approaches by promoting ethical
reasoning, that is, the systematic contemplation of what is involved in each situation and the
consequences of various choices (see Drugan and Megone 2011). Case studies bring the profes-
sion’s everyday issues and problems to the fore, and they become not only an object of study
per se but also one of the best tools to simulate real professional life within the “protected”
educational environment. Importantly, case studies dethroned the notion of neutrality. Real-life
situations and circumstances help prove that neutrality is not a sustainable ethical injunction,
no matter how alluring it sounds in theory. If neutrality were to be respected at all instances,
translators and interpreters would find themselves unable to refuse tasks, unable to promote
communication in tough situations and unable to act as members and citizens of wider social or
cultural formations. In the 2010s, the notion of neutrality has been largely replaced by notions
of responsibility and reflexivity. The aims of translator and interpreter education are now geared
toward empowering future translators and interpreters to reflect on their action (reflexivity), to
choose among possible courses of action and to bear responsibility for the choice they make
(responsibility and accountability). Since not all ethical problems and challenges are the same,
there cannot be a prescribed course of action that would fit all possible instances. The course of
action should therefore be decided ad hoc, that is, according to the specificities and peculiarities
of each situation. There can only be general – and rather subtle – guiding principles (cf. Floros
2011) but no concrete and direct advice, as is often wished for by students and professionals
alike. Unfortunately, the new pedagogy of transfer ethics does not seem to have found a way
to inform and transform professional codes of ethics. This, of course, is yet another source of
tension between academia and the professional world, an issue that will be taken up again in the
next section of this chapter.
Yet another turn in the approach to ethics training seems imminent. In the past decade,
research on ethics in transfer activities has turned to questions of activism and the role of volun-
teer translators and interpreters (cf., for example, Tymoczko 2000; Boéri 2008; De Manuel Jerez
2010; Pérez-González and Susam-Saraeva 2012; see also Chapter 16 “Ethics of volunteering in
translation and interpreting” in this volume). The active role assumed by professional and non-
professional translators and interpreters poses new challenges to the way we understand these
practices, their consequences and the much wider role translators and interpreters play within
society and across societies. One of the main challenges concerns the very notion of responsi-
bility referred to earlier, which is currently being expanded to social responsibility. As explicitly
stated by Drugan and Tipton (2017) in their introduction to a special volume of The Translator,
responsibility
can never be ideologically neutral and its invocation always confers an obligation to deter-
mine whose responsibility, to whom and for what. “Responsibility” is therefore understood
here as action-oriented and dynamic, encompassing value judgements and decisions that
may lead as much to resistance as to acceptance and commitment to sustain a form of social
consensus.
(122)
341
Georgios Floros
Social responsibility, understood as distributed responsibility, looks beyond the traditional ques-
tion of how translators/interpreters stand with regard to their own texts, towards the broader question of
how they stand within society through their own texts. Looking at responsibility as socially distributed
and dynamic entails broadening the perspective of the social role assumed by transfer profession-
als, towards a common goal: to exert infuence on the social and political order of the cultural
formations in which they live, with the ultimate aim of improving the quality of social and polit-
ical life. It is in this light that other, more recent contributions should also be seen, such as, for
example, Baker (2015) on translating dissent and Inghilleri (2017) on translation and migration.

Perhaps the most important issue with regard to training in ethical questions concerns the
interplay between academia and the translation and interpreting industry. The mutual fertilisa-
tion described earlier – in that research informs professional codes of ethics and they, in turn,
are reflected in the principles adopted by training institutions – actually hides a multitude of
tensions. Very often, professional organisations expect academic institutions, and research in
general, to provide detailed guidance as to how to proceed with difficult ethical dilemmas of any
sort, even for matters that do not apply particularly to translation (e.g. remuneration, confiden-
tiality, etc.). Academic institutions, on the contrary, do not always consider themselves suitable
or even obligated to provide such guidance. Many academic institutions around the world see
their role as developing a purely theoretical discussion of ethics and ethical issues, or keeping a
balance between theory and practice. Practitioners in the real world, just like the majority of
student translators and interpreters, often feel that theory does not help solve their problems and
consider theoretical courses and the theoretical examination of ethical problems redundant, to
say the least.
The professional world often laments that academics live in an ivory tower (see, for example,
Schnell and Rodríguez 2017) and that academic training fails to fulfil its preparatory role. The
counterargument from academia has long been that the primary function of academic institu-
tions is to prepare critically thinking individuals, not to provide ready-made solutions to be used
blindly for the practical problems they will encounter in their professional lives. While academic
institutions cannot focus exclusively on preparing students for practical problems, the profes-
sional world has offered a multitude of unexpected and sometimes unimaginable examples and
case studies of ethical dilemmas, which can inform – and indeed have informed – academic
training and theory building. In addition, not all training institutions touch upon ethical issues
in their curricula, so they do not shape ethical behaviour at all; as a result, students find them-
selves sometimes unprepared for the real world. This situation has changed lately, though perhaps
not at a pace that would satisfy the professional world. Judging by the expanding bibliography
on translation ethics and training as well as by the professionally and market-oriented training
principles followed by the CIUTI (2019), it seems that many courses nowadays make explicit
reference, discuss or disseminate codes of ethics from local and international professional bodies.
Today, there are many voices calling for the effective integration of examples from the real world
in courses, in an attempt not only to ease the tension but also to provide education that is as
comprehensive as possible (see contributions in Baker and Maier 2011; Baker 2016).
This brings us to the question of what future professionals should be taught in terms of
transfer ethics. Irrespective of the tensions with the professional world, academic institutions are
inevitably concerned with the place of theoretical as opposed to practical courses in educational
settings. Taking for granted that theory informs and grounds methodology, trainees should
start with where ethics is rooted and how ethics is to be understood in transfer practices. Also
342
pertinent are text-typological questions, questions of socio-political and cultural context, as well
as a rudimentary – nevertheless quite important for shaping ethical behaviour – classification of
ethical issues. These aspects are discussed in more detail next, starting with the last one.
A first distinction that trainees should learn to make is between two types of ethical issues:
those arising before accepting an assignment and those arising after accepting an assignment. The
differentiating criteria between these two types revolve around effect and dependence; the former
group of issues is more unilateral, mainly depending on and affecting the translating agent (i.e.
the translator/interpreter), the latter is more bi- or multilateral, depending on and affecting a
series of agents and sides, such as translator/interpreter, audience, client, organisation, wider
society, the text itself, etc. The first type of ethical issue includes dilemmas arising among others
from personal conflict, ideologically driven refusal or reluctance to accept an assignment, legal-
ity and legitimisation issues. For example, personal or ideological conflict can arise when the
translator/interpreter is opposed to the aims of the text or the client, such as when they are called
in to translate, say, an anti-LGBTQ+ text when they themselves belong to this community.
The same happens when they are called in to translate/interpret for a client who is, say, openly
denying the Holocaust, when they themselves are convinced of it (see e.g. Salama-Carr 2007;
Goodwin 2010; House 2018, 160–167). Equal problems may arise when a translator/interpreter –
especially a freelancer – does not deem their remuneration sufficient or when the text is about
an illegal product or idea (e.g. a banned medicine or hate speech). While these dilemmas may
seem easy to resolve by simply refusing the assignment, they are tricky in the sense that a refusal
might cost translating agents their job. But, the difficulty of the decision notwithstanding, these
are circumstances found in any profession, activity or aspect of personal life, and it is up to the
person to weigh how much they wish to wield their personal ethics and what leeway they wish
to give themselves.
This type of ethical issue could be considered non-translational, although McDonough-Dol-
maya (2011, 32), for example, holds that the choice to transfer immoral or illegal texts applies
particularly to translation or the language profession. But to the extent that the translators/
interpreters can – for whatever reason – maintain authority over their translations, the choice
remains theirs and needs to be made before officially accepting the assignment. For this reason
alone, such choice can be considered unrelated to the translation process per se. A quite impor-
tant insight in this regard comes from Inghilleri (2008, 222), who talks about cases of “illusory
freedom,” that is, cases where it only looks as if interpreters are free to choose to accept an
assignment or not, when they actually are compelled to, as happens in war interrogations. This
is why the first type of issue remains important as a set of ethical issues in translation, despite not
being entirely related to the process of the mediating activity.
The second type of ethical issue includes those that apply particularly to translation and
interpreting, encountered after choosing to accept an assignment. These may be further dif-
ferentiated into questions concerning language and culture (including issues such as the degree
of adaptation, accuracy, additive techniques, etc.) and questions concerning ideology (especially
conflict, politically sensitive discourse and the like). For these issues, translators and interpreters
need to consider a wide range of agents, from a single editor to society as a whole. They need
to keep delicate balances, linguistic, cultural and ideological; make concrete translation choices
for originally ambiguous instances; and decide which side to do justice to and for what reasons,
even when this happens at the expense of their personal views (see also Chapter 13 “Literary
translator ethics” and Chapter 30 “Ethics of collaboration and control in literary translation” in
this volume).
All this challenges the widely propagated notion of neutrality, which is found espe-
cially in official codes of ethics, and promotes responsibility and accountability in translation
343
Georgios Floros
decisions, a set of notions that has lately been put forward by many voices, as was previously
shown regarding the dominant paradigms in the 2000s and 2010s. The ideal promoted by
research on ethical issues in translation and interpreting today is that of reflexive translators and
interpreters, who can effectively reason with the aim of not only working out a delicate issue in
the text but also contemplating possible consequences of their actions and serving the interests
of wider society. If future translators and interpreters are to assume the manifold and complex
role described and propagated by research on transfer ethics, they need to be aware that ethics
is rooted in values, norms and narratives that are highly subjective and depend on the cultural
context in which a person lives and functions (cf. Baker 2006; Floros 2011). These values,
norms and narratives subconsciously shape our ideology and stance towards others and ourselves.
Therefore, students need to be made aware of the fact that neutrality is unattainable, first and
foremost because every individual carries ethical “baggage,” that is, a set of beliefs about what
is right or wrong, which is then put to the test by interacting with others and otherness. This
is why reflection and reasoning are indispensable for transfer activities; when mediating in any
context, one needs to question not only the Other but also the Self.
This might lead the whole discussion to a dead end. One could assume that if the only thing
students should expect from their training is the cultivation of the ability to think critically and
responsibly, without any conclusion as to how to handle a particular situation, the responsibility
for the shaping of ethical behaviour is shifted from the trainers to the students. Future language
professionals would then feel stranded or might easily resort to a do-as-you-feel logic. Although
a training programme cannot provide ready-made solutions for all possible situations, it can at
least promote certain guiding principles, which can inform the course of action without imply-
ing a predefined solution or the solution favoured by the trainer. The relevant literature on
translation ethics provides an abundance of approaches, which can be taken as guiding principles
or ethical injunctions for translating. But then again, it is the role of training institutions to high-
light further factors that inform the choice between a multitude of approaches.
One such factor is what was previously referred to as the text-typological question. Practi-
cally, this means that different types of texts present different ethical challenges and require
different ethical considerations. For example, highly technical texts of strong terminological
density might be thought to present much less “ethical” difficulty than, say, a political speech or
an advertisement. Similarly, interpreting a technical speech on agricultural policy seems less ethi-
cally challenging than community interpreting in asylum hearings or police interrogations. To
approach this question more systematically, the notion of genre is very helpful. Genre is a socio-
cognitive construct that refers to a communicative situation; in other words, it is the abstract
representation of a certain communicative instance which codifies in itself social and cultural
norms and values, and the form it takes is easily recognisable by the members who belong to the
same social or cultural group (cf. Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995; Tsiplakou and Floros 2012).
For example, people belonging to the same cultural group immediately recognise an obituary,
an official letter, a report, a political message, a court hearing, a joke, a poem, etc. by its topic,
the way it is written (or spoken), the social function it fulfils and the interlocutors involved. The
norms and values that different genres codify require ethical consideration, especially when they
are translated, since it cannot be taken for granted that the same genres exist in other cultures
or that they are conditioned by the same norms and values. Therefore, even if the language and
information contained in a highly technical text do not – at first sight – appear to pose any ethi-
cal challenges at all, the text might itself do so with its topic and intended use, which brings us to
the aforementioned first type of ethical issue, those encountered before accepting an assignment.
Similarly, even when a translator/interpreter accepts an assignment, a whole range of (sometimes
well-hidden) ethical problems may arise, for example, in a sensitive news article on a political
344
situation that may use toponyms or denominations that are not officially accepted. It is true,
however, that certain genres such as news reports, political speeches, social media texts, etc. are
much more prone to being ethically challenging.
The fact that ethical challenges depend on genre has led to the idea of ethical relativity, which
needs to be tackled in training, especially because the notions of genre and ethical relativity
seem helpful in keeping the very sensitive balance of choosing between ethics rather than discussing
decisions in terms of ethical vs. unethical (see also Harpham 1995; Diriker 2004). Ethical relativity
is defined as “the fluctuation of ethical thresholds impinging on translation through inherently
subjective values and narratives that govern translation behavior by creating equally subjective
norms” (Floros 2011, 71). In other words, ethical relativity implies that “it is always the type
and power of norms which will determine how tolerant each genre may be towards ideologi-
cal manipulation” (Floros 2012, 937). Training needs to make clear that the stances adopted by
translators and interpreters in confronting any ethical dilemma are always rooted in a certain
ideological perception of the world and thus always represent an ethical choice that may lead to
multiple repercussions. Seen from this perspective, these choices cannot be unethical in the sense
of a total absence of ethics; the way translators and interpreters choose to handle a situation is
actually by favouring one ethical stance over another, and there is essentially no unethicality as
such in their judgement, even when they strive for neutrality. Coming back to the questions of
genre and ethical relativity in this respect, student mediators need to be made aware that their
own ideological perceptions may ultimately vary according to text type or genre and that deal-
ing with ethical dilemmas cannot be uniform and absolutely consistent across text types and
communicative situations. In fact, ethical judgement does not need to be consistent across com-
municative situations, since the agents that might be involved in each of them may be different
to such a degree that different courses of action are needed each time (see previous examples).
Finally, the tools needed to operationalise abstract terms and discussions (i.e. to turn them
into concepts applicable in practice) include the use of authentic texts and case studies of real-
life situations (see, e.g. Drugan and Megone 2011), as well as the application of collaborative
learning, where the teacher acts as a moderator rather than an authority, regarding the negotia-
tion required on the part of the student. There seems to be widespread consensus in research
nowadays (see Washbourne 2013; House 2018) that the best pedagogical approach for ethics
training is to cultivate reasoning skills and enable students to think critically about the nature
of the ethical problem and the possible consequences of a variety of possible courses of action
before they decide how to proceed. Any translation activity is above all an activity of keeping
communicative channels open, an activity of staying in dialogue with otherness. The outcome of
such dialogue will always rest with the interlocutors involved and the use(s) they make of what
is said, but dialogue must be maintained and can only be achieved in a spirit of negotiation.
The best way for teachers to foster that spirit is to avoid offering predefined solutions or
actively promoting their take on an issue, but rather to help students design their own course
of action in a collaborative classroom environment (see Kiraly 2000). This is mainly done by
presenting them with real-life situations not only as they confront them by chance through dis-
cussion of isolated text examples but also with a deliberate choice of case studies, which should
be presented systematically, that is, with a specific issue in mind as well as the whole constellation
of agents and factors involved. The choice of case studies habitually comes from the immediate
socio-cultural context in which students live, usually addressing conflict situations relevant to the
area they will work in. Such situations can include, for example, historical or political tensions,
tensions among social groups or political developments that have an immediate impact on the
way a specific society organises itself and places itself within the international political arena. In
this way, students can better relate to the issue at hand and, more generally, to the need to discuss
345
Georgios Floros
ethics in the translation and interpreting classroom. Another important factor that influences the
choice of case studies is the degree to which the translation or interpreting market is established
in a certain area. In countries where such markets are less sufficiently regulated through legisla-
tion, the range of possible ethical problems is wider, since there emerge additional professional
issues, such as who is allowed to work or act as a translator or interpreter.
The flip side – concentrating too much on “local” ethical issues – is that training runs the
risk of not adequately preparing future translators and interpreters for the international market
or other contexts in this era of professional globalisation and markets that might be differently
structured from what students are used to. This is something that training institutions are
increasingly taking into consideration, particularly through the circulation, dissemination and
discussion of international research, especially research conducted in peripheral contexts
and contexts of conflict, which have international resonance and significance. The existence
and activities of international associations that promote quality training across institutions (such
as the EMT, EMCI and CIUTI) are therefore of great importance not only for promoting
research from both central and peripheral contexts but also for promoting and diffusing the
outcome of such research among professional institutions both locally and internationally, with
the ultimate aim of enabling novice professionals in particular to reflect on the role and mean-
ing of their profession at all levels, from the personal to the societal, as Tryuk (2015, 12) stresses
regarding interpreters.
4 Emerging issues
The very recent thought on translators and interpreters assuming social responsibility, translating
dissent, engaging with issues of translation and migration, etc. forms an important new theoreti-
cal apparatus. What remains to be seen is how this important new thought will be concretely
implemented in training, or in what ways it might inform the revision of official professional
codes of ethics. Another very important and promising ethical issue emerging in translator and
interpreter education is the examination of inherent legal issues (e.g. human rights, national and
international legislation, etc.), how to grapple with vast contemporary and future technological
possibilities and challenges (e.g. data and protection, safety of transmittance, etc.) and ultimately,
how to produce a fruitful inter- and cross-disciplinary synergy between academia, the authori-
ties and the profession.
While the regulation of human rights issues and national or international legislation might
seem outside the realm of translation studies, translator and interpreter training institutions, be
they universities or associations, can play a key role in shaping the guidelines that will affect good
conduct in professional and societal life. By educating reflexive, responsible and critical profes-
sionals who are aware of their ability and leeway to condition a wide audience’s perception of
a multitude of social and political issues, institutions can and should be among the first agents
consulted by policymakers in national and international human rights protection and promo-
tion, not least because new key texts in these areas very often enter a local context through
translation. The specific ethical challenges that arise in this respect have to do with the degree
to which the ethical perceptions of translators and interpreters align with or contradict the ethi-
cal perceptions of policymakers. There is also the issue of volunteer and activist translators and
interpreters, who many times have a head start in promoting, protecting, supporting or even
raising awareness of the human and civil rights of minorities or disadvantaged social groups. It
is precisely this kind of activist work, for example, that has come to the forefront in the recent
migration crisis across the Mediterranean, sometimes even leading to translators and interpreters
being accused of complicity in illegal migration.
346
Therefore, questions arise as to who should be allowed to translate or interpret not only in
extraordinary situations, but also in other, less precarious contexts (e.g. audiovisual translation).
This is an issue that generally has to do with the regulation of the profession and the qualifica-
tions required to become a translator or interpreter – a still pertinent issue in many translation
markets across the world. Nevertheless, activism and volunteerism should be seen in an ethical
framework that goes beyond purely legal implications. Activist and volunteer translators and
interpreters usually respond to cases of emergency (e.g. migration crises) or of – more or less –
lack of commercial interest (e.g. fansubbing) and certainly not with the aim of hijacking the
relevant professions. Intriguing questions also arise as to how institutional training might adapt to
ad hoc needs for translation and interpreting services by people who cannot afford (for whatever
reasons) fully fledged higher-education training in translation or interpreting, and how legisla-
tion might or might not respond to such possibilities.
A similar challenge is posed by technological advances, which go beyond computer-assisted
tools that facilitate the translation or interpreting process. These advances have to do with all
possible issues arising from the management of very large amounts of data (so-called big data)
that are too complex for traditional data-processing software. The specific challenges for train-
ing future translators and interpreters not only arise from the volume of the data sets and the
technological capacity required to deal with them, mainly through machine translation (see,
for example, Kenny 2011; Folaron 2012), but also from the fact that they may contain sensitive
information and mainly concern the domain of cybersecurity. Gaining access to, transmitting or
controlling such information is a very delicate issue with serious legal repercussions. Any attempt
to regulate these new issues will inevitably extend to all agents involved in big data, that is, also
to translators. This, in turn, will pose new challenges to translator and interpreter education –
regarding both the management of state-of-the-art technological tools and the ethical issues
involved (see also Chapter 18 “Translation technology and ethics” in this volume).
Perhaps the most imminent ethical issue in translator and interpreter education, however, is
about all the instances in which translation shares space with other disciplines (see, for example,
the contributions in Gambier and van Doorslaer 2016). The various professions that involve
translation and interpreting, both as process and product, such as language teaching and testing,
the larger media industry, the advertising industry, adaptation studies or global news produc-
tion and circulation, indicate that translation studies is expanding into a cross-discipline. This
fact is reflected in newly coined terms that attempt to describe the synergy and cohabitation of
translation and other disciplines, such as transcreation (translation in marketing and advertising; see,
for example, Pedersen 2014), news translation, and transediting (translation and news editing;
see, for example, Bielsa and Bassnett 2008; Floros 2012). The ethical challenges when translation
meets other disciplines and professions are particularly intriguing, since the ethical perceptions
that govern translation and the ethical perceptions that govern other professions are not always
aligned. In relation to journalism and translation, for example, Schäffner (2012, 877) maintains
that journalists pursue their own communicative aims, while translators do not. Similar discrep-
ancies can be assumed in other cases where translation and other professions cohabit the same
space. In such hybrid cases, the important aspect for translator and interpreter education is to
examine how the two activities might converge in terms of the ethical imperatives governing
their cohabitation, despite divergent communicative aims. The challenges to be tackled, and
ultimately the aim of training, revolve around highlighting not only the possible differences
between the disciplines involved but also the possibilities for cross-fertilisation. In order to do so,
translator and interpreter education will greatly benefit from systematically and critically delving
into other disciplines. Critical discussion of practices and prevailing concepts in other disciplines
will encourage close attention to the ethical subtleties of professional hybridity.
347
Georgios Floros
Last but not least, ethical training can also be enhanced by looking at how the very concept of
translation and interpretation has been shaped or changed across traditions and contexts, both in
theory and practice. In other words, translation history, traditionally taught in training institutions,
becomes increasingly significant for ethical training, since the comparison of canonical and less
canonical understandings of the discipline and the professional practice may prove beneficial in
shaping ethical considerations and guiding principles, as well as, ultimately, the “ethical leeway”
practitioners have at their disposal. There is a resurgent interest in historical research on transla-
tion and interpreting in various contexts, the latest additions being the volumes A World Atlas of
Translation by Gambier and Stecconi (2019) and Translating in Town: A History of Local Translation
Policies During the European 19th Century by D’hulst and Koskinen (2020).
5 Conclusion
The conclusion of such discussion brings us back to the initial question: should ethical issues be
discussed in separate courses or in an “incorporated” manner? On one hand, the omnipresence
of ethical issues in transfer practices prompts us to consider discussing the “ethical” whenever it
comes up, i.e. in all possible instances. On the other hand, the complexity of ethical issues suggests
a need for dedicated courses, where due attention can be given. Rather than being caught up in
yet another binary opposition, a balanced approach would be more meaningful for integrating
treatment of ethical issues in the curriculum. While the spectrum and variety of ethical problems
call for treatment across courses, the theoretical foundations deemed crucial for recognising prob-
lems and engaging critically with them must be offered in specifically designed, separate courses.
This, however, is an issue in its own right, one that requires careful consideration of general cur-
riculum design (see Chapter 23 “Ethics of translator and interpreter education” in this volume).

Ethics codes for interpreters and translators; functional translation theories and ethics; translator
ethics; professional translator ethics; ethics of translator and interpreter education; translating and
interpreting in conflict and crisis.
References
American Translators’ Association (ATA). 2010. “American Translators Association Code of Ethics and
Professional Practice.” Accessed September 29, 2019. www.atanet.org/governance/code_of_ethics.php
Arrojo, Rosemary. 1995. “Postmodernism and the Teaching of Translation.” In Teaching Translation and
Interpreting 3: New Horizons, edited by Cay Dollerup, and Vibeke Appel, 97–103. Amsterdam: John
Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators Inc. (AUSIT). 2012. “AUSIT Code of Ethics and Code
of Conduct.” Accessed September 29, 2019. http://ausit.org/AUSIT/Documents/Code_Of_Eth-
ics_Full.pdf. www.naati.com.au/media/1438/ausit-code-of-ethics-plain-english-version-190716.pdf
Baker, Mona. 2006. Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London: Routledge.
Baker, Mona. 2015. Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution. London: Routledge.
Baker, Mona. 2016. “Ethics in the Translation and Interpreting Curriculum: Surveying and Rethinking
the Pedagogical Landscape.” In Challenges and Channels: English Language and Literature at a Crossroads of
Cultures, edited by Ikram Ahmed Ibrahim Elsherif, 23–54. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing.
Baker, Mona, and Carol Maier, eds. 2011. Ethics and the Curriculum: Special issue of the Interpreter and Transla-
tor Trainer 5, no. 1.
348
Berkenkotter, Carol, and Thomas N. Huckin. 1995. Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cogni-
tion/Culture/Power. Erlbaum: Hillsdale.
Bielsa, Esperança, and Susan Bassnett. 2008. Translation in Global News. London: Routledge.
on Activism in Conference Interpreting.” The Translator 14, no. 1: 21–50.
Chesterman, Andrew. 1997. Memes of Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
CIUTI (Conférence Internationale Permanente d’Instituts Universitaires de Traducteurs et Interprètes).
2019. “Our Profile.” Accessed February 4, 2019. www.ciuti.org/about-us/our-profile/.
D’hulst, Lieven, and Kaisa Koskinen, eds. 2020. Translating in Town: A History of Local Translation Policies
during the European 19th Century. London: Bloomsbury.
De Manuel Jerez, Jesús. 2010. “From Ethics to Politics: Towards a New Generation of Citizen Interpreters.”
In Compromiso Social y Traducción/Interpretación, Translation/Interpreting and Social Activism, edited by Julie
Boéri and Carol Maier, 134–45. Granada: ECOS.
Diriker, Ebru. 2004. De-/Re-Contextualizing Conference Interpreting: Interpreters in the Ivory Tower? Amster-
Donovan, Claire. 2011. “Ethics in the Teaching of Conference Interpreting.” The Interpreter and Translator
Trainer 5, no. 1: 109–28.
Drugan, Joanna, and Chris Megone. 2011. “Bringing Ethics Into Translator Training.” The Interpreter and
Drugan, Joanna, and Rebecca Tipton, eds. 2017. “Translation, Ethics and Social Responsibility.” The
European Masters in Conference Interpreting (EMCI). 2017. “EMCI Core Curriculum.” Accessed Febru-
ary 4, 2019. www.emcinterpreting.org/course-structure. www.emcinterpreting.org/core-curriculum
European Masters in Translation (EMT). 2017. “EMT Competence Framework.” Accessed February 4,
2019. http://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/emt_competence_fwk_2017_en_web.pdf
Floros, Georgios. 2011. “‘Ethics-Less’ Theories and ‘Ethical’ Practices: On Ethical Relativity in Transla-
tion.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1: 65–92.
Floros, Georgios. 2012. “News Translation and Translation Ethics in the Cypriot Context.” Meta 57, no.
4: 924–42.
Folaron, Debbie. 2012. “Digitalizing Translation.” Translation Spaces 1, no. 1: 5–31.
Gambier, Yves, and Luc van Doorslaer, eds. 2016. Border Crossings: Translation and Other Disciplines. Amster-
Gambier, Yves, and Ubaldo Stecconi, eds. 2019. A World Atlas of Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Publishing Company.
Goodwin, Phil. 2010. “Ethical Problems in Translation: Why We Might Need Steiner After All.” The
Harpham, Geoffrey G. 1995. “Ethics.” In Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd edition, edited by Frank
Lentricchia, and Thomas McLaughlin, 387–405. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
House, Juliane. 2018. Translation: The Basics. London: Routledge.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2008. “The Ethical Task of the Translator in the Geo-Political Arena from Iraq to
Guantánamo Bay.” Translation Studies 1, no. 2: 212–23.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2017. Translation and Migration. London: Routledge.
Kenny, Dorothy. 2011. “The Ethics of Machine Translation.” In Proceedings of the XI NZSTI National Con-
ference, 121–31. Auckland: NZSTI.
Kiraly, Don. 2000. A Social Constructivist Approach to Translator Education. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2000. “Beyond Ambivalence: Postmodernity and the Ethics of Translation.” PhD. Diss.,
Lambert, Joseph. 2018. “How Ethical are Codes of Ethics? Using Illusions of Neutrality to Sell Transla-
tions.” JoSTrans, The Journal of Specialised Translation 15: 269–90.
ics for Translators.” JoSTrans, The Journal of Specialised Translation 15: 28–49.
Mikkelson, Holly. 2000. “Interpreter Ethics: A Review of the Traditional and Electronic Literature.” Inter-
preting 5, no. 1: 49–56.
Mounin, Georges. [1957] 1976. “Traduction fidèle . . . mais a quoi?” In Linguistique et traduction, 145–50.
Brussels: Dessart & Mardaga.
Pedersen, Daniel. 2014. “Exploring the Concept of Transcreation: Transcreation as ‘More than Transla-
tion’?” Cultus 7: 57–71.
349
Georgios Floros
Pérez-González, Luis, and Şebnem Susam-Saraeva. 2012. “Nonprofessionals Translating and Interpreting:
Participatory and Engaged Perspectives.” The Translator 18, no. 2: 149–65.
Prunc, Erich. 1997. “Translationskultur (Versuch einer konstruktiven Kritik des translatorischen Handelns).”
TextConText Neue Folge 1: 99–127.
Pym, Anthony. 1997. Pour une éthique du traducteur. Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa.
Salama-Carr, Myriam. 2007. Translating and Interpreting Conflict. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.
Schäffner, Christina. 2012. “Rethinking Transediting.” Meta 57, no. 4: 866–83.
Schnell, Bettina, and Nadia Rodríguez. 2017. “Ivory Tower vs. Workplace Reality.” The Interpreter and
Translator Trainer 11, nos. 2–3: 160–86.
Seeber, Kilian, and Christian Zegler. 2007. “Betrayal–Vice or Virtue? An Ethical Perspective on Accuracy
in Simultaneous Interpreting.” Meta 52, no. 2: 290–8.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.
Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press.
Tryuk, Małgorzata. 2015. On Ethics and Interpreters. Bern: Peter Lang.
Tsiplakou, Stavroula, and Georgios Floros. 2012. “Never Mind the Text Types, Here’s Textual Force:
Towards a Pragmatic Reconceptualization of Text Type.” Journal of Pragmatics 45: 119–30.
Tymoczko, Maria. 2000. “Translation and Political Engagement. Activism, Social Change and the Role of
Translation in Geopolitical Shifts.” The Translator 6, no. 1: 23–47.
Washbourne, Kelly. 2013. “Ethical Experts-in-Training: Connected Learners and the Moral Imagination.”
In New Prospects and Perspectives for Educating Language Mediators, edited by Don Kiraly, Silvia Hansen-
Schirra, and Karin Malsymski, 35–52. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
Further reading
Interpreting 3: New Horizons, edited by Cay Dollerup, and Vibeke Appel, 97–103. Amsterdam: John
Arrojo is among the earliest scholars to question universal values from the perspective of a postmodern
critique and to call for educating individuals who are conscious of both their history and present social
context to deconstruct power agents in their own context.
This book by Mona Baker introduces narrative theory to Translation Studies as a powerful tool not
only for understanding and analysing conflict (in its extended sense) but also for positioning oneself
within conflict situations that require mediation, as is often encountered in translation and interpreting.
Contributions in: Baker, Mona, and Carol Maier, eds. 2011. Ethics and the Curriculum: Special Issue of The
Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1.
This special issue of ITT, edited by Mona Baker and Carol Meier, focuses on critical approaches to intro-
duce ethical discussions and more specifically the issues of the ethical responsibility and accountability
on the part of the (future) translator/interpreter in university teaching programmes. The introduction
by the editors as well as the individual contributions argue for a more systematic engagement with
ethical issues in training by proposing not only theoretical approaches but also various activity types.
Kiraly, Don. 2000. A Social Constructivist Approach to Translator Education. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Kiraly capitalises on the traditional constructivist approach to learning and enriches it with a social
dimension to respond to the specific needs of the translation classroom, proposing a teaching method
that other translation teachers can adopt. The social constructivist approach maintains that knowledge
is constructed both by social/interpersonal activity and through cognitive thinking processes, which
appears to be particularly important for “ethical” decision-making as well.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2000. “Beyond Ambivalence: Postmodernity and the Ethics of Translation.” PhD. Diss.,
This book provides an extensive discussion of the “ethical” in Translation Studies. In the context of
such discussion, it highlights the relevance of the postmodern approach as a tool to combine different
theories, with the ultimate aim of fostering continued self-reflexivity.
350
23
Ethics of translator and
interpreter education
1 Introduction
As discussed in Chapter 22 “Ethics in translator and interpreter education” in this volume, in
recent years university-level translator and interpreter (T&I) education has gradually incorpo-
rated professional ethics into the curriculum. If we shift the focus from the question of how
ethics is taught to the question of how ethics are conceived in education, we can observe that the
ethical discussion is mainly focused on the moral duties and civil rights of teachers and students.
A thorough reflection on the ethics of T&I education should, however, turn its attention towards
the ways in which the pedagogical relationship between teachers and students is conceptualized
and manifested. Approaching “ethics” in this context means also thinking about the role that
T&I education and T&I educational institutions play in a given society.
In this chapter, we will examine the ways in which ethics can be understood at the level of
the T&I educational institutions and at the level of the educational practices taking place within
these institutions. Furthermore, we will focus on two different and conflicting aspects of educat-
ing translators and interpreters – socialization and self-formation – and will explore the tensions
and ethical challenges that these dimensions pose. Moreover, we will point out that education
triggers responsibilities from the side of educators, students, and educational institutions. At the
end of the chapter, we will outline some emerging areas which are strongly related to the ethics
of T&I education, namely the relation between professionalization, T&I education, and ethics,
as well as the ethical challenges of designing a curriculum for translators and interpreters.
2 Ethics of translator and interpreter education: a historical trajectory
2.1 Ethics and T&I educational institutions

Institutions for T&I education grapple with ethical issues regarding the motivations behind
their establishment. The purpose and the legitimation of T&I education is subject to historical,
cultural, and social conditions, which also shape the manner in which “education,” “translation,”
and their relation to “ethics” are perceived. Educational institutions explicitly play a political role
in society and instil certain ethical values and attitudes in the classroom. From this viewpoint,
351
education can be considered a place where political demands and agendas are implemented, and
where different forces and interests impose themselves on the teaching process (Derrida 2002b).
Hence, thinking about ethics in this context must take into account the power relations that
structure the agents and their possible feld of educational action.
The case of the Seminar for Oriental Languages at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin
(today Humboldt University of Berlin) is a good example to illustrate how educational institu-
tions can become sites of struggle. The Seminar for Oriental Languages was founded in 1887 to
train translators and interpreters who would serve in the German colonies. As such, they were
prepared not only to assume a role as mediators between languages and cultures, but also to
act politically in defending German colonial interests. As a consequence, the teaching models,
the working languages, as well as the attitude of the teaching staff reflected colonialist politics.
The Seminar for Oriental Languages was established on the basis of certain educational values
and tenets that reflected the national policies and ideologies of that time and society. Moreover,
it contributed to perpetuating existing power structures. In this sense, T&I students, trainers,
and tutors were challenged by ethical issues associated with the mechanisms of oppression and
discrimination (Pacheco Aguilar 2019). Other examples of the entanglement between national
politics and T&I educational programs can be observed in institutions like the Imperial Royal
Academy for Oriental Languages founded in Vienna in 1754 (Wolf 2012, 170–188) or the École
des Enfants de Langues established in 1669 in Constantinople by the French Prime Minister
Jean-Baptiste Colbert (Balli 1997; Cáceres-Würsig 2012).
With the beginning of the degree programmes for translating and interpreting at the uni-
versity level after the Second World War, T&I education became tightly linked to general
university policies. This brought new ethical questions into T&I education. In Germany, for
instance, a major objective of the universities in both West and East was to “civilize” the society
after Nazism. Therefore, T&I institutions implemented programmes which not only included
the professionalization of the novice translators and interpreters, but also the induction of
moral and political attitudes in keeping with the social and political imperatives of each society
(Schäffner 2017).
As these historical examples illustrate, the ethics of education, in the sense of the behaviour,
attitudes, and understandings that are considered correct, are generally governed by political and
ideological interests. Present-day T&I educational institutions are also linked to certain educa-
tional policies and to normative ideas regarding translation and its teaching. With the imple-
mentation of the Bologna Process in many European countries, for instance, education has been
progressively conceptualized as an instrument to enhance “competitiveness” and “employability”
(EMT 2009). This prioritization of economic aspects influences not only teaching and learning
practices, but also the way we think about the people involved in these processes as well as their
relationships to each other. Moral and ethical values are hereby framed by economic, political,
and social power structures that also have an impact on our understanding of an “ethical T&I
education.”
2.2 Ethics and T&I educational practices

If we take a closer look at the educational practices, we can observe parallels between how actors
involved in T&I education think about translation and interpreting and how they conceptual-
ize teaching. Both translation and education share a legacy of the logocentric assumption that
meaning can be transferred from one text to another and from the teacher to the students.
From this perspective, teaching translation and interpreting is generally reduced to the “trans-
mission” of knowledge regarding adequate understanding of texts and adequate equivalences
352
Ethics of T&I education
between languages. The T&I classroom has hereby been oriented around a teacher seen as a
repository of translation knowledge who can transfer this knowledge to the students, as Kiraly
(1997) points out:
From this traditional perspective, the instructor is a repository of translation-relevant knowl-

edge. Students demonstrate their lack of knowledge of formal and functional equivalents
when they read of their faulty translations. The instructor then proceeds to fll in those
knowledge gaps with the correct information.
(137)
What we fnd here is a scene of repetition: students repeat the teacher’s ideal translation
which at the same time repeats the meaning of the source text. When translation is seen as
the repetition of an original, T&I education becomes a place where students learn to iterate
certain reproducing techniques and norms. Students, teacher, and translation are considered
as instruments, used to transfer an ideal meaning. At stake is a representational conception
of translation as well as of the teaching performance that should preserve the meaning of
an original without any loss or derivation. This understanding leads to a T&I classroom
in which students acquire “accurate” conceptual and practical knowledge by “training,”
that is, by repeating and exercising (Davies and Kiraly 2006). Within this framework, T&I
students do not have to learn to make choices freely, and consequently to make moral and
value judgements regarding the task they have undertaken, but rather to follow the rules and
to learn equivalence pairs. Educating is associated with an operation performed on passive
objects which reproduce and emulate the original text. Moreover, it is seen as the attempt
to pour content and techniques into learners as though they were vessels waiting to be flled
(Dizdar 1998, 255). In this framework, the bodies (and emotions, feelings, relationships, and
interactions) of translators, of teachers, and of students disappear to clear the way for the
reproduction of the text.
One of the first scholars to criticize this understanding of education was Rosemary
Arrojo (1994):
[U]nder the aegis of logocentrism, what is implicitly taught to aspiring translators is the
notion that the ultimate goal of their work has to be the achievement of the impossible,
the achievement of an omnipotence that would produce a translation that could be free
from any error and survive the passing of time and any contextual change. Consequently,
what traditional theories of tanslation [sic] end up teaching aspiring translators is that they
are preparing themselves to perform a secondary, derivative activity which will never quite
reach its goal no matter how hard they try. What traditional theories of translation ulti-
mately teach aspiring translators is that they should not value their work which, in spite
of its fundamental role in all aspects of our cultural life and in the relationships between
diferent peoples, has never received its due recognition.
(4)
In her analysis, Arrojo questions not only a logocentric notion of translation and education, but
also the ethics behind this kind of educational model: if the aim of T&I education is to cultivate
experts who play a secondary role in transmitting the meaning of a source text, it is not surpris-
ing that T&I classrooms have been characterized by deontological rules such as accuracy, neu-
trality, or impartiality. In this paradigm of sameness, which shapes ethical questions within the
framework of fdelity- and equivalence-based ethics (Koskinen 2000, 16), ethics is understood as
353
normative ethic-moral statements which call for the faithful or loyal subservience of translators
and interpreters to the source text, the author, the client, or the commissioner.
With the essentialism critique and the general focus on difference developed in Translation
and Interpreting Studies, the framework of fidelity and neutrality in T&I education was eroded
considerably. In a world in which translation and interpreting play a major social role, contrib-
uting to the perpetuation or destabilization of power structures, this ethics of “subservience”
reaches its limits. Accordingly, researchers like Arrojo (1994) have pointed out that if we assume
that translation and interpreting can function as political acts, T&I education has to overcome
this framework of fidelity- and equivalence-based ethics and must outline a notion of ethics
based on the responsibility of translators and interpreters as social, cultural, and political agents.
T&I education then moved towards notions such as visibility (Venuti 1998) and responsibility
(Vermeer 1998, 2006, 373–376), which highlight the transformational and productive nature of
translation and interpreting, inside and outside the classroom. From such a viewpoint, translating
and interpreting are linked to an ethical accountability that assigns to translators and interpreters
the responsibility for the potential impact of their professional actions. As such, T&I education
is confronted with the need to be attentive to ethical dilemmas and to bring ethical judgement
into the classroom (Arrojo 2005; Baker 2011; Baker and Maier 2011; Koskinen 2012; see also
Chapter 22 “Ethics in translator and interpreter education” in this volume).
Furthermore, with the essentialism critique, T&I educators perceived the need for finding
new forms of education that leave the “transmissionist” educational framework behind (Davies
and Kiraly 2006). T&I education moved towards “emancipatory” educational approaches that
aimed to empower students by stimulating them to grow as autonomous individuals (Kiraly
2000) and as “emancipated” translators and interpreters, free from the restrictions imposed
by the ethics of “subservience” discussed previously (Bahadır 2011a; Abdallah 2011; Koski-
nen 2012). However, as Biesta (2008) points out, emancipating approaches in education are
confronted with another set of ethical tensions that make this emancipating shift problematic.
Educators face, for instance, the question of being both faithful and unfaithful to the educational
tradition, of both repeating and breaking with the educational canon: on the one hand, students
need to continue the legacy, to reproduce the skills and techniques that educators taught them;
they engage in mimetic processes and try to imitate the performance of the professionals; edu-
cators are committed to safeguarding the translating and interpreting tradition they are part of;
they play a representative role in this tradition and provide a model for students to imitate. On
the other hand, students ought to have the opportunity to leave this legacy behind and to break
with the norm; teachers have to let students change traditions and create something new. This
inherent tension in education imposes on educators the ethical challenge of contributing to the
perpetuation of established practices and understandings, and at the same time also enabling stu-
dents to become autonomous and singular professionals able to exercise their individual agency
and to change the established tradition and way of thinking.
This tension increases significantly when we consider a second aspect: the pedagogical rela-
tionship between educators and students draws on contrasts of both dependence and autonomy.
Educators are in the position of defning and directing students, who are relatively subordi-
nate and willing to accept their advice and direction. At the same time, however, students are
involved in a process of emancipation, of becoming autonomous translators and interpreters
who act for freely chosen reasons and are able to make use of their own reason without direction
from someone else. This tension in the pedagogical relationship is based on a paradox of cultivat-
ing freedom under constraint, as Kant (2007) had acknowledged: “One of the biggest problems
of education is how one can unite submission under lawful constraint with the capacity to use
one’s freedom. For constraint is necessary. How do I cultivate freedom under constraint?” (447).
354
T&I educational researchers attempted to overcome these tensions between preserving tra-
dition and breaking with it, as well as between authority and emancipation, by shifting the
attention from teaching to learning processes (Kelly 2010). The shift from a “teacher-centred” to
a “learner-centred” approach that took place, especially with the rise of social constructivism
in T&I education research (Kiraly 2000), has significantly changed the understanding of what
the role of the teacher should be. In strong opposition to the transmissionist understanding
mentioned earlier, teaching is now redefined as supporting a “natural” process of learning, just
as education is conceptualized as developing “authentic” learning environments (“situated learn-
ing”). Yet one problem of this understanding of educational ethics may be that it reduces the role
of the teacher to that of a “facilitator” of learning and the role of the student to a “consumer” of
learning “services” (Biesta 2006, 19–24). This perception creates an understanding of education
in which it becomes difficult to discuss the pedagogical relation between teacher and students:
if learning just occurs, educators do not have any role to play.
A way to overcome this perception could be to reflect upon the T&I classroom not within
the framework of learning as a cognitive process, but, as we will show in the next section, of
a theory of education that instead of concentrating on the learner alone shifts attention to
the social relationship between the learner, the teacher, and the institution. Considering T&I
education from the perspective of the pedagogical relationship means taking into account the
social relations that are established in the classroom and that are triggered by the intentional
attempt to foster the development of the students as professionals. This makes another aspect
of T&I education evident, which has to be considered when discussing the ethics of educa-
tion, namely that T&I education is not only a matter of learning, but also of professional
socialization.
3 Core issues in ethics of translator and interpreter education: the

ethical nature of T&I education
3.1 Between socialization and self-formation

Teaching ethical awareness implies creating pedagogical environments in which students can
make decisions, assume responsibility, and reflect on the impact of their actions in a “secure”
space (Baker and Maier 2011, 5). Hence, in order to think about ethics, it seems important not
only to promote an ethical judgement in the T&I classroom, but also to reflect on the ethical
aspects of educating translators and interpreters. This involves analyzing the pedagogical relation-
ships between educators and students from a social perspective. The concepts of socialization and
self-formation play a central role here.
On the one hand, education as “socialization,” along with related concepts such as “accul-
turation,” “civilization,” or “cultivation,” is understood to mean making individuals capable of
functioning in a given society. This implies introducing newcomers into an already-existent
group by inculcating socio-cultural content along with behavioural dispositions. This particu-
lar conceptualization of education is common within the discourse on T&I education. Some
authors like Hans J. Vermeer (1986) speak about “professional acculturation” (fachliche Enkul-
turation) in this context, referring to the social process by which students become professional
translators and interpreters (186). Socializing involves, therefore, endowing T&I novice transla-
tors and interpreters with the capacities that are necessary for them to “take their place” in the
profession, that is to become members of the profession. T&I education is thus an instrument used
to obtain a position within the social and economic field. This implies being aware of acting in
the “role” as expert in translating or interpreting.
355
It is interesting to note here that, in sociology, this kind of socializing process is connected
to the construction of a social unit (Simmel 1989 [1890]). The integration of newcomers into
existing cultural, socio-political, and professional structures secures social and cultural continuity
and contributes to the reproduction of existing knowledge and practices. In this context, gradu-
ated students can be viewed as the result of the appropriation of professional norms which are
necessary for maintaining the cohesiveness of the professional group. T&I education as socializa-
tion is associated with the aim of securing the future of the profession and is thus an important
part of the T&I professionalization process. From an ethical viewpoint, however, safeguarding
existing traditions and knowledge runs the risk of perpetuating a system and transmitting a tra-
dition by excluding what is new, subversive, or different. It also faces the peril of perpetuating
asymmetrical power structures as well as “conservative” translation and interpreting concepts
and practices.
Moreover, socialization is often a matter of training, of transmitting norms by imparting
knowledge, techniques, and skills. In the context of T&I education, these norms are outlined
and established in “competence models,” curricula, or institutional practices such as evaluation
and assessment. Professional socialization is linked to the acquisition of knowledge and skills
as well as to the adoption of norms and rules. In this sense, education represents a category of
appropriation. This idea of education entails a social functionality, which again can be linked
to ethics: if the function of education is limited to achieving a “good” position within the eco-
nomic and social hierarchies, it is reduced to the relations within the exchange of commodified
goods. The consequences of this economic logic of education can be described as a “promise
of pleasure and future usability” (Thompson 2005, 522). Education becomes an “investment
strategy that will enable us to compete successfully with other individuals for a better position
within the social hierarchy” (522).
Socialization also requires an expansion of one’s personal worldview, attitudes, and values to
accommodate professional identity. Accordingly, professional acculturation goes hand in hand
with a process by which the attitudes and values of a professional culture are internalized. This
induction of attitudes and values, however, raises controversial issues. By internalizing the profes-
sional culture, T&I students accept both conscious and unconscious tenets that will guide their
professional action and form their identity as translators and interpreters.
As already mentioned in the previous section, with the shift in the T&I pedagogical dis-
course from a teacher-centred to learner-centred education, some measures were proposed to
minimize the impact of imposing dominant norms through teaching. In particular, thinkers in
education have emphasized that educational practice is not directed at objects being cultivated,
but at subjects who act, make decisions, and assume responsibility for their own learning process
(Biesta 2013, 18). In this context, education is seen as a “self-formation” process and grounds
in the idea that education contributes to the emergence of an autonomous professional. Educa-
tion is no longer considered an appropriation process by which the students acquire knowledge
and skills or internalized norms, attitudes, and values, but as a process that enables students to
become individuals who can judge and act freely and justly. It follows that the aim of educa-
tion in this sense is a development that leads the student to become an increasingly ethically
responsible person.
This understanding of education is associated with humanistic goals such as autonomy, sover-
eignty, and freedom, and it is linked to the basic notion of Bildung, a concept rooted in the Ger-
man pedagogical tradition, but which is also related to other concepts like “liberal education,”
which hold analogous positions in other discourses (Masschelein and Ricken 2003, 151). At the
same time, it must be mentioned that the translation of Bildung is not easy; there are rather a
number of terms which each emphasize different aspects of the concept. For example, the aspect
356
of self-formation and self-organization through education is in the foreground of the (construc-

tivist) concept of “autopoiesis”; the idea of fulfilment and personal development is found in the
concepts of individual self-production and spiritual self-formation; and the notion of becoming
autonomous and responsible is associated with concepts like “empowering” (Thompson 2005,
530). Altogether, education as Bildung is conceptualized as an endless task of unfolding and
enlightening the students, so that they can act on their own. This idea of free and unfettered
self-realization leads to a view of T&I education as the process and the result of an engagement
between the self and the world, by which the self gains new perspectives on the world, allowing
it to become more of an autonomous individual. It formulates, therefore, a process of progres-
sive practical self-affirmation and self-determination in and through the world which states
that, through education, novice translators become truly more and more themselves. The aim
of education is an individual self-realization and self-elevation of the students, who transform
themselves from novice translators and interpreters to “experts” and “professionals.” Bildung
regards a self-centred process linked to the emergence of selfhood and autonomy through the
relation to others within an educational environment. It implies an individual process towards
an ideal professional as an autonomous subject acting independently of social and economic
determinations, coercions, and constraints. We have discussed it already: from this perspective,
educating translators and interpreters is conceived as a critical and emancipatory enterprise, i.e.
as a process in which students emancipate themselves from a secondary role as neutral transmit-
ters of information and become responsive professionals.
As already mentioned, these emancipating educational approaches have, in general, been
criticized because of the contradiction of conferring to students the power of acting on their
own behalf by “authorizing” them to operate on their own. Moreover, the paradoxical process
of developing autonomy due to heteronomic forces establishes a relation in which the self is at
the same time interpellated both to affrm and to transform itself (Masschelein and Ricken 2003,
148). In addition, this perspective on education is beset with another problem. The idea of the
professional translator and interpreter contained in the notion of Bildung remains fundamentally
oriented towards the choice of certain attitudes, values, actions, and skills established not by the
subject itself but by the professional community. Through individualization and self-formation,
a process arises which structures the individual translator and interpreter from the outside. Edu-
cation remains, also from the perspective of self-formation, in the framework of a socializing
process determined by educators and educational institutions. Thus, this “individualization”
process cannot be understood in terms of singularity and otherness, but can only be regarded
as a particularization of general ideals surrounding the professional translator and interpreter. In
consequence, the focus on selfhood and individuality tends to ignore the relationship between
education and power. The “humanist” quest for individuality fxes practices and understanding
in the T&I field and restrains the ways in which we conceive of ourselves as translators and inter-
preters. In this context, it must not be forgotten that educating is a form of power (Masschelein
and Ricken 2003, 142) and is structured by educational and institutional policies as well as by
the politics of translation and interpreting.
3.2 Responsibility and an ethics “to come”

Putting together these two tendencies of socializing and self-forming, we can affirm that being
educated is related to that process by which we change the relationship to ourselves, to others, and
to the world (Wimmer 2001, 154). Education bases on a relationship between the subjects and
what is outside them. This implies that education always has to do with intersubjectivity, since it
always involves a relationship with the outside world, with the other. Wimmer argues in this sense
357
that “Bildung can only take place through change, which means it can only take place in relation
to that which is without, other, unknown, an alien” (154). However, one of the main problems in
thinking about the ethical relation to the other concerns the borders of experience of the world
outside and inside ourselves. We are unable to know things-in-themselves, and even often remain
opaque ourselves, as Thompson (2005) points out: “Whenever someone addresses us, we are
never fully able to make out the meaning of what is said, nor the signifcance it has for us” (528).
If we assume that the relation to the others is the basis of ethics (Derrida 1978, drawing on
Levinas), we have to acknowledge that education is essentially an enterprise related to ethics.
Moreover, the encounter between the individual and the other imposes on the subject the ethi-
cal obligation of assuming responsibility (Wimmer 2001, 154). But what does it mean to be
responsible? From an educational viewpoint, to be responsible is bound up with being account-
able and answerable; it is the ability to answer to the call of the students (from the Latin respon-
dere, “to respond”). Responsibility is understood here as responsiveness, as the presence of an
imperative which demands a response to a concrete situation. Ethical education is a responsible
response that shows respect for the concrete particularity of the students in their singularity,
this means an involvement and entanglement with the students, an attentiveness. But how can
educators respond both to the necessity of respecting the other as an autonomous and singular
being and, at the same time, to the necessity of recognizing the other in a pedagogical relation
which reduces them to objects of care?
In education, being responsible poses a double bind: the duty to respect difference and sin-
gularity, while at the same time maintaining the universality of the educational rules. Respon-
sibility here does not, however, re-establish the strong self-transparent subject, but relates to
the impossible experience of the other in its otherness (Derrida 1978; see also Chapter 7 “The
ethics of linguistic hospitality and untranslatability in Derrida and Ricœur” in this volume). The
concept of responsibility on the basis of education addresses an ethics of the other, not as a code
of ethics, but as something that remains “to come” (Bahadır 2007, 213–248). This understand-
ing of ethics acknowledges the fallibility of our actions, without dissolving the challenge of
choosing the “appropriate” action. Our ethical responses and positions cannot hope to fnd fnal
justifcation or clarifcation. This ethics “to come” implies rather the cultivation of a self-critical
attitude which acknowledges our vulnerability, a vulnerability that is combined with a singular
ethical challenge imposed on us, one that acknowledges our at all times partial and situated
nature of understanding. This ethics of the other does not assume a sovereign subject but rather
refers to an unconditional affirmation of an alterity, an obligation to the singular other.
4.1 Professional ethics and T&I education

Reflecting on the ethical dimensions of education contributes to promoting new debates regard-
ing the ethical dimensions of professionalization as the implicit aim of T&I education. It can
also help to question professionalization-oriented thinking as the central legitimation for T&I
educational institutions.
A profession consists of a collective body “to which society entrust the solution of a particular
kind of problem which requires solving” (Monzó 2011, 12). Professional legitimacy and author-
ity bear, therefore, a responsibility and an ethical commitment. Clients place their trust in pro-
fessionals, permitting them to do something for them that they are unable to do by themselves,
in our case: to speak in their name. To be a member of a profession is to be worthy of the trust
of the public in general, and of one’s clients in particular. This trust is bound up with an ethical
358
bond between the professional and the client. A professional practice is, thus, inherently an ethi-
cal one. But what makes professionals, ethically speaking, worthy of trust? What consequences
do the different concepts of professionalization have for the ethics of T&I education?
First, professional ethics can be associated with the possession of a shared sense of values
and attitudes, to be acknowledged by all practitioners. In our field, there are different ways
to describe these shared values and attitudes. In Kiraly’s (2000) notion of professionalism, for
instance, the ethical basis of the translating and interpreting profession is mostly contractual.
Translators and interpreters enter into a contract with their clients which stipulates the sort of
relationship they are building up:
Professionalism . . . would characterize the translator’s ability to work within the social and
ethical constraints of translation situation in a manner that is consistent with the norms
of the profession. This would involve aspects like the commitment to meet deadlines and
to inform a client in due time if a translation will be late, to charge appropriate fees for
translational services without either gouging a customer or dumping one’s services on the
market to undercut competition.
(31)
T&I education aims, in this context, to teach the students to ft these contractual conditions,
which are framed in an economic relation taking place on the market. Professionalism is asso-
ciated with an increased efectiveness by meeting these contractual conditions. Following the
professional norms efectively makes novice translators and interpreters appear more expert,
and expertise bestows professional legitimacy. Accordingly, professional ethics is based on the
possession of special expertise. To learn professional expertise, T&I researchers advocate for
learning settings that foreground experiential learning. This can be achieved through “authentic
project work” (Gouadec 2007, 327–360; Floros 2011; Kiraly 2016) or even through learning
in the workplace. In both cases, students pick up skills and learn to act ethically by working as
(semi-)professional translators and interpreters. The ethical challenges of this kind of pedagogi-
cal approach refer particularly to the economic and political aspects of these learning settings. If
students work professionally or nearly professionally for free in a context in which professional
translators and interpreters would demand remuneration, they are acting against the economic
interest and status of the profession.
A second form of articulating professional ethics is to associate it with professional phronesis
(“practical wisdom”). This notion of becoming virtuous concerns habits and the “right” con-
duct in social situations, but also the ability to make just judgements. Moreover, in speaking of
phronesis we are not only referring to the development towards desirable outcomes that can be
quantified through a code of good practice. Professional phronesis as a practical moral wisdom
in professional practice is also linked to the development of the professional subject as a whole
person. As a holistic quality (Vermeer [2008] 2009), professional phronesis cannot be reduced to
stipulations about desirable and undesirable practices. To become practically wise, researchers
have proposed experiential or practical educational settings that stimulate students to make situ-
ated decisions and embodied judgements. This involves, for instance, engaging with theoretical
literature on ethics (Baker 2011, 274–299), problematizing recurrent deontological principles
(Martín Ruano 2015), analyzing and discussing ethically ambivalent situations (Drugan and
Megone 2011), or writing reflexive translation diaries (Abdallah 2011).
A third aspect in thinking about professional and educational ethics is that professional
phronesis cannot be understood as a quality that permits professionals to always succeed. Pro-
fessionalism is also linked to aspects like vulnerability and impossibility, since interpreters and
359
translators perform a speech act that represents the other, that is to say their professionalism
consists in giving the promise that they represent the other, that they speak in the name of the
other, even though this is not really possible (Dizdar 2009, 98; Bahadır 2010, 133–134, 2011b).
Drawing on Derrida (2002a), T&I professionalism can be associated with “to profess,” that is
“to make a pledge [gage] while committing one’s responsibility” (214) or, in different words, to
make the oath of responding to both the call of the source text and of the target reader seeking
for mediation. Therefore the process of becoming a professional and of fostering the develop-
ment of students as professionals means often teaching and learning to “take on responsibility
for the promise that cannot be kept” (Bahadır 2010, 134). For T&I education, this involves
that novice translators and interpreters should learn to question the nature of the promise itself
(Dizdar 2009, 98). Questions like “Why do I translate?” “For whom?” “Do I translate at all?”
need to be part of the T&I classroom. This also implies that T&I students, but also trainers
and researchers, need to learn to be critical, committed, active, and thus vulnerable to their own
subjectivity (Bahadır 2010, 135). Moreover, it is important to acknowledge “the impossibility
of total control over one’s own decision” as well of “controlling the future effects of what the
translator has signed in the name of the other” (Dizdar 2009, 98; emphasis added).
Finally, from the perspective of the ethics of education, it is necessary to question the common
sense of linking T&I education to the formation of professional translators and interpreters. Asso-
ciating education with work and occupations runs the risk of reducing it to certain professional
profiles in the form of specialized areas that meet the needs of the job market. This leads to a
strict fragmentation of T&I education into different territories of expertise. Strongly specialized
translators and interpreters master only or essentially only one particular subject. Specialization
promises better job opportunities, and then it improves the productivity of the translators and
interpreters, making them more attractive for the industry. But it is also beset with the problem
of a declining development of general skills that goes hand in hand with an increasing expansion
of low-level learning units and highly specialized courses. This polarization of expertise con-
fronts T&I education with a crucial ethical challenge: in a technologized and rapidly changing
professional market, a strong specialization faces the peril of becoming out-of-date, even before
the students have completed their education. T&I educational institutions would hereby be
strongly linked to the economic developments in the industry.
An alternative way of addressing this problem is to consider the aims of T&I education not in
the sense of professionalization, but of helping the students to foster a “translatorial way of think-
ing” (translatorischer Denkstil) and a translational habitus that permits them to develop a critical
attitude towards professional and non-professional translation and interpreting processes (Dizdar
2015, 203–208). The attention does not focus on transfer between two fixed unities (languages,
cultures, or texts), but on the interactions that transform, and even help to build up these uni-
ties as such. This kind of a “translatorial way of thinking” shifts the emphasis on relationships,
difference, and heterogeneity; it contributes to question one’s own worldview and, at the same
time, highlights the everyday life necessity of translating and being translated. Hence, having a
translatorial habitus means being able to reflect about the complexity of translation as an activity
of interacting with the other, of crossing cultural, linguistic, or epistemological boundaries, and
even of forming these boundaries in a political sense (Dizdar 2019).
4.2 Ethics of curriculum design

A last important issue when speaking about the ethics of education concerns curriculum design
and the question of qualification. Curricula and qualification programmes are specifications that
educational institutions lay down and that, once completed, allow students to act professionally
360
as translators and interpreters. Curricula are therefore based on what Hagemann (2016) calls
“a specific concept of what superior performance in translation involves.” The range of activi-
ties that a student should be able to perform after completing the qualification process – from
occupations such as translating highly specialized text on medicine to general considerations
regarding ethical and socio-political values – implies certain knowledge, skills, and dispositions.
In T&I education, curricula are frequently articulated using terms like “translation competence.”
This notion has a certain rhetorical attractiveness (who would not want to become a “compe-
tent” professional?). Another interesting aspect of this concept is that it addresses the practices
that translators should be able to perform rather than what they need to know. The concept of
competence seems to integrate knowledge, skills, and performances (EMT 2009); it is conceived
as a unit that combines theoretical and practical knowledge as well as personal dispositions in a
holistic way.
Within higher education, the concept of competence makes it possible to assess and standard-
ize student performances and attitudes. It focuses on the results rather than on the educational
process and continues a trend in line with an increasingly evidence-based education linked to
standardized accountability and assessments. The predominance of this kind of terminology
reflects a cultural change in higher education that is connected to an increasing market orienta-
tion, economic competitiveness and effectiveness, growing bureaucracy and lessening democ-
racy within the faculties (Pacheco Aguilar 2017, 117–126). It is therefore not surprising that
educational stakeholders use the concept of competence in conjunction with other terms such
as “employability” or “learning outcomes.” Under the surface of this terminology lies, however,
a dominant call for market orientation, which conceives the aim of T&I education as making
the students fit for the industry (Dizdar 2014, 209–210). The concept of competence therefore
reflects certain political and economic tendencies which reduce T&I education to a mere fulfil-
ment of the needs of the market (201).
From an ethical viewpoint, it should be mentioned that the objective of qualification and
curriculum is to enable students to practice their profession in an unforeseeable future. Hence,
an orientation to practice in T&I education should not make us mistake curriculum design
either for the description of (current) professional norms and standards or even for an empirical
description of professional performance itself. Translation and interpreting students may work in
a future in which professional conditions have already shifted. As it is impossible to predict what
the profession will be like in the future, it is problematic to prepare students by focusing only on
the present needs of the market or even on any established range of present conditions. Speci-
fying from an educational perspective what qualifies students to practice the future profession
does not have anything to do with a description of the (professional) present reality, but rather
with judgements about what is educationally desirable in relation to a particular constellation
of educational purposes (Pacheco Aguilar 2016, 26). This does not mean that students should
not be prepared for practicing the profession, but that educators have to assume their ethical
responsibility as teachers. This implies thinking not only in economic terms, but also about the
social and ethical implications of curriculum design.
5 Conclusion
In T&I education, an awareness of the ethical aspects implies reflecting on one’s own educa-
tional institutions, understandings, and practices. Thinking about the ethics in this framework
conceptualizes education as an intrinsically ethical enterprise and brings to light the inseparable
ties between the relation to the other and ethical responsibility. A T&I education has to take into
account the role that T&I educational institutions play in a given society. Educators concerned
361
with ethics also need to be informed about the discourses legitimizing T&I educational institu-
tions and establishing the goals they strive for. On the level of educational practices, it is also
relevant to reflect upon the understandings regarding education, translation, and ethics that
influence teaching performance. In closing, reflecting on the ethics of T&I education involves
familiarity with ethical challenges and an acknowledgement of the singularity of each decision.
It means assuming our responsibility towards something and someone that remains alien to us.

Ethics in translator and interpreter training; research ethics in translation and interpreting stud-
ies; professional translator ethics; conference interpreter ethics; ethics of public service inter-
preting; ethics of volunteering in translation and interpreting; ethics of activist translation and
interpreting; accessibility and linguistic rights; ethics in socialist translation theories.
References
Abdallah, Kristiina. 2011. “Towards Empowerment.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1: 129–54.
Arrojo, Rosemary. 1994. “Deconstruction and the Teaching of Translation.” TextconText 9, no. 1: 1–12.
Arrojo, Rosemary. 2005. “The Ethics of Translation in Contemporary Approaches to Translator Training.”
In Training for the New Millennium: Pedagogies for Translation and Interpreting, edited by Martha Tennent,
Bahadır, Şebnem. 2007. Verknüpfungen und Verschiebungen: Dolmetscherin, Dolmetschforscherin, Dolmetschaus-
bilderin. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Bahadır, Şebnem. 2010. “The Task of the Interpreter in the Struggle of the Other for Empowerment:
Mythical utopia or sine qua non of professionalism?” Translation and Interpreting Studies 5, no. 1: 124–39.
Bahadır, Şebnem. 2011a. “Interpreting Enactments: A New Path For Interpreting Pedagogy.” In Modelling
the Field of Community Interpreting: Questions of Methodology in Research and Training, edited by Claudia
Kainz, E. Prunc, and R. Schögler, 177–210. Münster: LIT Verlag.
Bahadır, Şebnem. 2011b. “The Task of the Interpreter in the Struggle of the Other for Empowerment:
Mythical utopia or sine qua non of professionalism?” In Identity and Status in the Translational Profes-
sions, edited by Rakefet Sela-Sheffy, and Miriam Shlesinger, 263–78. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Baker, Mona. 2011. In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation, 2nd edition. London, New York: Routledge.
Balliu, Christian. 1997. “L’École des Enfants de Langues del siglo XVII: la primera escuela de interpret-
tación en Francia.” In Actas de los VI Encuentros Complutenses en torno a la traducción, edited by Rafael
Martín-Gaitero, and Miguel Ángel Vega Cernuda, 251–60. Madrid: Editorial Complutense.
Biesta, Gert. 2006. Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Biesta, Gert. 2008. “Toward a New ‘Logic’ of Emancipation: Foucault and Rancière.” In Philosophy of Edu-
cation Yearbook: A Publication of the Philosophy of Education Society, edited by Ronald David Glass, 169–77.
Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society.
Biesta, Gert. 2013. The Beautiful Risk of Education. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Cáceres-Würsig, Ingrid. 2012. “The jeunes de langues in the Eighteenth Century: Spain’s First Diplomatic
Interpreters on the European Model.” INTP 14, no. 2: 127–44.
Davies, Maria González, and Donald C. Kiraly. 2006. “Translation: Pedagogy.” In Encyclopedia of Language
and Linguistics, edited by Edward Keith Brown, 81–85. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” In
Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 79–153. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2002a. “University without Condition.” In Without Alibi, translated by Peggy Kamuf,
202–37. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2002b. “Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends.” In Who’s afraid of Philosophy?
Right to Philosophy 1, translated by Jan Plug, 67–98. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
362
Dizdar, Dilek. 1998. “Wer hat den Uberblick? Uberlegungen zu Unterrichtsfach Translationstheorie.”
TextconText 12: 251–61.
Dizdar, Dilek. 2009. “Translational Transitions: ‘Translation Proper’ and Translation Studies in the Human-
ities.” Translation Studies 2, no. 1: 89–102.
Dizdar, Dilek. 2014. “Instrumental Thinking in Translation Studies.” Target 26, no. 2: 206–23.
Dizdar, Dilek. 2015. “Translationswissenschaft als Gegenwartswissenschaft.” In Geisteswissenschaft heute. Die
Sicht der Fächer, edited by Dieter Lamping, 194–209. Stuttgart: Kröner.
Dizdar, Dilek. 2019. “Translation und Grenze. Versuch einer translationswissenschaftlichen Neufiguration.”
In Übersetzung. Über die Möglichkeit Pädagogik anders zu denken, edited by Nicolas Engel, and Stefan Kön-
geter, 57–74. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
Drugan, Joanna, and Chris Megone. 2011. “Bringing Ethics Into Translator Training.” The Interpreter and
EMT. 2009. “Competences for Professional Translators, Experts in Multilingual and Multimedia Com-
munication.” https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/emt_competences_translators_de.pdf
Floros, Georgios. 2011. “‘Ethics-less’ Theories and ‘Ethical’ Practices. On Ethical Relativity in Translation.”
The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1: 65–92.
Gouadec, Daniel. 2007. Translation as a Profession. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hagemann, Susanne. 2016. “(Non-)Professional, Authentic Projects? Why Terminology Matters.” In
Towards Authentic Experiential Learning in Translator Education, edited by Donald C. Kiraly, 33–51. Göt-
tingen: V&R Unipress.
Kant, Emmanuel. 2007 [1803]. “Lectures on Pedagogy.” In Anthropology, History, and Education, edited by
Günter Zöller, and Robert B. Louden, translated by Robert B. Lauden, 434–85. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Kelly, Dorothy. 2010. “Translation Didactics.” In Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Yves Gambier,
and Luc van Doorslaer, 389–96. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Kiraly, Donald C. 1997. “In Search of New Pathways for Translator Education.” In Transfer: Übersetzen –
Dolmetschen – Interkulturalität: 50 Jahre Fachbereich Angewandte Sprach-und Kultuwissenschaft der Johannes
Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in Germersheim, edited by Horst W. Drescher, Lothar Görke, and Jürgen
Herber, 135–52. FASK. Reihe A Bd. 23. Frankfurt am Maim: Peter Lang.
Kiraly, Donald C. 2000. A Social Constructivist Approach to Translator Education: Empowerment from Theory to
Practice. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Kiraly, Donald C. 2016. “Authentic Project Work and Pedagogical Epistemologies: A Question of Com-
peting or Complementary Worldviews.” In Towards Authentic Experiential Learning in Translator Education,
edited by Donald C. Kiraly, 53–66. Göttingen: V&R Unipress.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2000. Beyond Ambivalence: Postmodernity and the Ethics of Translation. Acta Universitatis
Tamperensis 774. Tampere: University of Tampere.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2012. “Public Translation Studies in the Classroom.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer
6, no. 1: 1–20.
Martín Ruano, M. Rosario. 2015. “(Trans)formative Theorising in Legal Translation and/or Interpreting:
A Critical Approach to Deontological Principles.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 9, no. 2: 141–55.
Masschelein, Jan, and Nobert Ricken. 2003. “Do We (Still) Need the Concept of Bildung?” Educational
Philosophy and Theory 35, no. 2: 139–54.
Monzó, Esther: 2011: “Legal and Translational Occupations in Spain: Regulation and Specialization in
Jurisdictional Struggles.” In Identity and Status in the Translational Professions, edited by Rakefet Sela-
Sheffy, and Miriam Shlesinger, 11–30. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Pacheco Aguilar, Raquel. 2016. “The Question of Authenticity in Translator Education from the Perspec-
tive of Educational Philosophy.” In Towards Authentic Experiential Learning in Translator Education, edited
by Donald C. Kiraly, 13–31. Göttingen: V&R Unipress.
Pacheco Aguilar, Raquel. 2017. “Was macht die translatorische Kompetenz politisch? Eine dekonstruk-
tivistische Kritik eines translationswissenschaftlichen Begriffes.” In Translationslehre und Bologna-Prozess.
Unterwegs zwischen Einheit und Vielfalt = Translation/Interpreting Teaching and the Bologna Process: Pathways
between Unity and Diversity, edited by Susanne Hagemann, Julia Neu, and Stephan Walter, 105–32.
TransUD Band 87. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Pacheco Aguilar, Raquel. 2019. “Translation, Lehre, Institution. Eine dekonstruktive Annäherung.” PhD
Diss., Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz. FB 06 Translations-, Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft,
Germersheim/Mainz. Unpublished.
363
Schäffner, Christina. 2017. “Socialist Translation Studies: Theoretical Justification and Implications for
Training.” In Going East: Discovering New and Alternative Traditions in Translation Studies, edited by Larisa
Schippel, and Cornelia Zwischenberger, 405–26. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Simmel, Georg. 1989 [1890]. “Uber sociale Differenzierung.” In Aufsätze 1887–1890, 109–295. Georg
Simmel Gesamtausgabe, Band 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Thompson, Christiane. 2005. “The Non-Transparency of the Self and the Ethical Value of Bildung.” Journal
of Philosophy of Education 39, no. 3: 519–33.
Routledge.
Vermeer, Hans J. 1986. “Ubersetzen als kultureller Transfer.” In Übersetzungswissenschaft, eine Neuorientier-
ung. Zur Integrierung von Theorie und Praxis, edited by Mary Snell-Hornby, 30–53. Tübingen: Francke.
Vermeer, Hans J. 1998. “Starting to Unask What Translatology Is About.” Target 10.1: 41–68.
Vermeer, Hans J. 2006. Versuch einer Intertheorie der Translation. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Vermeer, Hans J. [2008] 2009. “Translationen Grenzen abschreiten. Erweiterte vorläufige Vorlesungsm-
anuskripte (2008/2009).” www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/vermeer/Dateien/Vorlesung_Teil_1.pdf
Wimmer, Michael. 2001. “The Gift of Bildung: Reflections on the Relationship between Singularity
and Justice in the Concept of Bildung.” In Derrida & education, edited by Gert Biesta and Denise Egéa-
Kuehne, 150–75. London, New York: Routledge.
Wolf, Michaela. 2012. Die vielsprachige Seele Kakaniens. Übersetzen und Dolmetschen in der Habsburgermonarchie
1848 bis 1918. Wien: Böhlau.
Further reading
Interpreting 3. New horizons: papers from de third Language International Conference: Elsinore, Den-
mark 9–11 June 1995, edited by Cay Dollerup, and Vibeke Appel, 97–104. Amsterdam, Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
This article highlights some ethical dilemmas of educating translators and interpreters from a poststruc-
turalist perspective.
Review of ethical approaches in translator and interpreting training.
Thompson, Christiane. 2005. “The Non-Transparency of the Self and the Ethical Value of Bildung.” Journal
of Philosophy of Education 39, no. 3: 519–33.
By approaching the relationship of Bildung and selfhood Thompson develops a concept of education in
which the tension between individualization and social determination is not decided in favour of one
over the other, but remains unsettled.
364
24
Research ethics in translation
and interpreting studies
1 Introduction
Notions of ethics in translation and interpreting are often associated with the practice of transla-
tion and interpreting, especially in professional contexts, in which ethical guidance is typically
provided by professional codes of ethics or best practices. This approach to ethics is largely
deontological, resulting in guidelines or rules against which specific behavior or practices can
be evaluated (cf. Pym 1992; Mulayim and Lai 2017). The body of scholarship on the challenges
surrounding this normative, rules-based approach to translator and interpreter behavior has con-
tinued to expand, with increased recognition of power differentials, bias, and agency within the
translator and interpreter’s scope of work, especially in situations of conflict, along with philo-
sophical and empirical challenges to the professional construal of the translator or interpreter
as a “neutral conduit” (see Chapter 15 “Ethics in public service interpreting” and Chapter 20
“Ethics codes for interpreters and translators” in this volume).
Much less scholarly attention has been paid, however, to the ethics of researching translation-
and interpreting-related phenomena (Hekkanen 2007; Valdeón 2017). This dearth of critical
reflection may be the result of translation and interpreting studies having adopted research meth-
odologies from neighboring disciplines – and by extension, the associated ethical practices. Yet,
the trans- and interdisciplinary nature of T&I studies, not to mention its transnational dimen-
sion, calls for sustained inquiry into discipline-specific research ethics. Moreover, many of the
issues that arise in ethical discussions surrounding the practice of translation and interpreting also
merit scrutiny within the context of researching translation and interpreting. Several research
methods volumes provide a foundation for ethically sound research practices in the field (e.g.
Hale and Napier 2013; Saldanha and O’Brien 2014; Angelelli and Baer 2016b; Mellinger and
Hanson 2017), which, together with a number of special issues on research methods (e.g. Pedro
Ricoy and Napier 2017; Monzó-Nebot and Wallace 2020; Xiao and Muñoz 2020), are begin-
ning to fill this gap.
In an effort to provide an overview of the current state of research ethics in translation
and interpreting studies, this chapter begins with a historical overview of the extant literature.
This first section addresses the theoretical considerations related to translation, language, and
power that inform contemporary discussions of ethics in the field. The issues raised include the
365
prevalence of Western bias in dominant research paradigms, the positionality of the researcher
and related questions of power and privilege, and the representation of linguistic and cultural
difference in acts of translation in research contexts. The chapter then discusses institutionalized
practices designed to protect human subjects and to minimize researcher bias throughout the
research process, from planning to analysis and dissemination of results. The chapter concludes
with a discussion of future directions in translation- and interpreting-related research ethics,
which includes the roles that translation and interpreting play in conducting ethical research in
neighboring disciplines as well as ethical questions that arise in relation to the dissemination of
research results and the sharing of research data.
2 Theoretical considerations: translation, language, and power

Research ethics across the humanities and social sciences today involve consideration of the situ-
atedness and geopolitics of knowledge (Haraway 1988; Harding 1991; Mignolo 2000; Chakrab-
arty 2000), including what knowledge gets produced and how that knowledge is circulated, both
of which implicitly or explicitly involve issues of translation – i.e. what knowledge gets translated
or not and how that knowledge is translated. Many of these issues were first raised in the field of
anthropology or in relation to the field of anthropology. In a 1984 address to anthropologists,
Edward Said (1989, 213–214) warned against “the heedless appropriation and translation of the
world by a process that for all its protestations of relativism, its displays of epistemological care
and technical expertise, cannot easily be distinguished from the process of empire.” The ubiq-
uity of translation and interpreting in both data collection and the presentation of ethnographic
findings coupled with the traditional power asymmetries between researchers and their infor-
mants in ethnographic studies led to some of the earliest reflections on the ethics of translation
in research: Asad (1986), Geertz (1983), and James Clifford (1986, 1988). Questions related
to translation’s specific role in the representation of the Other were addressed in other fields,
including translation studies, by Cheyfitz ([1991] 1997), Niranjana (1992), and Venuti (1992),
and more recently by Sturge (1997, 2007), Gentzler (2002), Hermans (2006), Bahadir (2004),
and Tymoczko (2006, 2010). (See also Chapter 8 “The ethics of postcolonial translation” and
Chapter 29 “Ethics of translating sacred texts” in this volume.) That being said, recognizing the
role of translators and interpreters in cross-cultural and cross-lingual research projects continues
in many fields to be the exception to the rule (see Casanova and Mose 2017; Bruchac 2018).
For example, Smith (2012) illustrates how academic research has appropriated knowledge from
indigenous communities and subjugated participants as a result of its intrinsic link with imperial-
ism and colonialism.
Another problem related to these power asymmetries involves Western bias in the method-
ologies used in cross-cultural and cross-lingual research, ranging from periodizations and termi-
nology to ethical vetting of research projects (Schrag 2010). For instance, Ramanathan (2011)
argues that ideological conflict and translation are two ethical dilemmas for researchers in the
context of post-colonialism. The first challenge of ideological conflict is related to the data upon
which researchers build their arguments, and by extension, which data are omitted. Research,
by its very nature, requires scholars to make decisions regarding the scope of a project and the
selection of the data on which their claims will be based. The ideological position of the scholars
may be at odds with the ideology present in the data, such that researchers may choose to select
specific data to support their purposes. Yet the failure to disclose the means by which these data
were selected for inclusion or exclusion may result in a lack of transparency that undermines
the ethical representation and characterization of the work in question. The second challenge,
which Ramanathan terms translation, is related to which data is presented for reception in the
366
Research ethics in T&I studies
West. Here, scholars must determine to what extent specific aspects of themselves as researchers
and the cultures under consideration are revealed to readers.
Also a central concern for researchers today is the hegemony of English, which not only
determines what gets translated and cited (theoretical works in English tend to be far more
frequently translated and anthologized than work in other languages), but also compels scholars
working in non-hegemonic languages to write in English, leading to epistemological impover-
ishment (Descarries 2003, 2014) or, in Bennett’s (2007) formulation, epistemicide. Following
from Said’s (1982) seminal essay “Traveling Theory,” scholars in the field of translation stud-
ies such as Susam-Sarajeva (2002, 2006) have addressed how the hegemony of English and of
Anglophone theory has led to the marginalization of non-hegemonic knowledge, typically
presented, when presented at all, as a case study or as ethnographic data. This is true even in
scholarship concerned with forms of oppression, such as feminism (Reimóndez 2017) and the
LGBT rights movement (Baer 2021). These power asymmetries continue to shape research in
the field of translation studies in fundamental ways and remain one of the most pressing ethi-
cal challenges for scholars working in hegemonic and non-hegemonic languages alike. Indeed,
it is one of the great paradoxes of the field that non-hegemonic communities, which typically
engage in translation far more than their hegemonic counterparts, “are largely absent as a focus
of enquiry from translation theories and histories” (Cronin 2002, 45).
The ethical implications of these power asymmetries are being addressed by researchers in
a variety of ways, first, by encouraging greater reflection on the conceptual frameworks being
used – do they reflect Western bias in their assumptions or in their analytical categories? – and
on the researcher’s positionality, understanding that positionality as complex, characterized by
overlapping oppressions and privileges (see hooks 1984 on interlocking oppressions and Cren-
shaw 1989 on intersectionality). Ramanathan (2011) has called on researchers to revisit their
work from the perspective of the ethical challenges faced and to recognize the provisional nature
of their findings. To that end, Kim (2012) investigates the researcher’s position with respect to
the research community of which he or she is a member, advocating that researchers reveal those
relationships to readers when reporting their findings, while Casanova and Mose (2017) argue
for greater linguistic reflexivity in ethnographic studies.
In the field of translation and interpreting studies, it is becoming increasingly common for
researchers to acknowledge their positionality (see Koskinen 2008; Pokorn 2012), and increasing
attention is being paid to the complex positionality – e.g. race, ethnicity, gender, or citizenship –
of interpreters in asylum hearings (Jacquemet 2005; Stahuljak 2010), in wartime (Rafael 2007),
and in domestic violence hearings (Pozo-Triviño and Fernandes-Del Pozo 2018). This complex
positionality, however, need not be seen as a limitation, especially when it endows the researcher
with a dual perspective (Winkler 1990; Reimóndez 2017, 51). As Pokorn (2012, 13) comments,
the native’s point of view can be
an added value: it can help us see past the embellishments or vilifications of post hoc clari-
fications and interpretations of past events and deeds. Our embeddedness also does not stop
us, through the application of the post-modern hermeneutics of suspicion, from submitting
to our doubt everything that imposes itself as generally known, accepted and universal.
This recognition has also led scholars in the field to critically examine their earlier research
through the lens of discretionary power (Tiselius 2019).
Reflective ethical research practices also require recognition that knowledge construction is
not a solitary act. A variety of voices are typically involved in data collection and the construc-
tion of meaning, but those voices are not always represented or problematized. This is especially
367
relevant with mediated data collection, that is, when interpreters or bilingual research assistants
aid in collecting data from informants or research subjects. Smith (2012), in her volume Decolo-
nizing Methodologies, not only makes the methodological argument for rethinking the means
by which research of indigenous cultures is conducted but also illustrates through case studies
how these approaches can be re-imagined by repositioning indigenous populations as active
contributors to knowledge creation rather than as passive subjects of ethnographic inquiry.
Bruchac (2018) re-interrogates findings from early anthropologists whose work was based on
indigenous informants and credits these individuals for their intellectual contributions. The
failure to acknowledge the multiple voices involved in cross-cultural and cross-lingual research
risks construing the researcher as an omnipotent arbiter of facts, rather than someone embedded
in a dialectic between text, context, and power differentials.
In the field of translation studies, Reimóndez (2017, 51) calls for greater polyphony in the
field, so that “no peripheries are created and that ideas travel in a more multi-directional fash-
ion.” To that end, she advocates for more collaborative translation projects not only between
hegemonic and non-hegemonic communities, but also between non-hegemonic communities,
and for more translator training programs and courses for non-hegemonic languages to sup-
port that goal. In fact, we now see the incentivization of such scholarly translation projects, as
represented by the Michael Henry Heim Translation Prize sponsored by the academic journal
East European Politics & Societies and Cultures. We also see attempts to develop more dialogic and
inclusive relationships between researchers and their informants. Turner and Harrington (2000,
253), for example, model research in interpreting that “entails the use of interactive or dialogic
research methods which attach appropriate significance to informants’ own agendas and to the
sharing of research-driven ‘knowledge.’” Action research is another model that seeks to reimag-
ine a more dialogic and egalitarian relationship between researcher and informants (Nicodemus
and Swabey 2016), which we discuss in the final section.
As evident from the previous discussion, ethical issues are now widely discussed in scholarly
venues in translation studies, although at present there is no recognized code of research eth-
ics specific to the field; therefore, codes developed in related fields are often used to govern or
guide research in translation studies. Some of the more commonly referenced codes are those
used in the social sciences, especially those related to research involving human subjects. The
emergence of those research codes is commonly described as a response to ethical violations,
most prominently as a reaction to biomedical research conducted during World War II. A prime
example of a code of ethics developed during this time is the Nuremberg Code (1947), which
codifies many of the tenets of commonly accepted best practices in research, including voluntary
consent, minimizing risk or harm to subjects, and maximizing benefit.1 Another biomedical
code of ethics that has influenced social science research is the World Health Organization’s 1964
Declaration of Helsinki, which expanded the Nuremberg Code to include protocols specific
to clinical trials.2 This international code provides a set of ethical principles by which research-
ers ought to be bound when working with human subjects. While these codes are undoubt-
edly highly influential in biomedical sciences and have since influenced the social sciences and
humanities, Israel (2015) indicates that the atrocities of World War II are not the sole impetus
behind the development of research ethics and argues against this reductionist view, proposing a
pluralistic view of the development of research ethics both within the biomedical sciences and
in other disciplines.
The applicability of these codes of ethics to the humanities and social sciences has been cri-
tiqued by scholars across disciplines who have focused on issues of institutionalization and regu-
lation of ethics boards (Schrag 2010), monetization and institutional accountability (Van Den
Hoonaard 2011), and the relevance to specific forms of research such as linguistic ethnography
368
(Copland and Creese 2016). To the extent that research on translation and interpreting spans
the humanities and social sciences, T&I researchers need to scrutinize how these codes apply to
their work. T&I scholars must also take stock of the immediate regulatory frameworks within
which they work so as to comply not only with the ethical requirements of their local university
or institution, but also with the larger research communities to which they belong. That is not
to say that these codes of ethics are not of value – quite the contrary. However, the various codes
of ethics that have been developed to regulate research in behavioral and social science research
are not comprehensive in that they do not explicitly address humanistic approaches to research,
such as oral histories, interviews, or questionnaires (Schrag 2010). This critique also applies to
metrics of scholarly productivity designed in the hard sciences, such as impact factor, h-indices,
and citation counts, that do not necessarily capture the scholarly activity in humanistic fields.

While the previous section has focused on macro-level research ethics and the context in which
translation and interpreting studies research is conducted, the main ethical issues addressed in
research codes involve the mitigation of risk – i.e. physical and/or emotional harm to human
subjects – and research bias, as discussed earlier. While some may view the codes as a kind of
checklist, presenting research ethics as a discrete act or set of tasks that must be completed prior
to conducting research, in light of our previous discussion, research ethics are better viewed
as a vital ongoing part of the entire research endeavor, involving reflection at each stage of
the research project. Indeed, reflection and action on ethical issues throughout the research
process may improve the quality of the research. Much of the discussion that follows draws on
the Belmont Report and the Common Rule, which are two US regulations that are used by
institutional review boards to evaluate and oversee research; similar principles underlie other
regulations and codes of ethics globally. This section briefly describes best practices in conduct-
ing research at each stage, from planning to dissemination of results.
3.1 Planning
As most research methods volumes will attest, the initial planning stages of a research project
should consider the ethics of the project. If the project involves human participants, research-
ers are likely to require approval from an ethics committee or institutional review board (IRB)
prior to conducting the work. Regulations surrounding human subjects research vary based on
region, country, and institution and are regularly updated (Israel 2015). As a result, researchers
should verify the specific requirements for their context. In addition, the topic of research may
require additional ethical considerations to be taken into account. For instance, scholars have
examined research ethics issues in corpus linguistics (McEnery and Hardie 2011; Hochgesang
et al. 2010), applied linguistics (De Costa 2016), and language industry studies (Mellinger 2020).
While there is variation among the various ethical regulations, several aspects are relatively con-
stant across social science research, such as risk mitigation, theoretical grounding, and informed
consent.
For many research codes of ethics, there is a utilitarian approach to research that aims to
maximize benefit for participants while reducing harm. To do so, researchers must demonstrate
how potential risk or harm to participants will be mitigated and what steps will be taken to
address undue harm should it occur during the study. The initial planning stages of a research
project require researchers to anticipate potential risks to participants and to establish protocols
to address any should they occur. In the context of translation and interpreting studies, potential
369
risk to participants can run the gamut from personal or professional embarrassment as a result of
a breach of confidentiality or anonymity to emotional discomfort or physical harm. The risks
involved in each study are unique to the context, and researchers must be mindful to avoid
exposing participants unnecessarily to risk (see Saldanha and O’Brien 2014; Mellinger and
Hanson 2017 for extended treatment of these topics). For example, research on interpreting
in domestic violence or other criminal hearings may pose emotional risk to research subjects
(Tipton 2018), especially minors (Böser and LaRooy 2018).
Critical to the success of sound research is establishing the theoretical framework within
which the study will be conducted (Angelelli and Baer 2016a; Muñoz 2016). In line with the
reflexive practices described in the previous section, critically situating the research and the
researcher in the extant literature is a crucial first step and may provide guidance on research
protocols to mitigate risk. Failure to engage the extant literature ultimately impacts the viability
of the study and subsequent dissemination of the results, thereby exposing human participants
to undue risk by participating in a study that might not advance the scholarly community’s
understanding of the phenomena under consideration.
Perhaps one of the most commonly cited aspects of ethical research practices involving
human participants is informed consent. At its core, informed consent involves ensuring volun-
tary participation in a study (Faden and Beauchamp 1986). In many cases, this process involves
providing information about the goals and objectives of the study, along with the potential risks
and benefits of participation. Potential participants usually review a written document that con-
tains this information and should have the chance to ask for any clarification prior to signing the
consent form. Informed consent as a process is the subject of considerable reflection (cf. Candilis
and Lidz 2009; Grady 2015; Resnick 2015), particularly with regard to ensuring that partici-
pants fully understand the associated risks and their ability to withdraw from a study. Likewise,
discussions of informed consent are also linked to the voluntary will of a participant to enroll
in the study without coercion. Due to space considerations, these topics cannot be addressed in
detail here, but several of the previously mentioned research methods volumes in translation and
interpreting studies discuss informed consent, voluntary participation, and vulnerable and disad-
vantaged populations, such as minors, victims of crime and domestic violence, ethnic minorities,
hospital patients, students, and asylum seekers.
3.2 Conducting
Research ethics also figure into the actual conduct of research. For research that is overseen by
ethics committees or institutional review boards, the most obvious feature of conducting ethical
research is adherence to the stipulations and protocols that were approved by these regulatory
bodies. Protocols related to recruiting participants, maintaining confidentiality and anonymity,
and managing data are safeguards designed to mitigate risk to participants and help ensure that
collected data are minimally biased or affected by the data collection process. Data collection,
management, and storage may also be limited by legal or regulatory policies (e.g. the 2016
General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union protects personal data and its use).
Moreover, researchers who adhere to the agreed-upon stipulations during the approval pro-
cess can more confidently report the research procedures upon the conclusion of the study to
enhance the replicability of their work.
As part of the informed consent process, participants are typically provided the opportunity
to withdraw from research studies at any time without penalty. The ability to withdraw consent
during the research process is imperative to maintain participant autonomy and to ensure that
370
they have not been coerced to participate. Moreover, this option for participants mirrors the idea
that informed consent is an ongoing process rather than a one-time act that cannot be revoked
(cf. Resnick 2015).
In some instances, participants may be incentivized to participate with pecuniary or non-
pecuniary benefits. These incentives are often useful to recruit enough participants to take part
in a study; however, they have ethical implications (Grant and Sugarman 2004; Head 2009). For
instance, incentives may be seen as a form of coercion or may undermine the ability of research-
ers to maintain the anonymity of research participants (see Roberts and Allen 2015). Moreover,
incentives that can only be received upon successful completion may compel participants to
remain a part of the study for longer than they initially wanted to be involved. In the case of stu-
dent participants, extra credit and the potential influence on their final grade illustrate the power
differential between the student as participant and the instructor as researcher. Consequently,
these issues need to be carefully considered when conducting the study.
Despite the best efforts of researchers to mitigate risk, accidents and adverse events occur.
The regulations on whether a study should be discontinued based on adverse events or unex-
pected outcomes vary on a case-by-case basis, but researchers must be mindful that deviations
from research protocols need to be evaluated and, in many instances, reported (Shamoo and
Resnik 2015). One extreme example of the adverse events and unexpected outcomes of a
psychological study is the Stanford prison experiment conducted in 1971. This study was
conducted by Philip Zimbardo, who aimed to investigate the influence of perceived power in
a prison setting. College students who were enrolled in the study were assigned to be guards
or prisoners in a mock prison setting that was set up in a college psychology building. After a
short time, the participants who were assigned to be guards began to mistreat the other students
enrolled in the study. While the study was initially planned to last two weeks, it was discon-
tinued after six days (for a full account, see Zimbardo 2007). Since then, additional research
ethics regulations have been implemented to avoid harm and mistreatment of participants in
research studies.
Conducting ethical research, however, extends beyond compliance with ethical approvals
for human subjects. There are ethical issues that surround data collection in text-based or data-
driven studies, such as corpus linguistics, literary analysis, or big data. In the context of corpus
linguistics, researchers must contend with copyright and ethical issues when compiling a corpus.
Texts included in a corpus may contain personal, identifiable information of participants who
might not have consented for their work to be reused in this manner (McEnery and Hardie
2011). Researchers might need to anonymize or de-identify data in the corpus or adopt specific
strategies when sharing built corpora or reporting results to minimize issues surrounding the
identity of text authors. Oral corpora or signed language corpora pose a greater challenge in
this regard, as the voices, timbre, and tone of speakers might be more readily identifiable, despite
the removal of specific identifiers of the speakers. In signed language corpora, videos are typi-
cally used, further complicating the ability of researchers to de-identify speakers who do not
wish to be included (Hochgesang et al. 2010). More recently, studies involving big data analytic
techniques have raised ethical questions regarding applicable ethical frameworks and regulations.
Metcalf and Crawford (2016) outline the ethical debates regarding big data techniques, discuss-
ing several contentious examples such as the emotional contagion study conducted by Facebook
in which users were enrolled in a study without their knowledge and the big data triangulation
techniques used to identify the artist Banksy who had sought to remain anonymous. Those ethi-
cal issues are likely of interest to translation and interpreting studies researchers working with big
data and employing artificial intelligence and machine learning.
371
3.3 Analyzing
The call for more empirical research in translation and interpreting studies over the past twenty
years, along with the incursion of big data and empirical methods in the humanities (e.g. in the
form of digital humanities), have made the ethical analysis of research data a pressing concern.
For example, one of the more trenchant critiques of critical discourse analysis (CDA), which
typically relies on analysis of large digitized corpora, is that the researcher will almost inevitably
find evidence to support what she is looking for (see Mason 2016), and that word frequency
lists can be misleading if the valence of the words is not analyzed using concordances. Moreover,
researchers today find themselves working with both quantitative and qualitative data, each
requiring ethical treatment specific to the type of data. Many of the research volumes in the field
(e.g. Hale and Napier 2013; Saldanha and O’Brien 2014; Angelelli and Baer 2016b; Mellinger
and Hanson 2017) provide guidance on how collected data should be analyzed in an ethical way
in line with best practices. When analyzing either qualitative or quantitative data, scholars need
to be mindful that their analytical methods align with the research questions or hypotheses of
the study itself. Data need to be treated in accordance with best practices in their respective dis-
ciplines, and current research methods scholarship should be consulted to facilitate this process.
For example, quantitative data analyses should be conducted that are appropriate to the research
design and method that were used in the study. In adjacent disciplines, such as health sciences
and psychology, there are increased calls for pre-registering studies so that researchers know
how data will be analyzed prior to data collection (Nosek et al. 2018). These calls aim, in part,
to counteract data mining or fishing expeditions – i.e. the use of statistical methods to generate
results without a guiding research question – and instead allow researchers to document how
results were obtained. Likewise, Panter and Sterba (2011) present guidelines on best practices for
ethical quantitative analysis across a range of statistical techniques and designs. The guidelines
that many of these authors present are an effort to present a holistic view of the results so as to
avoid cherry-picking results in the service of an argument.
Qualitative researchers have called for similar rigor in the analysis of data. For instance, Miller,
Birch, Mauthner, and Jessop (2012) bring together scholars across a range of academic disciplines
to examine the ethical challenges and imperatives of conducting qualitative work. The authors
point out the challenges facing qualitative researchers in light of the growing prevalence of
technology in research and “ethics creep” from the social sciences – i.e. qualitative researchers
are being compelled to consider the kinds of ethical questions discussed earlier, which they had
not traditionally addressed – while advocating for greater rigor and integrity in research. For
example, Irwin (2013) reflects on how qualitative data are embedded and situated in a larger
social context, thereby requiring epistemological thought on the nature of qualitative data itself.
Calls for this type of work echo the need for ethical reflection on issues related to issues of lan-
guage and power in the field of translation studies as outlined in the previous section.
3.4 Reporting
Once data analysis is complete, scholars should aim for transparency in how their results were
obtained. Research methodologists in various disciplines have developed best practices sur-
rounding reporting guidelines (e.g. PRISMA and CONSORT guidelines); translation and
interpreting studies scholars ought to review these guidelines to conform with ethical report-
ing principles. The information that is reported in a study is likely to vary depending on the
methods used, but the general principles of transparency and replicability are useful to guide
this discussion.
372
It should be noted that transparency and replicability are closely related. Transparency in
regard to data collection and analysis ensures that a study can be replicated, so as to confirm
or refute the reported results. Transparency and replicability are therefore key to a researcher’s
ethical participation within a scholarly research community. And so, research that involves
quantitative or qualitative data ought to report the provenance of the data, the methods used to
analyze the data, and the rationale for these methods. This type of reporting requires researchers
to engage with literature specific to research methods to justify how the data were analyzed.
Furthermore, transparency in quantitative data analysis requires that any statistical testing be
reported in full. In translation and interpreting studies, Mellinger and Hanson (2017) follow
current best practices in the statistics literature to advocate for reporting both significant and
non-significant results, as well as effect sizes and confidence intervals. This type of reporting
provides greater insight into the methods used and allows the scholarly community to evaluate
whether the conclusions drawn are in line with the methods used to make these claims. Like-
wise, full reporting of statistical testing prevents researchers from overinterpreting the results
of a study, limiting much of the discussion to support or refute the research questions under
discussion. Similar issues are raised by researchers such as Oakes and Ji (2012) and Zehnalová
and Kubátová (2019) in relation to corpus studies in translation and interpreting studies, and
researchers working with these methods will need to report on the representativeness of their
data and sample size.
Similarly, the means by which the results were obtained should be reported, particularly if
analytical software or statistical packages are used during data analysis. For example, researchers
should provide the name of corpus software (e.g. AntConc, WordSmith Tools) or data coding
software (e.g. nVivo) when describing their methods. Statistical packages such as SPSS or R
should also be explicitly mentioned, as should any of the extensions or packages that allowed
for more sophisticated analyses. Moreover, any data collection tools used, such as eye trackers,
keystroke loggers, or MRI equipment, should be described. The rationale for their inclusion
is again one of transparency and replicability; researchers working with different tools under
different conditions may obtain different results using the same data if the analytical techniques
are not reported.
In line with the calls for reflexive research ethics, any ethical challenges may merit inclu-
sion in the final report of a project. In the simplest of cases, researchers may simply report
that a specific research project was reviewed by an ethics review board, or that they followed
a specific set of ethical principles when conducting their work (e.g. Olohan 2011). In other
cases, ethical dilemmas and their ultimate solution can be described either within the article
itself or as a separate extended treatment (e.g. Bendazzoli 2016; Tiselius 2019). In both cases,
explicit recognition of research ethics as part of the research process inspires greater confi-
dence in the results.
3.5 Disseminating, reviewing, and citing

Insofar as the ultimate goal of a research project is to share the results in order to improve our
understanding of a specific topic or to propose solutions to challenges faced by the relevant
community, research ethics must extend through the dissemination process, and researchers
must be mindful to adhere to the commonly accepted ethical principles involved in the publica-
tion process. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE; publicationethics.org) is a non-
discipline-specific entity that provides guidance and support to academic journals, researchers,
and publishers in this regard, particularly with regard to three academic integrity violations that
occur with the most frequency: plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification.
373
The US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity (ori.hhs.
gov/definition-misconduct; emphasis original) defines these three terms as research misconduct,
and characterizes them as follows:
Research misconduct means fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, perform-

ing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.
a) Fabrication is making up data or results and recording or reporting them.
b) Falsification is manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing
or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the
research record.
c) Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words
without giving appropriate credit.
d) Research misconduct does not include honest error or differences of opinion.
While scholars are likely to nod in agreement that these practices are detrimental and unethical,
the unfortunate reality is that translation and interpreting studies are not immune to these issues.
It is difcult to assess the extent to which academic misconduct occurs in the feld since many
of these issues are seen only by journal editors and peer reviewers prior to publication; however,
there are documented cases.
For instance, Valdeón (2019) describes several instances of recent academic misconduct in the
field of translation and interpreting studies, pointing out the following ethical concerns: preda-
tory journals that publish works without a standard vetting or review process; an author’s simul-
taneous submission of a single work to two or more journals; established scholars’ unwillingness
to review manuscripts; and honorary authorship, which attributes authorship to someone who
contributed little or nothing to the work. As the number of translation and interpreting stud-
ies publications continues to increase, these issues will require greater attention on the part of
scholarly associations, publishers, and the research community as a whole.
Another area of ethical concern raised by Valdeón (2019) is citation practices, particularly
as they relate to self-citation and citation networks. As mentioned previously, research must be
grounded in the extant literature, and credit for previous work needs to be given to scholars who
have laid the foundation for current work in the area. The provenance of these ideas needs to be
attributed, typically in the form of citations to previous work. There are, however, regrettable
citation practices such as citation stacking and citation cartels in which authors inflate citation
counts to their own work through superfluous self-citation or by mutual agreement among
a group of researchers, or citation suppression, in which the scholarship of relevant authors
is systematically ignored (Haustein and Larivière 2015; see also Moed 2005). Self-citation is
not an inherently bad practice; researchers may be extending a previously made argument or
building on previous work. Scholars should be mindful, however, to cite relevant research of
other researchers to present a comprehensive overview of work that has been done in the area,
although we recognize that works from dominant languages are often more frequently cited
for reasons that have more to do with cultural capital than academic value, as discussed in the
earlier section on the geopolitics of knowledge. The peer review process is one ethical safeguard
in place to help avoid these issues, although it faces its own ethical challenges (Souder 2011).
A final ethical consideration during the process of dissemination is that of informing research
participants of the results of the study. Ideally, this process would be ongoing, but this is often not
the case. In some ethical review committees, researchers are required to debrief with research
subjects about the results of a study upon its conclusion. The argument has been made that this
374
is an ethical imperative (Fernandez, Kodish, and Weijer 2003), and that research should not be
published exclusively in venues that are inaccessible to the general public. Increased calls for
open access publications to allow for the dissemination of publicly funded research have led to
renewed and vigorous debates surrounding the ethics of open access publishing (Shaw and Elger
2018; see also Piwowar et al. 2018). Translation and interpreting studies will need to contend
with many of these ethical concerns, and researchers should be mindful of the current state of
academic publishing as the debates surrounding these issues continue to evolve.
4 New debates and emerging topics

While many of the challenges and issues surrounding research ethics at the macro- and micro-
levels are of continuing importance in the field, several newer debates are emerging with regard
to research ethics in translation and interpreting studies, such as the role of translation and inter-
preting in conducting research within and beyond disciplinary boundaries, the re-analysis and
sharing of data, and action research. These three issues have not yet received significant atten-
tion in the field; however, each will be briefly described in the hope that they serve as points of
departure for scholars moving forward.
First, translation and interpreting form part of the informed consent process in a variety of
fields, and the quality of these language services may have an impact on research and ethical
compliance. Kaufert, Kaufert, and LaBine (2009) note the lack of attention paid to translation
and interpreting services in maintaining ethical relationships with participants in biomedical
studies. Some scholars outside of translation and interpreting studies have taken note of the
positive impact interpreters can have on obtaining informed consent (e.g. Lee et al. 2017), while
others have noted the ethical tensions that arise from the inclusion of an interpreter in medical
settings (Barwise, Sharp, and Hirsch 2019). Mack et al. (2013) have shown the efficacy of focus
group testing in refining translations created for HIV prevention. In many cases, however, this
scholarship does not take into account research conducted by T&I scholars, which is perhaps
no surprise given the fact that explicit reflection on translation and interpreting remains an
exception even in the field of ethnography (see Casanova and Mose 2017). As research ethics
guidelines and protocols continue to be revised, translation and interpreting scholars have an
opportunity to lend their expertise to inform best practices in research methods and ethics.
Second, the use, reuse, and sharing of data is another practice that requires greater scrutiny
with regard to research ethics. In many cases, participants consent to provide data that are col-
lected to address a specific set of research questions or hypotheses. The labor-intensive, and at
times, costly, process of collecting data raises questions as to whether data should be reused or
repurposed to examine other research questions. Ethical issues surrounding the reuse of data
have been examined by scholars in a number of disciplines (e.g. Bishop 2009; Yardley et al. 2014;
Corti et al. 2014), and translation and interpreting research may need to grapple with many of
the same topics. Corpus studies often rely on a compiled corpus to examine multiple features of
language; however, as mentioned earlier, ethical issues surrounding corpus compilation must be
addressed in light of the potential for data reuse. Scholars must also reflect on data repositories
and the ethical implications of making data available, particularly in the case of proprietary or
sensitive information that participants might not have initially consented to during the informed
consent process (Mellinger 2020).
A third area of research ethics that has not yet been explored in great detail in translation
studies is the notion of action research, which in the realm of T&I practice and pedagogy
seeks to empower the practitioner or teacher to generate data to inform their practice. Such
participatory approaches provide opportunities for researchers to work in conjunction with
375
their research participants to effect meaningful change (Wurm and Napier 2017). However, as
Nicodemus and Swabey (2016) note, such projects sometimes face difficulty when undergoing
ethical review, which traditionally enforces a strict separation of researcher from informant and
might generate tension between codes of research ethics. While the ethical challenges associated
with these collaborative approaches to research have yet to be seriously explored in translation
and interpreting studies, scholars working in other areas have begun to do so (e.g. Khanlou and
Peter 2005; Brydon-Miller 2008).
Scholars will need to contend with the potential conflict between various approaches to eth-
ics as they conduct this type of research in the field, particularly given the interaction and influ-
ence that researchers have on the communities with which they interact. These three emerging
topics are by no means exhaustive, and many of the issues related to research ethics raised in this
chapter are likely to require additional investigation. Moreover, ethics are embedded through-
out the entire research process, and scholars conducting work in translation studies will need to
attend to these ethical micro-level considerations throughout each phase of the research process,
while being mindful that the macro-level context in which T&I research is embedded will ulti-
mately influence and constrain their work.

Paternity issues; copyright; plagiarism; ethics of translator and interpreter training; codes of
ethics and ethics.
Notes
1 2 trials of war criminals before the nuremberg military tribunals under control council law no.
10, at 181–182 (1949).
2 World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki: Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Sub-
jects, 18th World Med. Assem. (1964).
References
Angelelli, Claudia V., and Brian James Baer. 2016a. “Exploring Translation and Interpreting.” In Research-
ing Translation and Interpreting, edited by Claudia V. Angelelli, and Brian James Baer, 5–13. New York:
Routledge.
Angelelli, Claudia V., and Brian James Baer, eds. 2016b. Researching Translation and Interpreting. New York:
Routledge.
Asad, Talal. 1986. “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology.” In Writing Cul-
ture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford, and George E. Marcus, 141–64.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Baer, Brian James. 2021. Queer Theory and Translation Studies: Language, Politics, Desire. New York: Routledge.
Bahadir, Şebnem. 2004. “Moving in-between: The Interpreter as Ethnographer and the Interpreting-
Researcher as Anthropologist.” Meta 49, no. 4: 805–21.
Barwise, Amelia, Richard Sharp, and Jessica Hirsch. 2019. “Ethical Tensions Resulting from Interpreter
Involvement in the Consent Process.” Ethics & Human Research 41, no. 4: 31–35.
Bendazzoli, Claudio. 2016. “The Ethnography of Interpreter-Mediated Communication: Methodological
Challenges in Fieldwork.” In Addressing Methodological Challenges in Interpreting Studies Research, edited
by Claudio Bendazzoli, and Claudia Monacelli, 3–30. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Bennett, Karen. 2007. “Epistemicide! The Tale of a Predatory Discourse.” The Translator 13, no. 2: 151–69.
Bishop, Libby. 2009. “Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 44,
no. 3: 255–72.
Böser, Ursula, and David LaRooy. 2018. “Interpreter-Mediated Investigative Interviews with Minors: Set-
ting the Ground Rules.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 13, no. 2: 208–29.
376
Bruchac, Margaret M. 2018. Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists. Tucson: Uni-
versity of Arizona Press.
Brydon-Miller, Mary. 2008. “Ethics and Action Research: Deepening Our Commitment to Principles
of Social Justice and Redefining Systems of Democratic Practice.” In The SAGE Handbook of Action
Research, 2nd edition, edited by Peter Reason, and Hilary Bradbury, 199–210. London: Sage.
Candilis, Philip J., and Charles W. Lidz. 2009. “Advances in Informed Consent Research.” In The Ethics
of Consent: Theory and Practice, edited by F. Miller, and A. Wertheimer, 329–46. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Casanova, Erynn Masi de, and Tamara R. Mose. 2017. “Translation in Ethnography: Representing Latin
American studies in English.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 12, no. 1: 1–23.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton,
Cheyfitz, Eric. [1991] 1997. The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to
Tarzan: Expanded Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clifford, James. 1986. “On Ethnographic Allegory.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnogra-
phy, edited by James Clifford, and George E. Marcus, 98–121. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Copland, Fiona, and Angela Creese. 2016. “Ethical Issues in Linguistic Ethnography: Balancing the Micro
and the Macro.” In Ethics in Applied Linguistic Research, edited by Peter I. De Costa, 161–78. London:
Routledge.
Corti, Louise, Veerle Van den Eynden, Libby Bishop, and Matthew Woollard. 2014. Managing and Sharing
Research Data: A Guide to Good Practice. London: Sage.
Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique
of Antidiscrimination Doctrine.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1: 139–68.
Cronin, Michael. 2002. “The Empire Talks Back: Orality, Heteronomy and the Cultural Turn in Interpret-
ing Studies.” In Translation and Power, edited by Maria Tymoczko, and Edwin Gentzler, 45–62. Boston:
University of Massachusetts Press.
De Costa, Peter I., ed. 2016. Ethics in Applied Linguistics Research: Language Researcher Narratives. New York:
Routledge.
Descarries, Francine. 2003. “The Hegemony of the English Language in the Academy: The Damag-
ing Impact of the Sociocultural and Linguistic Barriers on the Development of Feminist Sociological
Knowledge, Theories and Strategies.” Current Sociology 51, no. 6: 625–36.
Descarries, Francine. 2014. “Language Is Not Neutral: The Construction of Knowledge in the Social Sci-
ences and Humanities.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39, no. 3: 564–69.
Faden, Ruth R., and Tom L. Beauchamp. 1986. A History and Theory of Informed Consent. New York:
Fernandez, Conrad V., Eric Kodish, and Charles Weijer. 2003. “Informing Study Participants of Research
Results: An Ethical Imperative.” IRB: Ethics & Human Research 25, no. 3: 12–19.
Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Gentzler, Edwin. 2002. “Translation, Poststructuralism and Power.” In Translation and Power, edited by
Maria Tymoczko, and Edwin Gentzler, 195–218. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Grady, Christine. 2015. “Enduring and Emerging Challenges of Informed Consent.” New England Journal
of Medicine 372, no. 9: 855–62.
Grant, Ruth W., and Jeremy Sugarman. 2004. “Ethics in Human Subjects: Do Incentives Matter?” Journal
of Medicine and Philosophy 29, no. 6: 717–38.
Hale, Sandra, and Jemina Napier. 2013. Research Methods in Interpreting: A Practical Resource. London:
Bloomsbury.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of
Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3: 575–99.
Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives. New York: Cornell
University Press.
Haustein, Stefanie, and Vicent Larivière. 2015. “The Use of Bibliometrics for Assessing Research: Possibil-
ities, Limitations and Adverse Effects.” In Incentives and Performance: Governance of Research Organizations,
edited by Isabell M. Welpe, et al., 121–39. London: Springer.
Head, Emma. 2009. “The Ethics and Implications of Paying Participants in Qualitative Research.” Interna-
tional Journal of Social Research Methodology 12, no. 4: 335–44.
377
Hekkanen, Raila. 2007. “The Role of Ethics in Translation and Translation Studies Research.” Across
Languages and Cultures 8, no. 2: 231–47.
Hermans, Theo, ed. 2006. Translating Others, vols. 1 and 2. New York: Routledge.
Hochgesang, Julie A., Pedro Pascual Villanueva, Gaurav Mathur, and Diane Lillo-Martin. 2010. “Building
a Database While Considering Research Ethics in Sign Language Communities.” In Proceedings of the
4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpora and Sign Language Technologies
at Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC ’10), 112–16. Valletta, Malta: ERLA.
hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Irwin, Sarah. 2013. “Qualitative Secondary Data Analysis: Ethics, Epistemology and Context.” Progress in
Development Studies 13, no. 4: 295–306.
Israel, Mark. 2015. Research Ethics and Integrity for Social Scientists: Beyond Regulatory Compliance, 2nd edition.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Jacquemet, Marco. 2005. “The Registration Interview: Restricting Refugees’ Narrative Performances.”
In Dislocations/Relocations: Narratives of Displacement, edited by Mike Baynham, and Anna De Fina,
197–218. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Kaufert, Patricia, Joseph M. Kaufert, and Lisa LaBine. 2009. “Research Ethics, Interpreters, and Biomedi-
cal Research.” In Critical Link 5: Quality in Interpreting: A Shared Responsibility, edited by Sandra Hale,
Uldis Ozolins, and Ludmila Stern, 235–50. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Khanlou, N., and E. Peter. 2005. “Participatory Action Research: Considerations for Ethical Review.”
Social Science & Medicine 60, no. 10: 2333–40.
Kim, Young Jeong. 2012. “Ethnographer Location and the Politics of Translation: Researching One’s Own
Group in a Host Country.” Qualitative Research 12, no. 2: 131–46.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2008. Translating Institutions: An Ethnographic Study of EU Translation. Manchester, UK:
St. Jerome.
Lee, Jonathan S., Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, Steven E. Gregorich, Michael H. Crawford, Adrienne Green, Jen-
nifer Livaudais-Toman, and Leah S. Karliner. 2017. “Increased Access to Professional Interpreters in the
Hospital Improves Informed Consent for Patients with Limited English Proficiency.” Journal of General
Internal Medicine 32, no. 8: 863–70.
Mack, Natasha, Catalina B. Ramirez, Barbara Friedland, and Soori Nnko. 2013. “Lost in Translation:
Assessing Effectiveness of Focus Group Questioning Techniques to Develop Improved Translation of
Terminology Used in HIV Prevention Clinical Trials.” PLoS One 8, no. 9: e73799.
Mason, Ian. 2016. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” In Researching Translation and Interpreting, edited by Claudia
V. Angelelli, and Brian James Baer, 203–11. New York: Routledge.
McEnery, Tony, and Andrew Hardie. 2011. Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory, and Practice. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Mellinger, Christopher D. 2020. “Core Research Questions and Methods.” In Bloomsbury Companion to
Language Industry Studies, edited by Erik Angelone, Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow, and Gary Massey,
15–35. London: Bloomsbury.
Mellinger, Christopher D., and Thomas A. Hanson. 2017. Quantitative Research Methods in Translation and
Interpreting Studies. New York: Routledge.
Metcalf, Jacob, and Kate Crawford. 2016. “Where Are Human Subjects in Big Data Research? The
Emerging Ethics Divide.” Big Data & Society 3, no. 1: 1–16.
Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking.
Miller, Tina, Maxine Birch, Melanie Mauthner, and Julie Jessop, eds. 2012. Ethics in Qualitative Research,
2nd edition. London: Sage.
Moed, Henk F. 2005. Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation. London: Springer.
Monzó-Nebot, Esther, and Melissa Wallace, eds. 2020. Research Methods in Public Service Interpreting and
Translation. A special issue of FITISPos: Public Service Interpreting and Translation 7.
Mulayim, Sedat, and Miranda Lai. 2017. Ethics for Police Translators and Interpreters. London: CRC Press.
Muñoz Martín, Ricardo. 2016. “Of minds and Men: Computers and Translators.” Poznan Studies in Con-
temporary Linguistics 52, no. 2: 351–81.
Mustajoki, Henriikka, and Arto Mustajoki. 2017. A New Approach to Research Ethics: Using Guided Dialogue
to Strengthen Research Communities. New York: Routledge.
Nicodemus, Brenda, and Laurie Swabey. 2016. “Action Research.” In Researching Translation and Interpreting,
edited by Claudia V. Angelelli, and Brian James Baer, 157–67. New York: Routledge.
Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
378
Nosek, Brian A., Charles R. Ebersole, Alexander C. DeHaven, and David T. Mellor. 2018. “The Prereg-
istration Revolution.” PNAS 115, no. 11: 2600–6.
Oakes, Michael P., and Meng Ji, eds. 2012. Quantitative Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies. Amster-
Olohan, Maeve. 2011. “Translators and Translation Technology: The Dance of Agency.” Translation Studies
4, no. 3: 342–57.
Panter, A.T., and Sonya K. Sterba, eds. 2011. Handbook of Ethics in Quantitative Methodology. New York:
Routledge.
Pedro Ricoy, Raquel de, and Jemina Napier. 2017. “Research Methods in Interpreting Studies.” A special
issue of Translation & Interpreting 9, no. 1.
Piwowar, Heather, Jason Priem, Vicent Larivière, Juan Pablo Alperin, Lisa Matthias, Bree Norlander, Ash-
ley Farley, Jevin West, and Stefanie Haustein. 2018. “The State of OA: A Large-Scale Analysis of the
Prevalence and Impact of Open Access Articles.” PeerJ 6: e4375. DOI: 10.7717/peerj.4375
Pozo-Triviño, María Isabel, and Doris Fernandes-Del Pozo. 2018. “What Public-service Agents Think
Interpreters Should Know to Work with Gender Violence Victims. The ‘Speak Out for Support’ (SOS-
VICS) Project.” Sendebar 29: 9–33.
Pym, Anthony. 1992. Translation and Text Transfer. Berlin: Peter Lang.
Rafael, Vicente. 2007. “Translation in Wartime.” Public Culture 19, no. 2: 239–46.
Ramanathan, Vaidehi. 2011. “Researching-Texting Tensions in Qualitative Research: Ethics in and around
Textual Fidelity, Selectivity, and Translations.” In Ethnography and Language Policy, edited by Teresa L.
McCarty, 255–70. London: Routledge.
Reimóndez, María. 2017. “We need to Talk . . . to each other: On Polyphony, Postcolonial Feminism and
Translation.” In Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives, edited by Olga Castro, and
Emek Ergun, 42–55. London: Routledge.
Resnick, David B. 2015. “Unequal Treatment of Human Research Subjects.” Medical Health Care Philosophy
18, no. 1: 23–32.
Roberts, Lynne D., and Peter J. Allen. 2015. “Exploring Ethical Issues Associated with Using Online Sur-
veys in Educational Research.” Educational Research and Evaluation 21, no. 2: 95–108.
Said, Edward. 1982. “Traveling Theory.” In The World, The Text, and the Critic, 226–47. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Said, Edward. 1989. “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors.” Critical Inquiry 15: 205–25.
Saldanha, Gabriela, and Sharon O’Brien. 2014. Research Methodologies in Translation Studies. New York:
Routledge.
Schrag, Zachary M. 2010. Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965–2009.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Shamoo, Adil E., and David B. Resnik. 2015. Responsible Conduct of Research, 3rd edition. New York:
Shaw, David M., and Bernice S. Elger. 2018. “Unethical Aspects of Open Access.” Accountability in Research:
Policies and Quality Assurance 25, nos. 7–8: 409–16.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd edition. Lon-
don: Zed Books.
Souder, L. 2011. “The Ethics of Scholarly Peer Review: A Review of the Literature.” Learned Publishing
24: 55–74.
Stahuljak, Zrinka. 2010. “War, Translation, Transnationalism: Interpreters in and of the War (Croatia,
1991–1992).” In Critical Readings in Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 391–414. New York:
Routledge.
Sturge, Kate. 1997. “Translation Strategies in Ethnography.” The Translator 3, no. 1: 21–38.
Sturge, Kate. 2007. Representing Others: Translation, Ethnography, and the Museum. New York: Routledge.
Susam-Sarajeva, Şebnem. 2002. “A ‘Multilingual’ and ‘International’ Translation Studies?” In Crosscultural
Transgressions, edited by Theo Hermans, 193–207. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome.
Susam-Sarajeva, Şebnem. 2006. Theories on the Move: Translation’s Role in the Travels of Literary Theories.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Tipton, Rebecca. 2018. “Translating/ed Selves and Voices: Language Support Provisions for Victims
of Domestic Violence in a British Third Sector Organization.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 13,
no. 2: 163–84.
379
Tiselius, Elisabet. 2019. “The (Un-)Ethical Interpreting Researcher: Ethics, Voice and Discretionary
Power in Interpreting Research.” Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 27, no. 5: 747–60.
Turner, Graham, and Frank Harrington. 2000. “Issues of Power and Method in Interpreting Research.” In
Intercultural Faultlines, edited by Maeve Olohan, 253–65. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome.
Tymoczko, Maria. 2006. “Reconceptualizing Western Translation Theory: Integrating Non-Western
thought about Translation.” In Translating Others, edited by Theo Hermans, 13–32. Manchester:
Tymoczko, Maria, ed. 2010. Translation, Resistance, and Activism. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.
Valdeón, Roberto A. 2017. “From Translatology to Studies in Translation Theory and Practice.” Perspec-
tives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 25, no. 2: 181–88.
Valdeón, Roberto A. 2019. “Translation Studies and the Ethics of Publishing.” Perspectives: Studies in Transla-
tion Theory and Practice 27, no. 5: 761–75.
Van Den Hoonaard, Will C. 2011. The Seduction of Ethics: Transforming the Social Sciences. Toronto: Univer-
sity of Toronto Press.
Venuti, Lawrence, ed. 1992. Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. New York: Routledge.
Winkler, John J. 1990. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. New
York: Routledge.
Wurm, Svenja, and Jemina Napier. 2017. “Rebalancing Power: Participatory Research Methods in Inter-
preting Studies.” Translation & Interpreting 9, no. 1: 102–20.
Xiao, Kairong, and Ricardo Muñoz Martín. 2020. “Cognitive Translation Studies: Theoretical Models and
Methodological Criticism.” A special issue of Lingusitica Antverpiensia 19.
Yardley, Sarah J., et al. 2014. “Ethical Issues in the Reuse of Qualitative Data: Perspectives from Literature,
Practice, and Participants.” Qualitative Health Research 24, no. 1: 102–13.
Zehnalová, Jitka, and Helena Kubátová. 2019. “From a Target Population to Representative Samples of
Translations and Translators.” The Translator 25, no. 2: 87–100.
Zimbardo, Philip. 2007. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random
House.
Further reading
Israel, Mark. 2015. Research Ethics and Integrity for Social Scientists: Beyond Regulatory Compliance, 2nd edition.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
This book presents an overview of research ethics guidelines for a number of countries while highlight-
ing the importance to move beyond regulatory compliance to ensure research integrity in the social
sciences.
Mustajoki, Henriikka, and Arto Mustajoki. 2017. A New Approach to Research Ethics: Using Guided Dialogue
to Strengthen Research Communities. New York: Routledge.
This book draws on theories of ethical decision-making to address a range of situations commonly
encountered in the research process and introduces guided dialogue as a means to engage with issues
that arise during the research endeavor.
Panter, A.T., and Sonya K. Sterba, eds. 2011. Handbook of Ethics in Quantitative Methodology. New York:
Routledge.
This edited collection is an up-to-date view of ethical guidelines when collecting, analyzing, and
reporting different types of quantitative data.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd edition. Lon-
don: Zed Books.
This monograph explores the intersection of research methods and imperialism, describing Western
bias in research methods while destabilizing the position of researchers as the sole arbiters and creators
of knowledge.
380
Part IV
25
Ethics in child language
brokering
1 Introduction
Child language brokering (CLB), a form of ad hoc translation and interpreting (T&I) also
grouped with studies in non-professional T&I, is frequently observed in education, emergen-
cies and disaster aids, hospitals and clinics, religious experiences and church, social services,
immigration, among other settings. Studies on CLB and ad hoc translation and interpreting are
reported from Europe (e.g. Austria: Pollabauer 2017; Germany: Meyer 2012; Greece: Apos-
tolou, Yannopoulou, and Papahadjopoulos 2018; Italy: Antonini 2017; Ceccoli 2018, 2019;
Cirillo 2017; Gavioli 2012; Davitti 2015; Baraldi and Gavioli 2017; Switzerland: Hild 2017;
the UK: Angelelli 2015; Bauer 2017; Cline, Crafter, and Prokopiou 2014), the Americas (e.g.
Valdés, Chávez, and Angelelli 2000, 2003; Angelelli 2010, 2016, 2017; Martínez Gómez 2014;
Ticca 2017; Rogl 2017) and Australia (e.g. Hlavac 2017; Napier 2017) to name just a few studies
in various areas of the world. While CLB is discussed at times as a form of ad hoc interpreting,
in this chapter we will focus mostly on CLB with the caveat that, at times, it is impossible to
completely separate them, as evidenced by the case of bilingual youngsters who start interpreting
for their parents early on and continue doing so at adult age. Thus, before we explore the main
topic, a word is necessary about the terms ad hoc and child language broker and how they are
used in this chapter.
The term child language brokers (CLBs), also known as child translator/interpreter, gener-
ally refers to bilingual children/youth brokering communication for members of their family
(Antonini 2017; Cirillo 2017; Orellana 2009; Valdés et al. 2000). There are, however, excep-
tions to this, as when bilingual children/youth are asked to broker/help with communication
by a figure of authority (e.g. a nurse, a school principal) rather than by adults of their family.
Research conducted on child language brokering (see section later) reports that children have
started brokering as early as at the age of 6 (Harris and Sherwood 1978; Valdés et al. 2003;
Orellana 2009; Antonini 2010; Angelelli 2016) and have brokered for family members as well
as for others (e.g. for friends or adults who requested their help). Some continue brokering
for their families at the age of 40 and older (Angelelli 2016) and, at times, the term ad hoc is
383
used to refer to them too. Two entries in Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2019) apply perfectly
to what an ad hoc interpreter does:
1 “concerned with a particular end or purpose; formed or used for specific or immediate
problems or needs” (as there is no qualified T/I provider where communication needs to
occur, so a bilingual person is brought in); and
2 “fashioned from whatever is immediately available” (as language service provided by a
bilingual who may step up on the basis of his/her language proficiency but not necessarily
translation or interpreting skills).
From these defnitions we can see how both may apply to a situation in which bilingual chil-
dren/youth broker communication for their family members. However, while the term ad hoc
does refer to a particular, specifc or immediate problem or need, researchers studying CLBs
report that child language brokering is not necessarily an ad hoc occurrence (Antonini 2010;
Orellana and Reynolds 2008; Valdés et al. 2003). Indeed, it is frequent. It is more the norm than
the exception. Additionally, at times it appears to be quite common for families (as reported in
studies mentioned previously in this paper as well as in Cline et al. 2014, and Napier 2017) to
have to use CLBs in lieu of professional language service (or ad hoc adult interpreters), when this
is not available. Families state that with CLBs they can cope and try to communicate.
CLB is a field of study in its own right. We can trace its origins to at least 40 years, although
the phenomenon is much older (Angelelli 2010) and has not always been referred to as CLB. For
example, the term “natural translator” was used by Harris and Sherwood (1978) during observa-
tions conducted on French-English speaking children in school playgrounds in Canada; the term
“native,” as applied to translators (Toury 1984), alludes to individuals who, based on their commu-
nicative abilities with two languages and having had no formal education in translation, manage
to translate in an acceptable fashion. Additionally, the qualifier “natural translator/interpreter,”
first used by Harris and Sherwood (1978), refers to the perceived natural ability a bilingual person
might have to translate or interpret (we return to this perception about bilinguals in section 2).
In addition, the terms “naïve” and “untrained” also are used. And finally, one term that is used to
refer to both adults and children/youngsters brokering communication is bilingual (see section 3).
Geographic displacement of people as a consequence of natural disasters, need for political
refuge or wars or movement of people due to migration, travels for medical/healthcare services,
pleasure, work or any other reason has linguistic consequences (Angelelli 2011) as well as ethical
ones. Societies have struggled to meet the communicative needs of linguistically diverse people
all over the world (Federici et al. 2019). This is among the various reasons why, in a family of
immigrants, bilingual children/youngsters engage in CLB for their family members.
Acknowledging the issue of communicative needs of non-societal language users (for exam-
ple, the language of some immigrant, indigenous, refugee or minority groups who cannot access
the language used in the place where they live, as is the case, for example, of Hmong speakers
in California or Polish in Scotland) as well as the shortage of qualified interpreters/translators is
necessary to understand the complexity of this issue. However, it does not do much to solve it,
and the pressing need for language provision continues to exist.
Mapping the issue of intercultural/linguistic communicative needs and language provision
(or lack thereof) in our current diverse societies might be helpful to contextualize the call on
children/youngsters to perform such tasks. It may be summarized as follows:
1 technology facilitates exchanges of information by enabling (technologically literate) indi-

viduals to communicate with each other as well as to access services remotely;
384
Ethics in child language brokering
2 an increasing number of exchanges of information occur between users of different lan-

guages belonging to different cultures, as a consequence of human displacement, movement
and increased contact between diverse people;
3 interlinguistic and intercultural exchanges, by definition, bring together users of different
languages (spoken or sign) who cannot communicate directly and, thus, need language
provision;
4 linguistic diversity and human displacement/movement are not stable; they vary across
space and time, making the planning of language-provision services challenging;
5 the number of qualified translators and interpreters to facilitate these exchanges does not
match either the change of linguistic needs or the increase of communicative needs in a
timely fashion;
6 existing opportunities for education or professional development of translators/interpreters
facilitating access to services for linguistic minorities (generally categorized as community/
public service translators/interpreters) are neither sufficient or timely nor appropriate to
cope with changing needs in language provision;
7 current recognition/status of community/public service translators/interpreters as well as
their monetary reward may not attract professional interpreters/translators who hold uni-
versity degrees or certifications to the field.
As the issue of access to communication and/or information for users of non-societal languages
prevails, when a communicative need arises in a family of immigrants and there is no societal
response in the form of a qualifed translator or interpreter, families often resort to their own
members for help. Given immigrant children’s and youngsters’ own bilingual abilities and their
willingness to help, it is not unusual for them to step up and interpret/translate for their families
and members of their immediate communities with various degrees of success (Angelelli 2010).
CLB occurs, however, not only because of children or youth volunteering to do it. Service pro-
viders (medical doctors and nurses) participating in a study on Access to Cross-border Health-
care in the EU1 (Angelelli 2015), for example, discuss that when family members accompany
patients and are present at their appointments, they bring in additional information and know
the patient better. Therefore, they are not prevented from brokering communication during
a medical interview, in fact for these providers, they are preferred even if they interpret only
because they are bilingual.
On the other hand, studying interviews between healthcare providers taking history from
patients mediated by interpreters, Bolden (2000) discusses interpreters’ involvement in the
interview and argues that patients’ voices do not get heard. Discussions about family members
(including CLBs), as well as other ad hoc interpreters taking part in interviews as interpreters,
and their positive and negative influence have been also studied by Zendedel, Schouten, van
Weert, and van den Putte (2018) and Hlavac (2017). Given all of this, we may want to refer to
ad hoc and CLB as not the same. In addition, ad hoc is mostly used to refer to adults broker-
ing communication across languages (see Chapter 28 “Linguistic first aid” in this volume). In
the next section we explore the development of research in CLB by looking at CLBs and their
interaction with other fields of knowledge throughout time.
2 Historical and contextual background

Although not without controversy, interpreting by children/youth (as well as ad hoc interpret-
ing) has gained more attention from researchers in TIS in recent years, although ethics has not
been central in these discussions. One could say that within TIS, in the 21st century, CLB has
385
become a field of inquiry in its own right. This is evident by the existing number of publications
(e.g. Antonini et al. 2017; Evrin and Meyer 2016), conferences (e.g. International Conferences
in Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation 2012 in Bologna, Italy; 2014 in Germersheim,
Germany; 2016 in Winterthur, Switzerland; and 2018 in Stellenbosch, South Africa), doctoral
dissertations (Ceccoli 2019) as well as research funding (e.g. Arts and Humanities Research
Council “Translating Cultures” call from 2014 to 2017) allocated to related topics (e.g. Transla-
tion and Translanguaging). The work on the ethics surrounding these topics is not abundant.
Prior to TIS other fields of inquiry such as bilingualism, cultural studies, education and psy-
chology (to name a few) have paid attention to these phenomena but with different foci. In this
section we review some of them.
2.1 Language contact: individual and societal bi-/multilingualism

CLB and ad hoc T&I occur when there is language contact. Research from bilingualism, lan-
guage contact, and language and society (Valdés and Angelelli 2003; Zentella 1997) has shown
that the phenomenon of language contact can occur within a person, between persons or within
larger groups (ARAL 2003). An example of language contact and bilingualism within a person
can be a language learner, a language teacher, a bilingual engineer, a child language broker as
well as a translator or an interpreter.
Bilinguals are not all identical, and they cannot be subsumed under a single standard (Valdés
and Figueroa 1994, 7). Bilingualism is not a monolithic construct. Research from bilingualism
(e.g. Valdés and Figueroa 1994) has shown a continuum with incipient bilinguals (those who are
beginning to acquire or learn another language) at one extreme and ambilinguals (those who
have the exact same abilities in both languages) at the other. A balanced level of bilingualism is
desirable in T&I. Language proficiency levels, however, are always changing. It requires work
to keep up two languages at the same level of proficiency, in all topics and social situations dur-
ing one’s life (Angelelli 2010). A person may acquire a second language later or earlier in life or
become a balanced or unbalanced bilingual (meaning one language is stronger than the other).
Perfect bilinguals may not exist (Chrystal 1987, 32).
An example of language contact between two or more persons are exchanges between users
of different languages at times doing code-switching or translanguaging, as well as users of dif-
ferent languages communicating with the assistance of an interpreter/translator. Code-switching
occurs when bilinguals switch from one language to the other (e.g. Spanish and English), and
this may occur between sentences or within a sentence (García and Otheguy 2014). Translan-
guaging refers to when individuals who know several languages communicate by using all the
languages they have at their disposal (García and Wei 2014).
The site of language contact in a bilingual child/youngster and the ability to communicate in
two languages as well at times to translate or interpret have been observed (Harris and Sherwood
1978), described in studies on translation (Toury 1984) and empirically researched and measured
in studies on psychology and bilingualism (Malakoff and Hakuta 1991), cultural studies (Orellana
2009) and interdisciplinary ones (Guo 2014), as well as the ethnographic study in education and
giftedness exploring bilingual children/youth talent in translation and interpreting (e.g. Valdés
et al. 2000, 2003).
When populations using different languages come into contact (e.g. whether it is in a coun-
try with a historical presence of groups using different languages or a border area, or in cases of
mass migration), in addition to individual bilingualism, we have societal bilingualism (Fishman
1980). This creates the perfect ecosystem for CLBs (and ad hoc translators or interpreters), for
the reasons explained in the Introduction. This is because in areas where societal bilingualism is
386
present, two languages are used for everyday needs, beyond the individual level. Sometimes these
two languages have a specific function (e.g. one is the language of government and administra-
tion and the other is the language used at home), resulting in bilingualism with diglossia.
Diglossia means the use of two varieties of the same language (e.g. standard and dialect as
in standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic; diglossia with bilingualism means English with one
function and Spanish with the other (Fishman 1991). When bilingualism with diglossia occurs,
the non-societal or minority language is used mostly at home or in private encounters (as with
friends, family or community members with whom the non-societal language is shared) and the
societal language is used at school, government, etc. (as in public encounters).
CLB has been observed more in cases of bilingualism with diglossia when parents or family
members can only speak their home language and the children/youngsters (who are schooled in
the societal language and therefore have some degree of proficiency in it) help the family with
their communicative needs. Additionally, the issue of adult bilinguals acting as ad hoc transla-
tors or interpreters has been problematized, especially in diglossic societies (Meylaerts 2010a,
2010b). Both CLBs and ad hoc translators and interpreters, although not referred to by these
names, have been studied by sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists (Katz 2014a, 2014b;
Valdés et al. 2003; Zentella 1997).
In areas of language contact with societal bi-/multilingualism, language mediation, inter-
preting and translating become more relevant activities because they enable communication
between users of non-societal languages and users of the societal language(s). Without language
provision, monolingual users of non-societal languages may be excluded from public discourse
and denied access to services (Angelelli 2010, 2015, 2018; Davidson 2002; van Dijk 2000) or
unable to interact with members of other cultures and heritages. When societies do not or can-
not accommodate linguistic diversity, CLBs (as well as ad hoc interpreters/translators) fill the
communicative void.
In addition, because the intersection of bi-/multilingualism and T&I goes beyond monolithic
constructs of language proficiency, professionalism or access to services (Angelelli 2015), new
ways of thinking about languages in contact have shed light on the role played by ad hoc, non-
professional interpreters and translators (Ervin and Meyer 2016; Meyer 2012; Angelelli 2010),
as well as on the “linguistic biographies” of immigrants, migrants and heritage speakers (Ham-
mer 2017). Additionally, existing research, policies and practices in translation and interpreting
have encountered a mix of bilinguals and have highlighted the bearing that bilingualism has on
translation and interpreting, especially insofar as it influences the construction of professional-
ism and role.
2.2 The education of gifted bilinguals

Prior conceptualizations of education and bilingualism portrayed bilingual students (children
or youth) as at risk or a problem (cf. White and Kaufman 1997) on the basis that they may not
have the expected command of the societal language. More current conceptualizations on edu-
cation and bi-/multilingualism portray linguistic diversity as a plus, as a gift/talent which needs
to be recognized and nurtured (Angelelli 2000, 2010; Valdés 2003; Malakoff and Hakuta 1991).
Moreover, in countries like Canada, the United States or the United Kingdom, to name just a
few, research on bilingualism and education has demonstrated the importance of nurturing the
giftedness of bilingual children/youth.
Research findings from educational psychology and educational linguistics (Malakoff and
Hakuta 1991; Bialystok and Hakuta 1994; Valdés et al. 2000, 2003; Borrero 2011) have demon-
strated unequivocally that translation and interpreting are not by-products of bilingualism, and
387
that not all bilinguals can successfully translate or interpret at an appropriate level (i.e. to enable
communication). As a result of the ethnography (1996–2001) carried out by a Stanford Uni-
versity team (led by Valdés and Heath entitled “Identifying, Teaching and Assessing the Gifted
through Linguistic and Cultural Lenses”) a curriculum was designed (Angelelli, Enright, and
Valdés 2000) for bilingual learners to expand the offerings of arts courses, at the time mostly
focusing on literature or grammar. The curriculum was piloted in one of the research sites and
later adopted in other schools in the Bay Area in California. Findings from the pilot study and
beyond showed that CLB enhanced students’ cognitive, linguistic, interpersonal and social skills
and fostered the development of decision-making and problem-solving strategies, empathy and
self-esteem (Borrero 2011).
Research from education and bilingualism has also demonstrated the importance of being
mindful about the different types and categories of bilinguals (Valdés and Figueroa 1994; Ange-
lelli 2010) representing the different upbringings of individuals, some of whom may perform as
translators or interpreters during childhood or adolescence. Their upbringings greatly impact
how they understand different communicative situations and shape their expectations as they
provide (or receive) a service. In addition, this different conceptualization of what service is,
what an interpreter or a translator does or where boundaries between the professional and the
personal roles lie should be brought to mind to understand the socialization of student inter-
preters who have experience as child/youth language brokers when deciding on appropriate
pedagogies (Angelelli 2010). The ethics surrounding these educational and pedagogical issues
have not been sufficiently explored by research focusing on translation and/or interpreting.
When discussing pedagogical issues and the student population in T&I classes (second-
language learners and heritage learners), it is worth emphasizing that, although all translators
and interpreters are bilinguals, not all bilinguals can translate or interpret. In fact, among bilin-
guals, professional translators and interpreters have always been a special case at the higher end of
the scale of bilingualism, as they use their languages to work rather than only to communicate.
Therefore, for them a mastery of standardized varieties of their language combination used to
work as well as their professional performance in both languages in different settings with various
degrees of formality and across speech communities is required.
Bilinguals have choices between their language repertoires, and they generally make decisions
based on the physical or social context in which they find themselves, as well as on the social
value ascribed to each language (Hamers and Blanc 2000). This unique ability is a valuable asset
and allows bilinguals to adapt to distinct situations and identify with diverse linguistic and ethnic
groups (Fishman 1991; Niño-Murcia and Rothman 2009). It should be noted, however, that
translators and interpreters, as bilingual professionals, do not have a choice among their working
languages once they are interpreting professionally. The language to be used is given to them
by the interlocutors for whom they interpret and they can neither code-switch nor engage in
translanguaging. This is an important difference between bilinguals who broker based on their
language proficiency and bilinguals who are professional translators or interpreters.
2.3 Child language brokering within translation and interpreting studies

One could argue that the beginning of CLB research followed the steps of Harris and Sherwood
(1978) when they observed “natural” translators between French and English in school play-
grounds in Canada. These bilingual children were perceived as ambassadors for newly arrived
children who could not speak the societal language. This perception of translation and interpret-
ing as innate or acquired skills for bilinguals is at the core of the long-standing debate raising ques-
tions such as “Are translators/interpreters born or made?” or “Is it necessary to teach translation/
388
interpreting to bilinguals?” These questions are closely related to the topic of CLB. At the time,
however, the focus was not on the ethics of having children take roles of adults (after all, the
school staff could have been better placed to help newcomers navigate the unfamiliar environ-
ment) as much as it was on observing the phenomenon of CLB (Harris and Sherwood 1978) and
understanding how CLBs acquire the ability of translating or interpreting at such an early age.
CLB (as well as ad hoc T&I) as a field of inquiry has met some resistance within the TIS com-
munity. In spite of this, both areas have continued to generate interest. As stated by Evrin and
Meyer (2016) in their opening editorial to the special issue on Non-professional Interpreting and
Translation of the European Journal of Applied Linguistics, “Over the last ten years, non-professional
interpreting and translation – perceived as the study of unpaid translation practices – has become
a field of research in its own right” (1). We therefore can discuss ad hoc translation and inter-
preting in a more informed way today than we were able to do 10 or 15 years ago. “The area
of inquiry of non-professional interpreters and translators [NPITs, see Chapter 15 “Ethics in
public service interpreting” in this volume], which includes CLB and ad-hoc practices, is no
longer perceived as the poor relative of Translation and Interpreting Studies” (Antonini 2017, 2).
3.1 Ethics and CLB: access to information and accountability

of service providers
Access to information is key to making informed decisions, especially when it comes to access-
ing public services such as education, justice, health or social services. Not providing equal
access to all eligible members of society is a form of discrimination. When there is a need for a
translator or an interpreter and a professional is not facilitating the interaction, various questions
arise from different perspectives involving ethics, accountability and responsibility. Linguistic
minorities – lawfully living in a country/region (e.g. deaf using sign language or immigrant,
refugees, indigenous members speaking a different language than that of the region/country
in which they reside), paying taxes and contributing to society – many times and for different
reasons cannot communicate using the societal language. The fact that language provision exists
and is less costly than social exclusion (Angelelli 2015) raises ethical questions. It also demands
accountability from government (Pellinen et al. 2018).
These questions and demands are closely related to CLB. Some of them are: why would these
members of society not enjoy the same rights to communication or access to services as users of
societal languages? Why are governments turning a blind eye when CLBs have to step up and
help their families access services when governments have already paid for language services to
be rendered to them? From the perspective of industry, when bidding, winning and charging
for services, why assume quality between professionals and non-professionals is the same? Since
quality does vary between CLB, ad hoc and professionals as well as between novices and experts
(Dillinger 1994; Degueldre 2002), industry has incurred responsibilities and risks by jeopardiz-
ing quality for cost-cutting and/or profit margin increasing as illustrated by the case of serious
translation errors with fatal consequences in a hospital near Epinal (Angelelli 2015).
Turning a blind eye to allowing access to services through CLBs, or assuming that they may
equate access to professional language services, raises ethical and accountability issues at all levels
(see for example Bill AB-292 from the California Legislature 2004 and Quan and Lynch 2010).
Among these are equal access under the law, right to quality services, stress caused to families,
unnecessary confusion, stress/tension caused to CLBs for the ad hoc arrangements and adjust-
ments they need to make within their family dynamics and structure.
389
3.1 Children/youth and adults sharing topics and interactions:

who determines appropriateness? And, role reversal?
When children/youth take part in adult conversations, whether as members of the family or as
performing CLB, they may be exposed to topics which may or may not be appropriate for their
age (e.g. a serious illness in the family, a missed mortgage payment, a crime committed in the
neighborhood or the passing of a friend). The matter of how appropriate it is to expose children/
youth to certain topics is one for each family to determine and, as such, it is personal and private.
However, when families (including children and youth) find themselves in public organizations
such as a hospital or a government agency where they need to access services, and professional
interpreting is not provided, CLB becomes the last resort for families in need of communication.
This is no longer a private matter of the CLB’s family (2004). This is a public matter as govern-
ment agencies or organizations are responsible for asking help from youth/children to broker
communicative events which may or may not be appropriate for them.
Some government agencies and NGOs offer guidelines as to when and where it would not
be good practice to bring CLBs to mediate adult communication. In the homepage of The
Children’s Society in the UK (Children’s Society), for example, there is a list of roles that refugee
and asylum-seeking children take to help parents communicate with service providers as well as
information on good and not-so-good practices. While guidelines might be helpful, they do not
absolve or exclude the organization/stakeholders from accountability and call into question the
ethics of the provider requesting the help of the CLBs. Conversely, and to show the complexity
of these matters, if the CLBs is not allowed to help their parents to communicate on the basis that
the topic is an adult matter, if this matter has a negative outcome or cannot be resolved due to
miscommunication, it would also raise a question on the ethics of the decision vis-à-vis its impact
on the child who may have trouble understanding why he/she was not allowed to help the parent.
Within immigrant families, the role that younger members play in mediating communica-
tion adds to the range of patterns of family interactions (Guo 2014) on a daily basis. Studies on
family dynamics and bilingualism and on family language policy (King and Fogle 2017; Spolsky
2004, 2012) shed light on the trust and respect towards family decision-making. Findings show
immigrant families play as teams. Members help each other by playing to their strengths (e.g. the
youngsters are schooled in the language of the host society and thus see helping family members
with communication as part of what a member of a team does). In the roles played in the family
by younger members, there seems to be an explicit or implicit understanding of who does what
(e.g. who helps with babysitting for a younger sibling, who sets the table, who calls grandma,
who takes the garbage out or who interprets [Valdés et al. 2003; Angelelli 2010; Guo 2014]).
These findings illustrate the risks of transferring family behaviors and ethical judgements from
one ethnic group to another.
Making ethical decisions for one specific case becomes less difficult if guidance can be found
in the law – provided, of course, that the law is enforced. However, in many countries, legisla-
tion covering access to language either does not exist (Angelelli 2015) or, if it exists, is enforced
only partially. For example, in the US there is legislation banning the use of children as family
“translators” in healthcare institutions receiving national funding (California Legislative Infor-
mation 2004). Professional and academic publications continue to report the use of bilingual
children/youth as well as ad hoc translators and interpreters (Valdés et al. 2003; Orellana 2009;
Hsieh 2016; Angelelli 2004a, 2016) in healthcare. In spite of the law, resorting to CLB for adult
interactions, however, is observed not only in healthcare and not only in the US (c.f. Napier
2017). This raises ethical questions on the part of adults requesting the help of CLBs and of
governments’ accountability vis-à-vis these occurrences.
390
The issue of role reversal and its implications for the child, the parents and the family has
been discussed extensively in CLB research (Angelelli 2010) and in developmental psychology
(see discussion in Guo 2014). What has emerged from studies conducted in organizations focus-
ing on education or healthcare, such as hospitals, clinics, schools and social service offices, is
that when children and youngsters interpret for their families, it is not just the adult members
of the bilingual child’s/youth’s family who request help from them. It is also the adults in the
community who cannot communicate with non-societal language users, even when there are
interpreters available and they are not costly. This is an ethical issue. And it is also the child/youth
who volunteers with adults’ consent. In this sense, and as it has been reported (Valdés et al. 2003;
Orellana and Reynolds 2008; Antonini 2010; Angelelli 2016, 2017; Napier 2017), the children/
youth stepping up and trying to help family members is not an arbitrary choice of either the
adult members of the family or the younger ones. It is the consequence of a (sometimes urgent)
communicative need which is not met with language services, i.e. interpreters are not provided,
even when available and affordable (see, for example, Angelelli 2015.)
In this way, the responsibility for reverting roles or placing children/youth in adult conversa-
tions exceeds the realm of the family and becomes a responsibility shared with the organization
and the society. In a way, the parents/family members are placed between a rock and a hard
place: either they have their children broker information for them or they are left with no
information. And what is even more serious is that the children are also placed in this difficult
position: either they broker the information discussed or they feel they are not helping their
parents.
In addition to role reversal and appropriateness or lack thereof, when communication is
brokered by CLBs or ad hoc T&Is, the issue of access to quality language provision for speakers
of non-societal languages in a multilingual society raises even more ethical issues and has driven
many debates current and past.

Several issues, although not new, appear to be attracting new attention and deserve serious con-
sideration. To contextualize this section and avoid discussions in abstract or overgeneralizations,
I will give an example of an ethical dilemma collected during fieldwork in two settings (a public
school and a public hospital). The dilemma refers to accountability and ethics of organizations
offering services to linguistic minorities and having or not having CLB as part of their language
provision. These empirical examples come from data collected during the course of two eth-
nographies involving communication between non-societal language users and users of societal
language (English). CLBs (as well as ad hoc T&Is) were used while providing services. In the
tradition of reporting data in ethnography (Fetterman 2009; Le Compte and Schensul 1999),
the reader should note that these examples are typical of the observations performed during
these studies, otherwise they should not be reported. In other words, these examples do not
constitute unique occurrences.
4.1 Examples of ethical dilemmas surrounding CLB

As more initiatives become available to foster the talents of bilingual children/youth in language
brokering, we continue to ponder the question of private and public spheres when it comes to
family decisions, dynamics and CLB. While it would be presumptuous to attempt to answer
if/when it is appropriate or not to call on and allow children/youth to broker communication
between adults as well as to determine how and why it would be appropriate to do so, it falls
391
within the scope of this chapter to discuss the ethics of the situation and the ethical consequences
of having or not having children/youth engage in brokering.
The first of the examples comes from an ethnographic study conducted in an educational
setting (Valdés et al. 2000, 2003; Angelelli 2000). In this study we found that CLB was used
in teacher-parent conferences, meetings, science fairs, translation of posters and notes to par-
ents, among others. The second one comes from one ethnographic study in three US hospitals
(Angelelli 2004a) and one exploratory study conducted in five Member States of the EU involv-
ing over 112 healthcare settings (Angelelli 2015, 2016). In these studies, we found that CLB
was used to help direct patients to various areas of the hospital, to assist them reading brochures,
test descriptions, medication-intake instructions, as well as to communicate during educational
sessions (e.g. cooking for diabetics, nutrition during pregnancy) as they broker interactions with
other family members who share the language of the CLBs.
Several issues can be identified in these situated practices. These issues are part of current
debates on CLB:
1 Children/youth come into an appointment to school/the hospital with their adult family
members to help them in their communication. In both settings, these children/youth are
not requested to leave the room unless the matter is delicate. They are allowed to help their
own family members in communicating with adults.
2 When bilingual children/youth are present at school/the hospital, in both studies, they are
asked to do CLB for adults/children in the organization who are not their own family members (i.e.
either for other parents in a teacher-parent conference or for another patient at the reception
desk in a hospital, for example). They are asked to do so by the adult in the organization.
3 CLB was used not only when no adult interpreter/translator was available for both sched-
uled and impromptu interactions. In various occasions the child/youth stepped up when
the assigned “interpreter” could not understand the speaker of non-societal language due
to the interpreter’s limited proficiency in it. On these occasions neither the adult family
member nor the provider objected to CLB and the communicative event went on with
various degrees of success.
The examples show how CLB occurs in private encounters (a doctor-patient consultation or
a teacher/parent conference). Unlike public ones, occurring in a court of law or a conference
lecture hall, in private encounters there is no audience. The presence of an audience limits the
possibility of interactions between the parties (i.e. there is a protocol). It also reminds interlocu-
tors that they are performing in the presence of others. The others (i.e. the audience) witness
the interaction and communicative rules are observed, leaving little fexibility to break protocol
and negotiate roles (Angelelli 2004b, 88). In a private encounter, on the other hand, there is
more fexibility, a protocol can be broken and roles are more fuid as they are less clearly defned.
Therefore in a private encounter, family members many times can decide who plays which role
when needed in an interaction.
5 Conclusions
In this chapter we have discussed ethical issues surrounding children and youth’s participation in
language brokering for their friends and families, and even when requested by help from strangers
to communicate. We have considered how the topic of CLB relates to bilingual and multilingual
societies, how it fills a void when access to communication is not provided. It is evident that the
phenomenon of CLB (as well as ad hoc interpreting) is complex and multifaceted. While its
392
exploration sheds light on important points, it also raises several questions. Some questions related
to the education of bilinguals, their giftedness and cultural/linguistic talent have been researched
abundantly (Guo 2014; Malakoff and Hakuta 1991; Angelelli 2010, 2016; Antonini 2010; Bor-
rero 2011; Valdés et al. 2003) and, while we have made some progress and learned much in those
specific areas, in terms of ethics and accountability of stakeholders much remains to be done.
As long as there are people, there is diversity, movement and displacement. Communication
occurs through movement and displacement. When people do not share a language, they cannot
communicate directly. Their communication is facilitated by translators and interpreters. As we have
discussed in this chapter, in bi-/multilingual societies which, at least in principle, support participa-
tive democratic practices, the need to provide access to services for linguistic groups that do not use
the societal language is basic. Individuals cannot participate without access. When access is disre-
garded, individuals and communities get organized helping each other in the same ways families do.
In these situations, organizations as well as families may resort to bilinguals (children, young-
sters) to act as translators/interpreters. Organizations make choices based on availability and cost.
Families make choices based on trust or need. Users of non-societal languages, when not pro-
vided with language services, are denied a choice. In these cases, they resort to whatever means
is available for them to communicate. This may mean relying on their own children. Sometimes,
even when offered an interpreter they still prefer to have a family member, as they can trust their
family member more than they can trust a stranger or the stranger’s abilities.
Because CLB is a situated practice, we have highlighted the need for exploring phenomena
in context rather than reducing them to right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate. Addi-
tionally, we have raised the issue of accountability on the part of requesters for their actions
when involving CLBs in interactions. Every interaction of CLBs in communication is a situated
practice, whether the CLB is child-to-child, child-to-adult or adult-to-adult. We, as ethical and
responsible adult members of society, and as researchers, should look at the phenomenon of
CLB, understand its context, ask whose responsibility it is to provide, allow, ban or even require
CLB, which means to consider if/when it can be either appropriate or inappropriate to engage
children/youngsters in brokering communication in general and adult communication specifi-
cally, as well as to consider the consequences of each and all of these decisions. This chapter and
this volume have afforded us the opportunity to delve into this discussion in context.

Ethics in public service interpreting; ethics of volunteering in translation and interpreting; eth-
ics of activist translation and interpreting; ethics codes for interpreters and translators; research
ethics in translation and interpreting studies; translating and interpreting in conflict and crisis;
accessibility and linguistic rights.
Note
1 The participating Member States were Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. The study
was conducted in a pre-Brexit era.
References
Angelelli, Claudia V. 2000. “Interpreting as a Communicative Event: A Look through Hymes’ Lenses.”
Meta. Journal des Traducteurs 45, no. 4: 580–92.
Angelelli, Claudia V. 2004a. Medical Interpreting and Cross-cultural Communication. London: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
393
Angelelli, Claudia V. 2004b. Revisiting the Interpreter’s Role. Benjamins Translation Library. Volume 55.
Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Angelelli, Claudia V. 2010. “A Professional Ideology in the Making: Bilingual Youngsters Interpreting for
Their Communities and the Notion of (No) Choice.” TIS Translation and Interpreting Studies, 5, no. 1:
Angelelli, Claudia V. 2011. “Translators and Interpreters: Geographic Displacement and Linguistic Con-
sequences.” Special issue of The International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2011: 207. Issue editor,
Claudia V. Angelelli. General editor, Joshua Fishman.
Angelelli, Claudia V. 2015. “A Study on Public Service Translation in Cross-Border Healthcare.” Technical
Report. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. ISBN 978-92-79-47163-6.
Angelelli, Claudia V. 2016. “Looking Back: A Study of (Ad-Hoc) Family Interpreters.” In the Special Issue
of the European Journal of Applied Linguistics: Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation: Transla-
tional Cultures in Focus. Special issue 4: 1, edited by Feyza Erwin, and Bernd Meyer, 5–32. Berlin,
Germany: Mouton de Gruyter
Angelelli, Claudia V. 2017. “Bilingual Youngsters’ Perceptions of Their Role as Family Interpreters: Why
Should Their Views be Measured? Why Should They Count?” In Non-professional Interpreting and Trans-
lation: State of the art and future of an emerging field of research, edited by Rachele Antonini, Letizia
Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi, 259–79. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
Angelelli, Claudia V. 2018. “Cross-Border Healthcare for all EU Residents? Linguistic Access in the Euro-
pean Union.” The Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice 11, no. 2: 113–34.
Angelelli, Claudia, Kerry Enright, and Guadalupe Valdés. 2000. Developing the Talents and Abilities of Linguis-
tically Gifted Bilingual Students: Guidelines for Developing Curriculum at the High School Level., RM02156.
Storrs, CT: The National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. (https://files.eric.ed.gov/
fulltext/ED505444.pdf).
Antonini, Rachele. 2010. “The Study of Child Language Brokers: Past, Current and Emerging Research.”
MediAzioni 10, Special Issue. http://mediazioni.sitlec.unibo.it
Antonini, Rachele. 2017. “Through the Children’s Voice: An Analysis of Language Brokering Experi-
ences.” In Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation: State of the Art and Future of an Emerging Field of
Research, edited by Rachele Antonini, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi, 315–35. Amster-
dam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Antonini, Rachele, Cirillo Letizia, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi. 2017. Non-Professional Interpreting and
Translation: State of the Art and Future of an Emerging Field of Research. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John
Apostolou, Fotini, Effie Yannopoulou, and Angeliki Papahadjopoulos. 2018. Round Table Discussion at
Narratives of Immigration–Community Interpreting as a Right of Passage. The voice of community
interpreters: Community interpreters working in different settings in Greece.
Baraldi, Claudio, and Laura Gavioli. 2017. “Intercultural Mediation and ‘(Non) Professional’ Interpret-
ing in Italian Healthcare Institutions.” In Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation: State of the Art and
Future of an Emerging Field of Research, edited by Rachele Antonini, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and
Ira Torresi, 83–106. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Bauer, Elaine. 2017. “Language Brokering and the Agency of the Interpreter/Translator.” In Non-
Professional Interpreting and Translation: State of the Art and Future of an Emerging Field of Research, edited
by Rachele Antonini, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi, 359–80. Amsterdam, Philadelphia:
Bialystok, Helen, and Kenji Hakuta.1994. In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second Language
Acquisition. New York: Basic Books.
Bolden, Galina. 2000. “Toward Understanding Practices of Medical Interpreting: Interpreters’ Involvement
in History Taking.” Discourse Studies 2, no. 4: 387, 419.
Borrero, Noah. 2011. “Nurturing Students’ Strengths: The Impact of a School-Based Student Interpreter
Program on Latino/a Students’ Reading Comprehension and English Language Development.” Urban
Education 46, no. 4: 663, 688.
California Legislative Information. 2004. Assembly Bill 292. Accessed January 20, 2019. http://leginfo.
legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=200320040AB292
Ceccoli, Federica. 2018. “Child Language Brokering: la percezione degli student di origine stranjera e del
rispettivi insegnanti.” In Studi e ricerche 13 La didattica delle lingue nel nuovo millennio. Italia: Universita
di Bologna.
394
Ceccoli, Federica. 2019. “A Sociolinguistic Perspective on Child Language Brokering: Attitudes, Percep-
tion of Self and Interactional Contributions.” PhD Diss., Universita di Bologna, Italia.
Children’s Society. “Children and Informal Interpreting.” Accessed January, 2020. www.childrenssociety.
org.uk/youngcarer/refugee-toolkit/children-and-informal-interpreting
Chrystal. David. 1987. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Cirillo, Letizia. 2017. “Child Language Brokering in Public and Private Settings: Perspectives from Young
Brokers and Their Teachers.” In Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation: State of the art and Future of
an Emerging Field of Research, edited by Rachele Antonini, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi,
295–314. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Cline Tony, Sarah Crafter, and Evangelia Prokopiou. 2014. “Child Language Brokering in Schools: A
Discussion of Selected Findings from a Survey of Teachers and Ex-Students.” Educational and Child
Psychology, Special Issue. 31, no. 2: 34–45.
Davidson, Brad. 2002. “A Model for the Construction of Conversational Common Ground in Interpreted
Discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 34: 1273, 1300.
Davitti, Elena. 2015. “Interpreter-Mediated Parent-Teacher Talk.” In Linking Discourse-Studies to Professional
Practice, edited by Lubie Grujicic-Alatriste, 176–200. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual matters.
Degueldre, Christian. 2002. “Le rôle de l’imagerie dans la communication réalisée par un interprète.”
META 47, no. 1: 58–86.
Dillinger, Mike. 1994. “Comprehension during Interpreting: What Do Interpreters Know That Bilinguals
Don’t?” In Bridging the Gap: Empirical research in simultaneous interpretation, edited by Sylvie Lambert,
and Barbara Moser-Mercer, 155–89. [Benjamins Translation Library 3]. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John
Benjamins Publishing.
Evrin, Feyza, and Bernd Meyer. 2016. “Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation: Translational Cul-
tures in Focus.” European Journal of Applied Linguistics, Special Issue: 4, no. 1.
Federici, Federico, Sharon O’Brien, Patrick Cadwell, Jay Marlowe, Brian Gerber, and Olga Davis. 2019.
International Network in Crisis Translation: Recommendations on Policies. Policy report. Dublin: Dublin City
University.
Fetterman, David. 2009. Ethnography: Step by Step. Applied Social Research Methods Series. Volume 17.
Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Fishman, Joshua A. 1980. “Bilingualism and Biculturism as Individual and as Societal Phenomena.” Journal
of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 1, no. 1: 3–15.
Fishman, Joshua A. 1991. Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threat-
ened Languages. Clevedon, Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters.
García, Ofelia, and Ricardo Otheguy. 2014. “Spanish and Hispanic Bilingualism.” In The Routledge Hand-
book of Hispanic Applied Linguistics, edited by Manel Lacorte, 639–58. New York, NY: Routledge.
García, Ofelia, and Li Wei. 2014. Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. London, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Gavioli, Laura. 2012. “Minimal Responses in Interpreter-Mediated Medical Talk.” In Coordinating Par-
ticipation in Dialogue Interpreting, edited by Claudio Baraldi, and Laura Gavioli, 201–28. Amsterdam,
Guo, Zhiyan. 2014. Young Children as Intercultural Mediators: Mandarin-Speaking Chinese Families in Britain.
Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto: Multilingual Matters.
Hamers, Josiane F., and Michel Blanc. 2000. Bilinguality and Bilingualism. Cambridge, New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Hammer, Kate. 2017. “Sociocultural Integration and Second Language Proficiency Following Migration.”
In The Linguistic Integration of Adult Migrants: Some Lessons from Research, edited by J.C. Beacco, D. Little,
H.-J. Krumm, and Ph. Thalgott, 91–96. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton in cooperation with the Council
of Europe.
Harris, Brian, and Sheila Sherwood. 1978. “Translating as an Innate Skill.” In Language Interpretation and
Communication, edited by David Gerver, and H. Wallace Sinaiko, 155–70. New York: Plenum Press.
Hild, Adelina. 2017. “The Role and Self-Regulation of Non-Professional Interpreters in Religious Set-
tings: The VIRS Project.” In Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation: State of the Art and Future of an
Emerging Field of Research, edited by Rachele Antonini, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi,
177, 194. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Hlavac, Jim. 2017. “Brokers, Dual-Role Mediators and Professional Interpreters: A Discourse-Based
Examination of Mediated Speech and the Roles That Linguistic Mediators Enact.” The Translator 23,
no. 2: 197–216. DOI: 10.1080/13556509.2017.1323071
395
Hsieh, Elaine. 2016. Bilingual Health Communication: Working with Interpreters in Cross-Cultural Care. Lon-
don, New York: Routledge.
Katz, Vikki S. 2014a. “Children as Brokers of Their Immigrant Families’ Healthcare Connections.” Social
Problems 61, no. 2: 194–215.
Katz, Vikki S. 2014b. Kids in the Middle: How Children of Immigrants Negotiate Community Interactions for Their
Families. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
King, Kendall A., and Lyn W. Fogle. 2017. “Family Language Policy.” In Language Policy and Political Issues
in Education: Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 3rd edition, edited by Teresa McCarty and Stephen
May S. Cham: Springer.
Le Compte, Margaret, and Jean Schensul. 1999. Analyzing and Interpreting Ethnographic Data (Ethnographer’s
Toolkit): 5. Walnut Creek, London, New Delhi: Altamira Press.
Malakoff, Marguerite, and Kenji Hakuta. 1991. “Translation Skills and Metalinguistic Awareness in Bilin-
guals.” In Language and Processing in Bilingual Children, edited by Ellen Bialystok, 141–66. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Merriam Webster Dictionary. 2019. Accessed January 3, 2019. www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/
ad-20hoc-examples
Martínez Gómez, Aída. 2014. “Interpreting in Prison Settings: An International Overview.” In Interpreting
16, no. 2: 233, 259. John Benjamins Publishing.
Meyer, Bernd. 2012. “Ad-Hoc Interpreting for Partially Language-Proficient Patients: Participation in
Multilingual Constellations.” In Coordinating Participation in Dialogue Interpreting, edited by Claudio
Baraldi, and Laura Gavioli, 99–114. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.
Meylaerts, Reine. 2010a. “Multilingualism and Translation.” In Handbook of Translation Studies, Volume 1, edited
by Yves Gambier, and Luc van Doorslaer, 227–30. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.
Meylaerts, Reine. 2010b. “Habitus and Self-Image of Native Literary Author-Translators in Diglossic
Societies.” Translation and Interpreting Studies Special Issue 5, no. 1: 1, 19.
Napier, Jemina. 2017. “Not Just Child’s Play: Exploring Bilingualism and Language Brokering as a Precur-
sor to the Development of Expertise as a Professional Sign Language Interpreter.” In Non-Professional
Interpreting and Translation: State of the art and Future of an Emerging Field of Research, edited by Rachele
Antonini, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi, 381–410. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John
Niño-Murcia, Mercedes, and Jason Rothman. 2009. Bilingualism and Identity: Spanish at the Crossroads with
Other Languages. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.
Orellana, Marjorie Faulstich. 2009. Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth, Language and Culture. Piscat-
away, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Orellana, Marjorie Faulstich, and Jennifer F. Reynolds. 2008. “Cultural Modeling: Leveraging Bilingual
Skills for School Paraphrasing Tasks.” Reading Research Quarterly 43, no. 1: 48–65.
Pellinen, Jukka, Toni Mättö, Kari Sippola, and Antti Rautiainen. 2018. “Blame Game or Dialogue? Finan-
cial, Professional and Democratic Accountabilities in a Complex Health Care Setting.” Accounting,
Auditing & Accountability Journal 31, no. 2: 626–50.
Pollabauer, Sonja. 2017. “Issues of Terminology in Public Service Interpreting: From Affordability through
Psychotherapy to Waiting Lists.” In Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation: State of the Art and Future
of an Emerging Field of Research, edited by Rachele Antonini, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Tor-
resi, 131–56. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Quan, Kelvin, and Jessica Lynch. 2010. The High Costs of Language Barriers in Medical Malpractice, edited by
Sarah Lichtman, and Mara Youdelman. University of California. Berkeley: School of Public Health,
The National Health Law Program. Accessed September, 2019. www.healthlaw.org/publications/the-
high-costs-of-language-barriers-in-medical-malpractice#.Vj78naR-QhY
Rogl, Regina. 2017. “Language-Related Disaster Relief in Haiti.” In Non-Professional Interpreting and Trans-
lation: State of the Art and Future of an Emerging Field of Research, edited by Rachele Antonini, Letizia
Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi, 231–55. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
Spolsky, Bernard. 2004. Language Policy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Spolsky, Bernard. 2012. “Family Language Policy: The Critical Domain.” The Journal of Multilingual and
Multicultural Development 33, no. 1: Language Policy and Practice in Multilingual, Transnational Families
and Beyond: 3–11.
Ticca, Anna Claudia. 2017. “More than Mere Translators: The Identities of Lay Interpreters in Medical
Consultations.” In Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation: State of the Art and Future of an Emerging
396
Field of Research, edited by Rachele Antonini, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi, 107–30.
Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Toury, Gideon. 1984. “The Notion of ‘Naïve Translator’ and Translation Teaching.” In Die Theorie des
Ubersetzens und ihr Aufschusswert fur die Ubersetzungs un Dolmetschdidaktik, edited by W. Willis, and G.
Thome, 186–95. Tubingen: Gunter Narr.
Valdés, Guadalupe. 2003. Expanding Definitions of Giftedness: The Case of Young Interpreters from Immigrant
Communities. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Valdés, Guadalupe, and Claudia V. Angelelli. 2003. “Interpreters, Interpreting and the Study of Bilingual-
ism.” In Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Volume 23, edited by M. Mc Groarty, 58–78. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
Valdés, Guadalupe, Cristina Chávez, and Claudia V. Angelelli. 2000. “Bilingualism from Another Perspec-
tive: The Case of Young Interpreters from Immigrant Communities.” In Research on Spanish in the United
States: Linguistic Issues and Challenges, edited by Ana Roca, 42–81. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Valdés, Guadalupe, Cristina Chávez, and Claudia V. Angelelli. 2003. “A Performance Team: Young Interpret-
ers and Their Parents.” In Expanding Definitions of Giftedness: The Case of Young Interpreters from Immigrant
Communities, edited by Guadalupe Valdés, 63–98. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Valdés, Guadalupe, and Richard Figueroa. 1994. Bilingualism and Testing: A Special Case for Bias. Norwood,
NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
van Dijk, Teun. 2000. “Discourse and Access.” In Rights to Language: Equity, Power and Education, edited by
Robert Phillipson, 73–78. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
White, Michael, and Gail Kaufman. 1997. “Language Usage, Social Capital, and School Completion
among Immigrants and Native-Born Ethnic Groups.” Social Science Quarterly 78, no. 2: 385–98.
Zendedel, Rena, Barbara Schouten, Julia van Weert, and Bas van den Putte. 2018. “Informal Interpret-
ing in General Practice: The Migrant Patient’s Voice.” Ethnicity & Health 23, no. 2: 158–73. DOI:
10.1080/13557858.2016.1246939
Zentella, Ana Celia. 1997. Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers.
Further reading
Antonini, Rachele, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato, and Ira Torresi. 2017. Non-Professional Interpreting and
Translation: State of the Art and Future of an Emerging Field of Research. Benjamin Translation Library 129.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
This edited work presents a collection of essays displaying multiple methods and theoretical frameworks
to study non-professional translating and interpreting. It includes studies on adults as well as children/
youth from spoken as well as sign languages. The empirical studies report results using qualitative,
quantitative as well as mixed methods.
Orellana, Marina. 2009. Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth, Language, and Culture. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Based on longitudinal data on linguistic and cultural brokering of Latino children and youth acting as
“para-phrasers” for their immigrant families on a day-to-day basis, this book presents insights of child/
youth development. Orellana critiques simplistic notions of child–parent role reversal and highlights the
role biculturalism plays in these translation practices. She also shows that exchanges are not unidirec-
tional; instead, they are co-constructed between children/youth translators and their parents.
Valdés, Guadalupe, ed. 2003. Expanding the Definition of Giftedness: The Case of Young Interpreters from Immi-
grant Communities. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Two different bodies of research and literature ground this work: giftedness and translation/interpreting
in a book discussing a five-year ethnographic study looking at bilingual youth translating and inter-
preting to broker communication between societal language users and linguistic minorities. Based on
empirical data, this book challenges the position on translation and interpreting as a by-product of
bilingualism. By identifying, assessing and teaching gifted bilinguals, results unequivocally show that
T&I performed by youngsters/children is a case of giftedness.
397
26
Translating and interpreting
in conflict and crisis
Małgorzata Tryuk
1 Introduction
For two decades now, translation and interpreting in conflict zones and in crisis situations have
received considerable attention in scientific literature. However, despite growing interest and
up-to-date research on the historical trajectories of the subject, more studies are needed on
the ethical implications of multicultural and multilingual communication in conflict or crisis
situations.
Ethical considerations are traditionally associated with questions of neutrality, identity, loyalty
and the different roles of professional translators and interpreters that influence the linguistic
mediator’s position. These are outlined in professional codes of conduct. Distinctive ethical issues
associated with translation and interpreting are increasingly identified with reference to non-
professional, civilian, volunteer or citizen translators and interpreters who lack adequate training
relevant to this particular field and encounter numerous linguistic and cultural challenges. The
issue of poor-quality translation or interpreting produced by untrained linguistic mediators is
closely examined by researchers from the ethical viewpoint (Cambridge 1999). Therefore, new
training models using technological aids that support communication are being developed for
non-professional translators and interpreters in response to real-life actual situations (Federici
and Al Sharou 2018). Also, in a situation of conflict or crisis, ethical implications of linguistic
mediation arise if the issue of language, free access to information and means of communication
is ignored by national or international entities in a humanitarian or disaster setting.
In this chapter, I will be using the word “conflict” to refer to situations of armed or ideologi-
cal confrontation between countries, armies, parties or groups of people, in which a translator
or an interpreter is involved and when their job or their life is at risk. In such a situation, an
assignment’s ethical implications depend on a series of factors, such as the level of professionalism
of the linguistic mediator, knowledge of the languages that are needed in a particular situation,
the cultural dimension and, last but not least, the social and physical environment in which the
translators or interpreters work (Snellman 2016, 266). As defined by Baker (2006, 166), a con-
flict is “a situation in which two or more parties seek to undermine each other because they have
incompatible goals, competing interests, or fundamentally different values.” This approach goes
beyond the comprehension of conflict understood as a metaphor for the tension and resistance
398
T&I in conflict and crisis
which are inevitably present in any intercultural communication (Salama-Carr 2007, 10) and has
specific implications are far as ethical issues are concerned.
In a crisis situation, linguistic mediation takes place between individuals and specific bodies,
non-governmental organizations or institutions involved in rescue or humanitarian operations
(O’Brien 2016). According to Federici (2018, 487–488), translation linked with operations in
crisis or disaster relief following natural disasters (e.g. earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, hurri-
canes, disease outbreaks, mass migrations, etc.) remains a pivotal issue for humanitarian actions.
Even though crisis is a threatening condition that requires urgent action and is characterized by
fast evolution and a high rate of uncertainty (Pescaroli 2014, 86), access to information, as well
as the means of communication, constitutes a basic human right. All people have a fundamental
right to generate, access, acquire, transmit and benefit from information during a crisis, and
the right to information exists at every phase of a crisis, regardless of the geographical loca-
tion, political, cultural or operational context or its severity. The role of communication and
translation in a crisis is of key importance for populations facing disasters, and the ethical issues
of linguistic mediation affect, above all, the role of non-professional and untrained mediators
(Moser-Mercer, Kherbiche, and Clas 2014; Cadwell and O’Brien 2016; INTERACT).
Language brokering in conflict zones or in crisis situations has been present throughout history.
Translators and interpreters have been necessary during conflict or crisis situations: during wars,
in prisoner-of-war and concentration camps, during conquest and colonization, in countries
under foreign occupation, during migration crises and in any emergency or disaster situation.
There is a high demand for their services in refugee camps or in disaster zones where there are
incidents involving mass casualties. In situations of conflict and crisis, language mediation is a
crucial and complex activity which remains largely undocumented and unknown to the general
public. When one side of the conflict does not speak the language of the other, some type of
language brokering is necessary, and it is undeniable that the need for and importance of any
reliable language brokers, professional translators and interpreters or ad hoc appointed bilinguals
are of primary importance.
In conflict or crisis situations, the challenge for translators and interpreters exceeds linguistic
and cultural issues. It also involves ethical judgments and requires conceptualization of ethics of
translation and interpreting which goes beyond the prescriptive nature of codes of professional
conduct for translators and interpreters. Translators and interpreters are not always able to simply
“objectively” interpret between two parties who wish to understand each other. Indeed, it may
happen that the two parties do not wish to engage in mutual understanding at all. Sometimes an
interpreter or a translator must convey information which is offensive, immoral, brutal, stripped
of all human dignity and outside the boundary of any law. At times, the stories interpreters
and translators have to communicate in another language are somewhat “embellished” or even
invented (Todorova 2016). It also happens that language mediators are considered by one of the
sides as “communicative detectives” used by employers to prevent the stories of refugees or vic-
tims from being told and listened to (Jacquemet 2010, 142). Nonetheless, without translators or
interpreters, communication between opposite or adverse parties would often be impossible; so,
the need for and importance of translators and interpreters is undeniable. It is noteworthy that in
some situations, e.g. during wars, both sides of the conflict do not wish to engage in a two-way
communication, and interpreters may not wish to assist one of the sides. It may often happen
that translators or interpreters undertake their tasks without full awareness of the consequences
of their actions for the persons they interpret for or for themselves. It has also been documented
399
Małgorzata Tryuk
that the translator or the interpreter is held accountable for his or her actions and may be accused
of committing a criminal offense and put on trial years after performing the job (Guo Ting 2015;
Lan 2016; Takeda 2016).
From the very beginning, it has been the presence of interpreters and translators, both pro-
fessionals and civilians, in war zones that has prompted researchers to analyze their identities,
their motivations and also the potential risks resulting from their choices as well as the need
for physical and mental protection of the providers of linguistic brokering (Allen 2012; Kahane
2007; Moerman 2005). Due to the intensity of armed conflicts or emergency situations and
the growing visibility of translators and interpreters involved, scholars have been looking into
various aspects of the role and position of translators and interpreters in different historical peri-
ods and in different cultural environments, ranging from the conquest of Latin America (e.g.
D’Amore, Gallegos, and Zimányi 2016; Cáceres Würsig 2017), colonization (e.g. Chang 2016),
16th-century conflicts to World War I (e.g. Cowley 2016; Heimburger 2012; Svoljšak 2012),
the Spanish Civil War (e.g. Baigorri Jalón 2011, 2012), World War II in Europe (e.g. Gómez
Amich 2016), on battlegrounds (e.g. Kujamäki 2012, 2016a and 2016b), in Nazi concentration
camps, (e.g. Tryuk 2011, 2015, 2016; Wolf 2013; Wolf 2016), in the Far East (e.g. Lan 2016;
Takeda 2009, 2016), the Korean War (e.g. Ping Li, Tian, and Huang 2016; Wang and Xu 2016)
and Sino-Japanese war (e.g. Guo Ting 2015) to contemporary wars in Iraq (e.g. Palmer 2007;
Guidère 2008; Baker 2010b; Inghilleri 2010, 2012), Afghanistan and the Balkans (e.g. Snell-
man 2016; Stahuljak 2010a; Tălpaș 2016; Todorova 2016, 2017; Dragovic-Drouet 2007; Baker
C. 2010). The role and fate of local interpreters left behind after the withdrawal from recent
scenes of war is also largely commented on in various press accounts (Frail 2016; Mathieu 2018;
Andlauer and Müller 2019).
All the aforementioned studies put forward the issues of the neutrality of linguistic mediators as
it is established in the professional codes of conduct or ethics. As the codes and professional stan-
dards do not cover all the aspects, dimensions, constraints and expectations of neutrality during an
armed conflict, researchers stressed the need to adjust existing guidelines to that specific military
context. The analyses conducted in different settings and historical periods suggest also that, at
a conceptual level, the principles of neutrality, trust, loyalty and identity of linguistic mediators,
professionals or amateur civilians, which are closely intertwined, need to be redefined according
to the changing situations. Moreover, in studies devoted to wartime (e.g. Rafael 2010; Stahul-
jak 2010a, 2010b) translation is described as an instrument of power and manipulation, where
there is no place for neutrality of the translator or interpreter. The gap between the principles of
neutrality, objectivity, impartiality, invisibility or trustworthiness which are contained in ethical
and professional codes of conduct and a real-life job in a situation of armed conflict has been
recognized and is the object of research in translation and interpretation studies (Snellman 2016).
The principle of neutrality, so effectively hidden under the veil of ethical codes, has today
become one of the key issues of both theoretical and empirical research within translation and
interpreting studies in crisis and conflict-related situations (Inghilleri 2010, 192). Apart from
neutrality, one of the questions extensively discussed in the literature on ethical dilemmas is the
principle of invisibility of the translator or interpreter (Angelelli 2004; Todorova 2016; Tryuk
2015). In numerous papers, scholars have not only recognized the visibility of the interpreter
but also demonstrated the interpreter’s agency. Another issue put forward by researchers in the
field is the question of trustworthiness, which is also an important characteristic of interpreting
and translation in a crisis situation (Todorova 2016).
As mentioned earlier, the foreground topic which is problematized by numerous scholars is
the neutrality of the interpreter or the translator in a conflict or crisis situation (Snellman 2016;
Todorova 2016; Tryuk 2015). This principle refers to not taking sides in a conflict or remaining
400
outside a conflict, despite the fact that the translator actually has a side or is a side in the conflict
him- or herself. While some scholars try to relativize neutrality as a notion by maintaining that
translators and interpreters should strive to encourage all parties to the conflict to tell their story,
others argue that not only is neutrality impossible, but in fact it is the opposite of neutrality that
occurs in the real word. The view of a translator as an always-neutral mediator has been con-
tested in TS research. Inghilleri (2010), Jacquemet (2010), Stahuljak (2010a, 2010b) and Pölla-
bauer (2004) provide many examples of the (mis)use of interpreters and translators in preventing
refugees’ stories being told, in controlling the flow of the interaction between an interviewer
and the interviewee during a refugee status determination or in passing judgement on the cases.
In his study on neutrality of military interpreters, Snellman (2016) concludes, “interpreters are
human beings who are subject to the influence of personal, social and institutional factors and
whose neutrality is shaped in their interactions with their clients” (265). Nonetheless, linguistic
mediators in a conflict or crisis situation can play pivotal roles in an unequal communication
between sides of the conflict, as put forward by Cronin (2002):
The role of interpreters throughout history has been crucially determined by the prevailing
hierarchical constitution of power and the position of interpreters in it. In this respect, if
you and your people are seriously disadvantaged by the hierarchy, the most ethical position
can be to be utterly “unfaithful” in interpreting, in the name of another fdelity, a fdelity
of resistance.
(58–59)
Stahuljak (2010a), who studied interpreting in contemporary war zones, agrees with the previ-
ous statement, adding that during an armed confict,
[t]he only ethical position may be then to disrupt or undermine the “neutral” arbiter, a
practice that Cronin . . . labels “translation as resistance” and describes as “the ways in which
originals can be manipulated, invented or substituted, or the status of the original subverted
in order to frustrate the intelligence-gathering activities of the Imperial Agent”.
(407)
Also, according to Guidère (2008, 174) who addresses ethical issues in translation and interpret-
ing in an armed confict, language mediators should re-examine their idea of social and political
neutrality. For this author, there is no such thing as a neutral translation, as all translations refect
intellectual engagement, ideological choice, lexical selection or communicational orientation
of the translator (127). In this sense, in a war, interpreting and translating is frst and foremost
an “ethical profession.”
Among many other scholars, Baker and Maier (2011) argue that the ethical norms of neu-
trality and non-engagement, as expressed in numerous codes of conduct and taught in many
training programmes, can leave many practitioners with a sense of unease and disorientation.
They stress, “the ethos of neutrality often blinds them to the consequences of their actions” (3).
In such a situation, the only ethical conduct a translator or an interpreter can adopt is that of
accountability or responsibility (3).
After the recent wars at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, in Iraq, Afghanistan and the
Balkans, a new line of investigation has appeared concerning the role of an interpreter or a trans-
lator in a situation of military conflict or in hostile environments when the outcomes of language
mediation can be a matter of life or death. At present, the emergence of situations, such as mass
migration for example, makes it possible to problematize new intercultural relations between
401
Małgorzata Tryuk
civilian or military professional translators and/or untrained language brokers on the one hand,
and war victims, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers on the other (Bulut and Kurultay 2001;
Cadwell and O’Brien 2016; O’Brien and Cadwell 2017).

Key issues in the development of translation and interpreting in conflict or crisis from an ethical
perspective were elaborated in the seminal works by Baker (2006) and Baker (2010). Adopting a
narrative perspective, the author focused on two main issues. The first one was to analyze how
translators and interpreters are narrated by other participants in the war zone, including military
personnel, war correspondents, media and local populations. The second issue was to under-
stand how translators and interpreters participate in elaborating public narratives of the conflict
in which they are taking part as language brokers.
Since then, the subject of wars, colonization, ethnic cleansing, peacekeeping missions, peace
negotiations, migration and domestic violence has generated a significant body of research on
ethics within translation and interpreting studies.
3.1 Translating and interpreting in armed conflicts

For over two decades now, several conferences and publications have focused on interpreting
and translation in situations of violent conflicts and wars, with a special emphasis put on the
ethical dimensions of the job, particularly on issues of power, trust, conflict, loyalty, visibility
and identity of translators and interpreters. The volume edited by Salama-Carr (2007) marked
an important step in the conceptualization of the ethical dimensions of translation and inter-
preting in situations of crisis or conflict. This commendable book brings together the key issues
ranging from the problematics of neutrality and loyalty expected of frontline or local translators
and interpreters (or fixers) during the more recent wars in Iraq and in former Yugoslavia (2007;
Dragovic-Drouet 2007), the relations between translation and memory in conveying and inter-
preting facts and testimonies through translation (Kuhiwczak 2007), ideology and censorship
in producing mistranslations called “negative mediation” (Valdeón 2007; Chan 2007), conflict
awareness and the role/s played by translators in conveying models of behaviour (Calzada Pérez
2007), translators’ and interpreters’ role on the front lines during the 19th-century Opium Wars
between Britain and China (Wong 2007), and questions concerning the visibility, rights and
responsibilities of war translators (Maier 2007).
The principles of neutrality and impartiality of linguistic mediators during past and recent
armed conflicts in different parts of the world, including the legal and humanitarian contexts,
constitute the pivotal topic discussed in Translation and Violent Conflict, a special issue of The
Translator edited by Inghilleri and Harding (2010). The articles in this issue explore the overlap-
ping themes of mediation, agency and ethics in relation to translators and interpreters as they
negotiate the political, social, cultural and linguistic factors which converge in situations of
armed conflict. For example, Inghilleri (2010), in her paper based on direct observation of the
war in Iraq, draws attention to the fact that during war or conflict, interpreters are inclined to
exercise ethical judgement with respect to the war within the framework of specific war ethics.
As a consequence, they function more as agents and conduits for the military institutions they
serve rather than as neutral mediators. In some cases, they become actors in a conflict which they
sustain morally and instrumentally. Beebee (2010), in his essay based on examples from history,
contemporary events and fictional and non-fictional writings, develops the idea that due to the
nature of their profession, translators and interpreters cannot be neutral in situations of conflict as
402
they do not belong fully to any of the languages they are translating into and from. The concept
homo sacer (or an outlaw, as put forth by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben 1998) is used
to explain the impossibility for a translator to remain neutral and invisible.
3.2 Training of professional and non-professional translators

and interpreters
The questions of technological, social, political and professional developments in translation and
interpreting that are to be explored from the ethical standpoint are also addressed in Ethics and
the Curriculum: Critical Perspectives, a special issue of the Interpreter and Translator Trainer, edited by
Baker and Maier (2011). One of the issues discussed in the volume is the nature of relationships
that emerge between military personnel and civilian interpreters recruited locally in situations
of armed conflict, with specific reference to the war in Iraq. The norms of invisibility, neutrality
and confidentiality contained in codes of ethical conduct are challenged in many situations of
war and conflict where ad hoc appointed language mediators are involved. As put forward by
the editors of the volume, new ethical standards, such as accountability in the job of translators
and interpreters, emerge in such situations as
the conduct of translators and interpreters is . . . scrutinized by the media, especially in the
context of recent wars in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. For translators and interpreters,
accountability means that they are increasingly held responsible for the consequence of their
behaviour and therefore have to refect carefully about how their decisions, both textual and
non-textual, impact the lives of others.
(Baker and Maier 2011, 3)
The articles presented in the volume call for an altered view of the relationship between learn-
ing and training of professional and non-professional translators and interpreters. For example,
Tipton (2011) explores the possibility of training civilian, locally recruited people with knowl-
edge of the languages needed who are contracted to work with military personnel. She focuses
on ethical, cultural and professional issues linked with this particular group of language brokers
who, in a situation of confict, depend on the military personnel who, in turn, depend on inter-
preters in their missions. Floros (2011) discusses the issue of ethical responsibility on the part of
the translator while translating politically sensitive texts. Particular stress is put on the practices
that emerge in the context of translator training. Finally, Drugan and Megone (2011) present
a systematic approach to incorporating questions of ethics into the translation and interpret-
ing curriculum. The authors argue that ethics must not be considered as a topic separate from
practice but should be incorporated and embedded in the training, which can provide a number
of case studies to be discussed during the training (see also Chapter 22 “Ethics in translator and
interpreter education” and Chapter 23 “Ethics of translator and interpreter education” in this
volume). It can also lead to discussions on the limits of the ethical principle of confdentiality or
circumstances which warrant the refusal to provide the service by both professional translators
and ad hoc appointed language brokers.
3.3 Development of the code of ethics for war translators and interpreters
Detailed case studies on the use of languages and the roles of language mediators during wars,
in military alliances, in invasions, in occupied countries, in the aftermath of conflicts and in the
intelligence community are exposed in two volumes edited by Footitt and Kelly (2012a and
403
Małgorzata Tryuk
2012b). The cases presented cover periods from the 18th century and the Napoleonic campaigns
against Britain to World War I and II and the recent armed conflicts in the Balkans. The chapters
of the volumes present the past and present conflicts and wars in Ireland, Britain, France, Fin-
land, Slovenia, Korea, Cyprus and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The volumes discuss key problems in
(mis)communication between different sides of the conflicts and wars and the linguistic diversity
in the particular historical periods and geographical zones under analysis. The authors deliver an
in-depth examination of the roles of military linguists or professional civilian translators on the
one hand, and untrained bilinguals, locally employed civilians recruited on site, on the other.
At the same time, Footitt and Kelly explore the various ethical implications of translation and
interpreting on a battlefield and the delivery of translation services for occupying forces or dur-
ing interrogations of prisoners. The outstanding role of linguistic brokers in rebuilding societies
and relationships after a conflict is also discussed in the two volumes. However, in many cases, it
is shown that the unclear positions of translators and interpreters in a war or conflict can place
them at a personal risk: they are exposed to danger on a daily basis, and they have no personal
protection or guarantee of a professional future after the war or the conflict ends. That is why
Fitchett (2012) in her paper proposes the elaboration of guidelines to help and support interpret-
ers, be they military or civilians, in conflict zones. She stresses that such protection should cover
issues concerning the definition of rights and obligations which lie with the language mediator
and their “client,” the necessity of specific training for professional and, in particular, non-
professional or civilian interpreters, and the protection of interpreters both during and after the
conflict. Fitchett calls also for appropriate contracting of translators and interpreters, as it is not
rare that translators and interpreters are used as “liaisons” or “intelligence” agents without due
consideration of the requirements of their tasks and without being afforded adequate protection
during their mission and after its completion. As put forward by Fitchett (2012), who problema-
tizes the situation of language mediators during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it sometimes hap-
pens that interpreters and translators are targeted by opponents of the foreign intervention who
consider them to be traitors. During the armed conflicts, many language brokers died or were
injured while helping the enemy forces. It emerges that the key problem for language brokers is
their direct protection during and after wars and in conflict zones.
In 2012, as a result of endeavours undertaken by the International Association of Conference
Interpreters (AIIC) in this matter, together with The Red T, an American non-profit organiza-
tion advocating for the protection of translators and interpreters in high-risk settings, and the FIT
International Federation of Translators, a Conflict Zone Field Guide for Civilian Translators/Interpreters
and Users of Their Services was drafted. This guide outlines the basic rights and responsibilities
as well as best practices recommended by the three aforementioned organizations and applies
to translators and interpreters working as field linguists for the armed forces, as journalists and
for NGOs and other organizations in conflict zones and other high-risk settings (Fitchett 2010,
2012, 184; Tryuk 2015, 161). The guide contains recommendations for translators, interpreters
and the users of their services concerning ethical issues such as impartiality, confidentiality and
accuracy while translating or interpreting. It provides guidelines on how to work with interpret-
ers and translators as far as the positioning, speaking, and checking and control of the translator
and interpreter is concerned. It stresses the rights and the obligations of a language mediator in
conflict zones, the definition of the role of a translator or interpreter, the limits of the job and
working conditions. Finally, it contains also recommendations on how to respect, protect and
support translators and interpreters in war zones, assuming that at least the vast majority of inter-
preters and translators working in conflict zones have not committed any crimes, and therefore
deserve our solidarity – regardless of the party they are working for (https://aiic.net/page/3853/
aiic-red-t-and-fit-introduce-the-first-conflict-zone-field-guide/lang/1).
404
Also, in the volume edited by Valero-Garcés (2014), a series of papers by scholars such
as Moreno Bello, Rok and Spahic as well as by Capelli, a war interpreter and captain in
the Italian army, addresses scenarios of interpreting and translation in war or conflict zones
as well as post-war situations (Spahic 2014). Their research, based on direct observations,
surveys and questionnaire data from both stakeholders and interpreters, reveals that there
is limited knowledge about the exact role and importance of the services interpreters and
translators can provide in a war. The authors claim that there exists an ethical dilemma
between ideology and the implementation of fundamental tenets of the profession such as
accuracy, impartiality and confidentiality. Therefore, the aforementioned authors emphasize
the need to develop a new kind of code of ethics that would protect interpreters and transla-
tors and help them provide quality services. They also stress the general lack of professional
training and, what is more important, the absence of psychological counselling for war or
conflict zone interpreters and translators. This can cause significant differences in the quality
of services provided by various categories of language specialists: military interpreters and
untrained civilian and local interpreters. In her paper, Moreno Bello (2014) points out that in
a conflict zone locally hired translators or interpreters tend to develop their own ethical code
without reference to any broader professional identity they would be acquainted with during
their education. The lack of a particular code of ethics related to the linguistic profession
in general leads to the development of their own code of ethics based on practical military
professionalism. The author stresses that at the same time, war translators and interpreters
are unable to adopt the norms of military professionalism entirely because of their status as
civilians, untrained mediators and non-citizens of the employing force. This is why Moreno
Bello (2014, 67–68) advocates for a new and specific code of ethics for war translators and
interpreters – one which would take into account the data collected through interviews and
surveys with soldiers and war interpreters. This new code of ethics could cover the specific
needs of war interpreters and would allow them to follow a set of guidelines through which
they could tackle the job’s linguistic difficulties and become acquainted with their rights and
responsibilities. The objective of such a code of ethics would also be to facilitate the inter-
preter’s choice between taking an active role in communication or remaining faithful to the
content of the message and remaining neutral. The code would also stress the question of
protection, specific training which would need to include security and emergency training
and the responsibilities of an interpreter related to the neutrality, confidentiality and accu-
racy on the job. Also Rok (2014) emphasizes that taking into consideration the ambiguous
status and contradictory role of war and conflict interpreters, the question of ethics should
be in the forefront of the discussion. Her paper discusses the challenges of establishing a set
of relevant and practicable ethical guidelines for interpreting in war, conflict and crisis zones
which would concern quality issues, limitations in the provision of adequate services due to
physical or mental exhaustion, the questions of neutrality and impartiality, accuracy, con-
fidentiality, anonymity and invisibility of the linguistic mediators. Those ethical principles
should not be freely applied to the various communicative situations without raising doubts
about their adequacy and validity. However, while discussing the necessity of establishing
common guidelines for interpreting and translation in conflict or crisis zones, the author
ascertains that the greatest obstacle to establishing a professional code of ethics or conduct
stems from the contradictory and undefined role of interpreters in a war or in crisis zones.
According to this scholar, researchers in the field should first develop a “legal” definition of
the concept of neutrality, which would be necessary to provide for basic protection against
categorical identification with individual parties of a conflict, thus lessening the burden of
ethical dilemmas faced by language mediators (Rok 2014, 78).
405
Małgorzata Tryuk
3.4 Institutional affiliations and training

The volumes edited by Valero-Garcés (2014) and Valero-Garcés and Tipton (2017) address some
of the general questions posed by the previously mentioned scholars and add new perspectives
on the struggle to establish coherent responses to the ethical imperatives inherent in the relations
between states and institutions, on the one hand, and limited language proficiency speakers, war
victims, migrants or refugees on the other. The two volumes draw the reader’s attention to trans-
lation and interpreting in the public sector as a source of deep ideological conflict in societies.
They also explore interconnections between ideology and ethics and bring some insights into
this complex field (see also Chapter 15 “Ethics in public service interpreting” in this volume).
In the chapters of the volume edited by Valero-Garcés and Tipton (2017), we are presented
with historical and contemporary perspectives on ideology and ethics in the development of
interpreting for state bodies and institutions, e.g. the police, courts, prisons and asylum authori-
ties. The volume also tackles the question of education and training of public service interpret-
ers and translators working with refugees, asylum seekers, trauma survivors and other speakers
with limited linguistic proficiency. For example, Brander de la Iglesia (2017), while discussing
the consequences of the lack of attention to ethical issues in the training of interpreters and
translators in conflict situations with reference to what she calls the “absent curriculum,” raises
the question of different stages in deontology which are indisputably related with the dilemmas
language specialists must sense, deal with and endure in their job. The author also proposes to
develop the concept of the “ethical dilemma” as a starting point for the study of ethics in the
training of translators and interpreters. Taking a more practical approach, the issue of codes of
ethics in the context of the Spanish prison system is debated in the chapter by Valero-Garcés,
who presents a broad overview of national and European legislation concerning linguistic ser-
vice provision in a prison setting.
4 New debates
Over the past decade, debates on the ethical dimensions of translation and interpreting in situa-
tions of crisis and conflict have experienced a thematic expansion into emerging areas of research
related to language mediation in crisis-related situations, migration emergency contexts, gender-
based conflicts and, last but not least, translator and interpreter education and training.
4.1 Translating and interpreting in the situation of mass migration

The importance of ethical issues in connection to language mediation provided by professionals
or non-professional bilinguals in the migration setting in the legal or, most frequently, illegal
emergency context is evidenced by a growing number of publications. One of the first scholars
to draw attention to the active role of an interpreter in asylum procedure was Barsky (1995,
1996 and 2010). Also Pöllabauer (2004) analyzed the work of interpreters in the asylum proce-
dure in Austria, Inghilleri (2005) looked at the “interpreting habitus” of interpreters within the
asylum system in the United Kingdom, whereas Maryns (2006) studied the oral performance
of asylum speakers and how their stories are transformed in the Belgium. Gentile (2012) and,
more recently, Tipton and Furmanek (2016) place special significance on the role of interpreters
during the appeal hearings in front of refugee and asylum tribunals in Australia and the United
Kingdom (see also Chapter 15 “Ethics in public service interpreting” in this volume).
Also, Todorova (2016 and 2017) provides an overview of research in the area of interpreting
in conflict zones, with special focus on working with refugees. Her studies are supplemented by
406
the researcher’s personal experience and that of other professionals working as field interpret-
ers for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Macedonia and
Kosovo. In her papers, she argues for the need for conflict mediation awareness and skills in the
curricula used for training of UNHCR interpreters.
Another viewpoint on interpreting in a refugee setting is presented in an article by Taronna
(2016), who analyzes interviews with a group of language mediators who assisted the newly
arrived migrants in Southern Italy. They served as interpreters and played other roles such as
advisors and assistants to “the boat people” in claiming and negotiating their rights in the host-
ing country. Taronna’s research has shown significant differences between the work of transla-
tors and interpreters in Southern Italy and the practices in Northern and Southern Europe in
general. Her research was also concentrated on the use of English as a lingua franca in the practice
of language mediation and on the role this language may play either as a barrier or as a bridge.
Recently, greater attention has been paid to ethical issues in connection with language
mediation provided by professionals or non-professional bilinguals in the migration emergency
context, as evidenced by a growing number of publications – e.g. in Translation, Ethics and Social
Responsibility, special issue of The Translator edited by Drugan and Tipton (2017), which focuses
on translation and interpreting of minority and majority languages in the public service context
(see also Drugan 2017; Valero-Garcés 2017; Tipton 2008). The authors advocate for bringing
ethics into translator and interpreter training, especially for the prospective interpreters who
work in legal, medical and social settings which can be related to crises or conflicts. Accord-
ing to the authors, interpreters and translators working in legal, medical and other specialized
vulnerable contexts should have formal training in ethics in order to become certified language
mediators. They should also subscribe to codes of best practice or ethics which are relevant for
their professions. However, even though interpreters and translators rarely have access to this
sort of ethical infrastructure, they are still responsible for their services as language mediators.
The authors also stress that greater attention should be paid to interpreter training and collabora-
tion with other professionals in different sectors. They also recognize the significance of mutual
recognition of duties in professional codes of conduct.
4.2 Gender issues in translating and interpreting

Another area of investigation as regards the ethics of translation and interpreting in a conflict
situation involves public service interpreting and translation of encounters dealing with gender-
based violence, which is a specific example of a crisis situation. In order to respond to this situ-
ation, a European project “Speak Out for Support (SOS-VICS)” has been initiated and funded
by the Directorate-General for Justice, Freedom and Security of the European Commission
(Hertog 2015). Its aim is to combine the provision of interpreting services in criminal proceed-
ings with a focus on women who have been victims of domestic or gender-based violence.
The volumes edited by Del Pozo Triviño, Toledano Buendía, Casado-Neira, and Fernandes
Del Pozo (2015) and Toledano Buendía and Del Pozo Triviño (2015) address major questions
posed by both scholars and practitioners (police officers, social workers, therapists, doctors and
lawyers) who work with interpreters and translators in legal, medical, social and police settings
in order to facilitate communication with patients or victims of gender and domestic violence.
The two volumes have triggered discussions on ethical standards, training and competences of
translators and interpreters. They have also offered guidelines, recommendations and best prac-
tices for professionals who work with interpreters (Borja Albi and Triviño 2015). The question
of the role of education and training in ethics for translators and interpreters is raised in all of
the aforementioned publications (see also Tipton 2017).
407
Małgorzata Tryuk
4.3 Translation and interpreting in humanitarian crisis zones

The ethical demands faced by interpreters in humanitarian crisis zones have been extensively
discussed in a study by Moser-Mercer and Bali (2008). The authors drew attention to the fact that
Interpreters are often recruited because they “know” both the local language/dialect and
English, the language of international relief operations, and not because they have been
trained as translators or interpreters. . . . Thus, they lack both essential professional skills to
perform adequately as interpreters, as well as the necessary professional ethics to support
crisis management and humanitarian efforts in a stressful environment.
While discussing the training needs for language mediators working in confict, post-confict
and humanitarian settings, Moser-Mercer and Bali (2008) take a close look at the experience of
training feld interpreters working for humanitarian organizations. As a response to emergency
situations in many geographical locations, the Faculty of Interpreting and Translating (FTI) at
the University of Geneva launched the project InZone (www.unige.ch/inzone/who-we-are/)
with the aim to develop multilingual communication and higher education in communities
afected by confict and crisis. From the very beginning of this project, InZone ofered basic
training for humanitarian feld interpreters which is a blended course, with on-site training in
the feld followed by virtual training available in a standard desktop and mobile version. This
course covers training of basic interpreting skills and professional ethics.
The issues of language mediation during emergencies in disaster response and in training of
translators and interpreters in fast-developing crises and dangerous environments is also exten-
sively commented in more recent publications (e.g. Federici 2016). As noted by Federici and
Al Sharou (2018), training translators and interpreters to react to a sudden emergency situation
constitutes a real challenge. In most cases in a crisis environment, there is no access to profes-
sional language mediators and there is an urgent need to employ untrained civilians with some
knowledge of languages though with no actual skills or competencies to translate or interpret.
The lack of adequate training relevant to this field of activity is emphasized in recent analyses
by O’Brien (2016), Federici and Cadwell (2018), Federici and Al Sharou (2018) and Mahasneh
and Obeidat (2018), who propose using new technologies such as statistical machine translation
tools in training of non-professional and citizen translators and interpreters in crisis-related situ-
ations. Such training should also respond to new expectations and ethical issues specific to the
situation, among which Federici (2018) mentions the quality assurance of the performance by
non-professional language mediators.
5 Conclusion
As noted in the present chapter, the question of ethics has become increasingly relevant for
translation and interpreting in conflict and crisis zones. These issues are associated with differ-
ences in the services provided in battlefield or in an emergency situation by military transla-
tors or interpreters, civilian professionals and bilingual individuals acting as ad hoc appointed
linguistic mediators without specific training – which can affect performance from the ethical
viewpoint. Military or civilian professionals are bound by professional codes of ethics, whereas
the latter group of ad hoc interpreters or translators does not necessarily abide by any code of
ethics and can be more easily influenced by external factors, such as compassion or familiarity
with one of the parties, etc. Additionally, non-professionals may have limited fluency in one
of the two working languages, which in turn may cause misunderstandings, as the messages
408
may not be correctly conveyed and/or important details may be omitted or altered. Therefore,
many stakeholders, who have observed the performance of non-professionals, propose special
pre-deployment training and psychological counselling in order to guarantee adequate quality
under the circumstances. Such training should also include reflections on certain aspects of ethi-
cal standards such as impartiality, which is a big issue in any crisis situation when it comes to
potential conflict between ideology and ethics in language-brokering by local linguists who do
not know (or observe) any professional code of ethics (Capelli 2014, 23).
The ethical considerations in conflict or crisis situations tend to add additional insight into
the fact the fact that translators and interpreters are no simple intermediaries but are accountable
participants who must assure that what they do is professionally and ethically appropriate in a
given socio-cultural context.
The consequences that may arise from the current and future ethical dilemmas faced by
numerous language brokers, professionals or civilians, in war or in emergency situations as
presented in the chapter, should result in developing a series of training modules offered by pro-
fessional associations, institutions or NGOs, using new technologies, in order to provide inter-
preters and translators working in these complex situations with adequate tools to execute the
job (Federici and Cadwell 2018; Federici and Al Sharou 2018; Mahasneh and Obeidat 2018).

Professional translator ethics; the ethics of public service interpreting; ethics of volunteering in
translation and interpreting; ethics of activist translation and interpreting; ethics in translator and
interpreter education; ethics of translator and interpreter education; accessibility and linguistic
human rights.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Boazer.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Allen, Katharine. 2012. “Interpreting in Conflict Zones.” NAJIT. Accessed January 31, 2019. http://najit.
org/blog/?p=229
Andlauer, Brice, and Quentin Müller. 2019. Tarjuman. Une trahison française. Un scandale d’État: l’affaire des
interprètes afghans. Paris: Éditions Bayard.
Angelleli, Claudia. 2004. Revisiting the Interpreter’s Role: A Study of Conference, Court, and Medical Interpreters
in Canada, Mexico and in the United States. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Baigorri-Jalón, Jesús. 2011. “Wars, Languages and the Roles of Interpreters.” In Les liaisons dangereuses. La
langue, traduction, interprétation, edited by Henri Hawaiss, and Jarjoura Hardane, 173–204. Beyrouth:
Université St-Joseph.
Baigorri-Jalón, Jesús. 2012. “La lengua como arma: interpretes en la Guerra civil española o la enramanada
madeja de la geografía y la historia.” In La mediación lingüístico-cultural en tiempos de guerra, edited by
Gertrudis Payás, and José Manuel Zavela, 85–108. Temuco, Chile: Ediciones Universidad Católica de
Temuco.
Baker, Carol. 2010. “The Care and Feeding of Linguists: The Working Environment of Interpreters,
Translators, and Linguists during Peacekeeping in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” War and Society 2: 154–75.
Baker, Mona, ed. 2010a. Critical Readings in Translation Studies. London: Routledge.
Baker, Mona. 2010b. “Interpreters and Translators in War Zone.” The Translator 16, no. 2: 197–222.
Baker, Mona, and Carol Maier, eds. 2011. Ethics and the Curriculum: Critical Perspectives, Special Issue of
The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1.
Barsky, Robert. 1995. “The Construction of the Other and the Description of the Self: Efficacious Dis-
cursive Production in the Convention Refugee Hearing.” In Encountering the Other/s, edited by Gisela
Brinkler-Gabler, 79–100. New York: SUNY Press.
409
Małgorzata Tryuk
Barsky, Robert. 1996. “The Interpreter as Intercultural Agent in Convention Refugee Hearing.” The
Barsky, Robert. 2010. “Accessing Contextual Assumptions in Dialogue Interpreting: The Case of Illegal
Immigrants in the United States.” In Text and Context: Essays on Translation and Interpreting in Honour of
Ian Mason, edited by Mona Baker, Maeve Olohan, and María Calzada Pérez, 288–302. Manchester:
Beebee, Thomas O. 2010. “Shoot the Transtraitor: The Translator as Homo Sacer in Fiction and Reality.”
In Translation and Violent Conflict, edited by Moira Inghilleri, and Harding Sue-Ann, 295–313. Amster-
dam, NY: Rodopi.
Borja Albi, Anabel, and Maribel Del Pozo Triviño, eds. 2015. La comunicación mediada por intérpretes en
contextos de violencia de género. Guía de buenas practicas para trabajar con intérpretes. Valencia, TH. Tirant
Humanidades.
Brader de la Iglesia, María. 2017. “A Sea of Troubles: Ethical Dilemmas from War Zones to the Class-
room.” In Ideology, Ethics and Policy Development in Public Service Interpreting and Translation, edited by
Valero-Garcés Carmen, and Rebecca Tipton, 84–101. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/
10.21832/9781783097531
Bulut, Alev, and Turgay Kurultay. 2001. “Interpreters-in-Aid at Disasters: Community Interpreting in the
Process of Disaster Management.” The Translator 7, no. 2: 249–63.
Cáceres Würsig, Ingrid. 2017. “Interpreters in History: A Reflection on the Question of Loyalty.” In Ide-
ology, Ethics and Policy Development in Public Service Interpreting and Translation, edited by Valero-Garcés
Carmen, and Rebecca Tipton, 3–20. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Cadwell, Patrick, and Sharon O’Brien. 2016. “Language, Culture, and Translation in Disaster ITC: An
Ecosystemic Model of Understanding.” Perspective 24, no. 4: 1–19.
Calzada Pérez, Maria. 2007. “Translating Conflict: Advertising in a Globalized Era.” In Translating and
Interpreting Conflict, edited by Myriam Salama-Carr, 149–65. Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi.
Cambridge, Jan. 1999. “Information Loss in Bilingual Medical Interviews through an Untrained Inter-
preter.” The Translator 5, no. 2: 201–19.
Capelli, Paolo. 2014. “Wartime Interpreting. Exploring the Experience of Interpreters and Translators.” In
(Re)considerando ética e ideología en situaciones de conflicto. (Re)visiting Ethics and Ideology in Situation of Con-
flict, edited by Carmen Valero Garcés, 15–24. Alcalá: Universidad de Alcalá. Servicio de Publicaciones.
Chan, Red. 2007. “One Nation, Two Translations: China’s Censorship of Hillary Clinton’s Memoir.” In
Translating and Interpreting Conflict, edited by Myriam Salama-Carr, 119–34. Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi.
Chang, Pin-Ling. 2016. “Wartime Interpreting during the Sino-Dutch War (1661–1662).” Linguistica Ant-
verpiensia, New Series: Themes in Translation Studies 15: 51–71.
Conflict Zone Field Guide for Civilian Translators/Interpreters and Users of Their Services. Accessed
August 31, 2019. https://aiic.net/search/text?q=Conflict+zone+field+guide+for+civilian+translator
s%2Finterpreters#
Cowley, Peter James. 2016. “Declining the Interpreter’s Role in World War I.” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New
Series: Themes in Translation Studies 15: 72–88.
Cronin, Michael. 2002. “The Empire Talks Back: Orality, Heteronomy and the Cultural Turn in Interpret-
ing Studies.” In Translation and Power, edited by Maria Tymoczko, and Erwin Gentzler, 45–62. Amherst,
MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
D’Amore, Anna Maria, Veronica Murillo Gallegos, and Krisztina Zimányi. 2016. “Have Faith in Your
Vocabulary: The Role of the Interpreter in the Conquest of Power, Language and Ideology in the New
Spain.” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series: Themes in Translation Studies 15: 36–50.
Del Pozo Triviño, Maribel, Carmen Toledano Buendía, David Casado-Neira, and Doris Fernandes Del
Pozo, eds. 2015. Construir puentes de communicacíon en el ambito de la violencia de género. Building Commu-
nication Bridges in Gender Violence. Granada: Editorial Comares.
Dragovic-Drouet, Mila. 2007. “The Practice of Translation and Interpreting during the Conflicts in the
Former Yugoslavia (1991–1999).” In Translating and Interpreting Conflict, edited by Myriam Salama-Carr,
29–40. Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi.
with and beyond the Professions.” In Translation, Ethics and Social Responsibility, edited by Joanna Drugan,
and Rebecca Tipton, 126–42.
Drugan, Joanna, and Chris Megone. 2011. “Bringing Ethics Into Translator Training: An Integrated,
Inter-Disciplinary Approach.” In Ethics and the Curriculum: Critical Perspectives, edited by Mona Baker,
and Carol Maier, 183–211.
410
Drugan, Joanna, and Rebecca Tipton, eds. 2017. Translation, Ethics and Social Responsibility. Special issue
of The Translator 23, no. 2.
Federici, Federico M., ed. 2016. Mediating Emergencies and Conflicts: Frontline Translating and Interpreting.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Federici, Federico M. 2018. “Crisis, Translation Workflows: Citizen Translators a Solution.” A Talk at the
University of Lisbon, March 16.
Federici, Federico M., and Al Sharou Khetam. 2018. “Moses, Time and Crisis Translation.” Translation and
Interpreting Studies 13, no. 3: 486–508.
Federici, Federico M., and Patrick Cadwell. 2018. “Training Citizen Translators: Design and Delivery of
Bespoke Training on the Fundamentals of Translation for New Zealand Red Cross.” Translation Spaces
7, no 1: 23–43.
Federici, Federico M., and Sharon O’Brien. 2019. Translation in Cascading Crisis. London, New York:
Routledge.
Fitchett, Linda. 2010. “AIIC Forum on Interpreters in Conflict Areas.” Accessed January 31, 2019. www.
aiic.net/ViewPage.cfm/page3398.htm
Fitchett, Linda. 2012 “The AIIC Project to Help Interpreters in Conflict Areas.” In Languages and the
Military: Alliances, Occupation and Peace Building, edited by Hilary Footitt, and Kelly Michael, 175–85.
Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Floros, Georgios. 2011. “‘Ethics-Less’ Theories and ‘Ethical’ Practices: On Ethical Relativity in Trans-
lation.” In Ethics and the Curriculum: Critical Perspectives, edited by Mona Baker, and Carol Maier,
65–92.
Footitt, Hilary, and Michael Kelly, eds. 2012a. Languages and the Military: Alliances, Occupation and Peace
Building. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan.
Footitt, Hilary, and Michael Kelly, eds. 2012b. Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contact in
Conflict. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan.
Frail, T.A. 2016. “The Tragic Fate of the Afghan Interpreters the US left behind.” Smithsonian Magazine,
November. Accessed July 1, 2019. www.smithsonianmag.com/history/tragic-fate-afghan-interpreters-
left-behind-180960785/
Gentile, Adolfo. 2012. “Interpreting as Human Right–Institutional Responses: The Australian Refugee
Review Tribunal.” The Interpreters’ Newsletter 17: 157–72.
Gómez Amich, Maria. 2016. “The Untold Story: June’s Case Study.” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series:
Themes in Translation Studies 15: 89–105.
Guidère, Michel. 2008. Irak in translation. De l’art de perdre une guerre sans connaître la langue de son adversaire.
Paris: Éditions Jacob-Duvernet.
Guo, Ting. 2015. “Interpreting for the Enemy: Chinese Interpreters in the Second Sino-Japanese War
(1931–1945).” Translation Studies 8, no. 1: 1–15.
Heimburger, Franziska. 2012. “Fighting Together: Language Issues in the Military Coordination of the
First World War Allied Coalition Warfare.” In And the Military: Alliances, Occupation and Peace Building,
edited by Hilary Footitt, and Michael Kelly, 47–57. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Hertog, Eric. 2015. “The Right of Victims to Understand and to be Understood: The SOS-VICS Project
Against Its EU Background.” In Construir puentes de communicacíon en el ambito de la violencia de género.
Building Communication Bridges in Gender Violence, edited by Maribel Del Pozo et al., 19–36. Granada:
Editorial Comares.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2010. “You Don’t Make War without Knowing Why: The Decision to Interpret in Iraq.”
The Translator 16, no. 2: 175–96.
Inghilleri, Moira, and Sue-Ann Harding, eds. 2010. Translation and Violent Conflict. Special Issue of
The Translator 16, no. 2.
INTERACT. “International Network on Crisis Translation.” Accessed July 1, 2019. https://cordis.europa.
eu/project/rcn/207037/factsheet/en
Jacquemet, Marco. 2010. “The Registration Interview: Restricting Refugee’s Narrative Performance.” In
Critical Readings in Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 133–51. London, New York: Routledge,
Taylor & Francis Group.
Kahane, Eduardo. 2007. “Interpreters in Conflict Zones: The Limits of Neutrality.” Accessed January 31,
2019. www.aiic.net/ViewPage.cfm/page2691.htm
411
Małgorzata Tryuk
Kuhiwczak, Piotr. 2007. “The Grammar of Survival: How Do We Read Holocaust Testimonies?” In
Translating and Interpreting Conflict, edited by Myriam Salama-Carr, 61–74. Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi.
Kujamäki, Pekka. 2012. “Mediating for the Third Reich: On military Translation Cultures in World War
II in Northern Finland.” In edited by Hilary Footitt, and Michael Kelly, 86–99. Basingstoke: Palgrave
MacMillan.
Kujamäki, Pekka. 2016a. “‘And then the Germans Came to Town’: The Lived Experiences of an Interpreter
in Finland during the Second World War.” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series: Themes in Translation
Studies 15: 106–20.
Kujamäki, Pekka. 2016b. “Im Dienst des Reiches im Hohen Norden.” In Translation und ‘Drittesreich”.
Menschen – Entscheidungen – Folgen, edited by Anders Dörte, and Larisa Schippel, 51–64. Berlin:
Frank & Timme.
Lan, Shi-chi Mike. 2016. “Crime of Interpreting: Taiwanese Interpreters as War Criminals of World
War II.” In New Insights in the History of Interpreting, edited by Kayko Takeda, and Jesús Baigorri-Jalón,
193–223. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Mahasneh, Anjad A., and Mohammed M. Obeidat. 2018. “Conflict Zones: A Training Model for Inter-
preters.” The Interpreters’ Newsletter 23: 63–81.
Maier, Carol. 2007. “The Translator’s Visibility: The Rights and Responsibilities Thereof.” In Translating
and Interpreting Conflict, edited by Myriam Salama-Carr, 253–66. Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi.
Maryns, Katrijn. 2006. The Asylum Speakers: Language at the Belgium Asylum Procedure. Manchester: St.
Jerome.
Mathieu, Luc. 2018. “Afghanistan: les interprètes face au silence de la France.” Libération, March 28. Accessed
July 1, 2019. www.liberation.fr/planete/2018/03/28/afghanistan-les-interpretes-face-au-silence-de-
la-france_1639607
Moerman, Ellen Ruth. 2005. “Interpreters under Fire.” Website of the International Association of Confer-
ence Interpreters (AIIC). Accessed January 31, 2019. http://aiic.net/page/2977/interpreters-underfire/
lang/1
Moreno Bello, Yolanda. 2014. “The War Interpreter: Needs and Challenges If Interpreting in Conflict
Zones.” In (Re)considerando ética e ideología en situaciones de conflicto. (Re)visiting Ethics and Ideology in Situ-
ation of Conflict, edited by Carmen Valero-Garcés, 65–71. Alcalá: Universidad de Alcalá. Servicio de
Publicaciones.
Moser-Mercer, Barbara, and Grégoire Bali. 2008 “Interpreting in Zones of Crisis and War.” Communicate,
Summer. Accessed January 31, 2019. www.aiic.net
Moser-Mercer, Barbara, Leïla Kherbiche, and Barbara Clas.2014.“Interpreting Conflict: Training Chal-
lenges in Humanitarian Field Interpreting.” Journal of Human Rights Practice 6, no. 1: 140–58.
O’Brien, Sharon. 2016. “Training Translators for Crisis Communication: The Translators without Borders
Example.” In Mediating Emergencies and Conflict: Frontline Translation and Interpreting, edited by Fedrico
M. Federici, 85–111. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
O’Brien, Sharon, and Patrick Cadwell. 2017. “Translation Facilitates Comprehension of Health-Related
Crisis Information: Kenya as an Example.” The Journal of Specialised Translation 28: 23–51.
Palmer, Jerry. 2007. “Interpreting and Translation for Western Media in Iraq.” In Translating and Interpreting
Conflict, edited by Myriam Salama-Carr, 13–28. Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi.
Pescaroli, Gianluca. 2014. “Pathogenic Vulnerabilities and Resilience Factors in Systems and Populations
Experiencing a Cascading Disaster.” Fortress, FP7 Project Report 2.1. Accessed July 1, 2019. http://
fortress-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/FORTRESS-2.1_Pathogenic-vulnerabilities-and-
resilient-factors-in-systems-and-populations-experiencing-a-cascading-andor-cross-border-disaster.pdf
Ping Li, Chuanmao Tian, and Zhonglian Huang. 2016. “Ethics, Identity and Ideology: A Study of the
Interpreters in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937–1945).” Linguistica Antverpiensia.
New Series–Themes in Translation Studies 15: 163–85.
Pöllabauer, Sonja. 2004. “Interpreting in Asylum Hearings: Issues of Role, Responsibility and Power.”
Rafael, Vicente. 2010. “Translation in Wartime.” In Critical Readings in Translation Studies, edited by Mona
Baker, 383–90. London, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Rok, Chitrakar. 2014. “The Challenge of Professional Ethics in War and Crisis in Interpreting.” In (Re)
considerando ética e ideología en situaciones de conflicto. (Re)visiting Ethics and Ideology in Situation of Conflict,
edited by Carmen Valero-Garcés, 72–78. Alcalá: Universidad de Alcalá. Servicio de Publicaciones.
Rosendo, Lucia, and Clementina Persaud, eds. 2016. Interpreting in Conflict Situations and in Conflict Zones
throughout History, Special Issue of Linguistica Antverpiensia. New Series–Themes in Translation Studies 15.
412
Salama-Carr, Myriam, ed. 2007. Translating and Interpreting Conflict. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.
Snellman, Pekka. 2016. “Constraints on and Dimensions of Military Neutrality.” Linguistica Antverpiensia.
New Series: Themes on Translation Studies 15: 260–81.
Spahic, Edina. 2014. “Interpretar en situaciones belicas y posbelicas.” In (Re)considerando ética e ideología en
situaciones de conflicto. (Re)visiting Ethics and Ideology in Situation of Conflict, edited by Carmen Valero-
Gracés, 79–84. Alcalá: Universidad de Alcalá. Servicio de Publicaciones.
Stahuljak, Zrinka. 2010a. “War, Translation, Transnationalism: Interpreters in and of the War (Croatia
1991–1992).” In Critical Readings in Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 391–414. London, New
York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Stahuljak, Zrinka. 2010b. “Minor Empires. Translation, Conflict, and Postcolonial Critique.” In Translation
and Violent Conflict, edited by Moira Inghilleri, and Sue-Ann Harding, 255–74.
Svoljšak, Petra. 2012. “The Language Policy of the Italian Army in the Occupied Slovenian Territories,
1915–17.” In Languages and the Military: Alliances, Occupation and Peace Building, edited by Hilary Footitt,
and Michael Kelly, 70–85. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Takeda, Kayoko. 2009. “War and Interpreters.” Across Languages and Cultures 10, no. 1: 49–62.
Takeda, Kayoko. 2016. “Guilt, Survival, Opportunities and Stigmata: Japanese Interpreters in the Post-War
Occupation Period (1945–52).” In New Insights in the History of Interpreting, edited by Kayko Takeda, and
Jesús Baigorri-Jalón, 225–46. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Takeda, Kayoko, and Jesús Baigorri-Jalón, eds. 2016. New Insights in the History of Interpreting. Amsterdam,
Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Tălpaș, Mihaela. 2016. “Words Cut Two Ways: An Overview of the Situation of Afghan Interpreters at
the Beginning of the 21st Century.” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series: Themes in Translation Studies
15: 241–59.
Taronna, Annarita. 2016. “Translation, Hospitality and Conflict: Language Mediators as an Activist Com-
munity of Practice across the Mediterranean.” Linguistica Antverpiensia – Themes in Translation Studies
15: 282–302.
Tipton, Rebecca. 2008. “Reflexivity and the Social Construction of Identity in Interpreter-Mediated
Asylum Interviews.” The Translator 14, no. 1: 1–19.
Tipton, Rebecca. 2011. “Relationships of Learning between Military Personnel and Interpreters in Situa-
tions of Violent Conflict. Dual Pedagogies and Communities of Practice.” In Ethics and the Curriculum:
Critical Perspectives, edited by Mona Baker, and Carol Maier, 15–40.
Tipton, Rebecca. 2017. “Contracts and Capabilities: Public Service Interpreting and Third Sector Domes-
tic Violence Services.” In Translation, Ethics and Social Responsibility, edited by Joanna Drugan, and
Rebecca Tipton, Rebecca, 237–54.
Tipton, Rebecca, and Olgierda Furmanek. 2016. Dialogue Interpreting: A Guide to Interpreting in Public Ser-
vices and the Community. London, New York: Routledge.
Todorova, Marija. 2016. “Interpreting Conflict Mediation in Kosovo and Macedonia.” Linguistica Antverpi-
ensia New Series: Themes in Translation Studies 15: 227–40.
Todorova, Marija. 2017. “Interpreting at the Border: ‘Shuttle Interpreting’ for the UNHCR.” CLINA: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Communication 3, no. 2: 115–29.
Toledano Buendía, Carmen, and Maribel Del Pozo Triviño, eds. 2015. Interpretacíon en el contexto de violencia
de género. Valencia: TH tyrant Humanidades.
Translators without borders TWB. Accessed July 1, 2019. www.translatorswithoutborders.org
Tryuk, Małgorzata. 2011. “‘You Say Nothing. I Will Interpret’. Interpreting in Auschwitz-Birkenau Con-
centration Camp.” In Translation and opposition, edited by Margaret Rogers, and Dimitri Asimakoulas,
223–43. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Tryuk, Małgorzata. 2015. On Ethics and Interpreters. Frankfurt a/Main: Peter Lang.
Tryuk, Małgorzata. 2016. “Interpreters in the Concentration Camp of Majdanek (1941–1944).” In Inter-
preting in Nazi concentration camps, edited by Michaela Wolf, 115–33. New York: Bloomsbury.
Valdeón, Roberto A. 2007. “Ideological Independence or Negative Mediation: BBC Mundo and CNN en
Español’s (Translated) Reporting of Madrid’s Terrorist Attacks 99.” In Translating and Interpreting Conflict,
edited by Myriam Salama-Carr, 99–118. Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi.
Valero-Garcés, Carmen, ed. 2014. (Re)considerando ética e ideología en situaciones de conflicto. (Re)visiting Ethics
and Ideology in Situation of Conflict. Alcalá de Henares: Servicios de Publicaciones Universidad de Alcalá.
Valero-Garcés, Carmen. 2017. “Ethical Codes and Their Impact on Prison Communication.” In Ideology,
Ethics and Policy Development in Public Service Interpreting and Translation, edited by Carmen Valero-Garcés,
and Rebecca Tipton, 105–30. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
413
Małgorzata Tryuk
Service Interpreting and Translation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Wang, Binhua, and Minhui Xu. 2016. “Interpreting Conflicts and Conflicts in Interpreting: A Micro-
Historical Account of the Interpreting Activity in the Korean Armistice Negotiations.” Linguistica
Antverpiensia: New Series – Themes in Translation Studies 15: 186–204.
Wolf, Michaela. 2013. “‘German Speakers, Step Forward!’ Surviving through Interpreting in Nazi Con-
centration Camps.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 8, no. 1: 1–22.
Wolf, Michaela, ed. 2016. Interpreting in Nazi concentration camps. New York: Bloomsbury.
Wong, L.W. 2007. “Translators and Interpreters during the Opium War between Britain and China (1839–
1842).” In Translating and Interpreting Conflict, edited by Myriam Salama-Carr, 41–57. Amsterdam, NY:
Rodopi.
Further reading
Interpreting in conflict situations and in conflict zones throughout history, special issue of Linguistica Antverpiensia
New Series – Themes in Translation Studies No. 15 edited by Rosendo Lucia, and Clementina Persaud
(2016).
A collection of papers on past and contemporary crisis situations which involve the participation of
translators and interpreters. The volume sheds light on ethics, ideology, status, neutrality, loyalty and
trust, the use of interpreting or translation as a tool of manipulation and power and the role of translators
and interpreters in modern and ancient times, past and contemporary wars, intelligence and migration
crises.
New Insights in the History of Interpreting edited by Takeda and Baigorri Jalón (2016).
This volume focuses on the practice of translation and interpreting from a historical and geographical
perspective. The papers in the volume address questions of identities and roles of translators and inter-
preters during conquests, colonization or occupation of foreign territories and discuss the risks faced
by interpreters in such situations.
The volume Translation in cascading crises authored by Federici, Federico M., and Sharon O’Brien (2019).
This volume is devoted to the problematics of volunteer translation in different geographic regions, the
needs and challenges of crisis translation for NGOs and the use of new technologies, such as machine
translation and crowdsourcing in disaster and crisis situations.
414
27
Ethical stress in translation
and interpreting
1 Introduction
Translators and interpreters suffer from an onslaught of job stressors. In a working context where
time pressures, technology, and competition are increasingly threatening professional linguists,
and where translation and interpreting can be transitory, low-status, and poorly paid occupa-
tions (e.g. Dam and Zethsen 2016), it is not difficult to conceive that stressors can impact the
productivity and well-being of translators and interpreters. But while a certain amount of stress
can be healthy and enhance translation performance, occupational stress that results from dispari-
ties between one’s ethical values and expected behaviours – known as ethical stress – can have
nefarious consequences for individuals and even lead to burnout.
Ethical issues can occur in any translation or interpreting situation where profound moral
questions of what is “right” or “wrong” underlie professional decision-making. For example,
Hermans (2009, 93) recounts the case of the interpreter Günter Deckert who was convicted
for interpreting a lecture in which the American Frederic Leuchter denied the existence of
gas chambers in Auschwitz, something which is forbidden by law in Germany. Although
in this instance the interpreter agreed with Leuchter’s claims, Hermans questions whether
the conviction was morally justified and whether interpreters assume responsibility for the
speeches they interpret. Should they faithfully interpret a speech they consider morally dubi-
ous? Interpreters are likely to ask themselves this very question when they are sent out on
challenging assignments that conflict with their personal goals, values, or beliefs (Bontempo
and Malcolm 2012). Similarly, translators can find themselves in situations where they have to
translate texts the ideological content of which is offensive to them or situations where they
have to compromise their professional ethics (Abdallah 2010). Otherwise they may face loss
of employment, disgrace, or worse. Making ethical decisions in these contexts can be par-
ticularly challenging, and this is exacerbated by the fact that “it is not always possible for the
translator to know to just what ends their translation will ultimately be put” (McAlester 2003,
226). Translators and interpreters are part of a complex network of people (or “agents”) who
can be affected by the ethical decisions they make. As a result, ethical decision-making can
be stressful, mentally draining, and even impair our progress to becoming human beings in
an existential sense.
415
2 Historical trajectory and core issues
2.1 Interpreting and translating as stressful professions

When translators and interpreters experience stress, this means that they are experiencing a state
whereby the demands being placed upon them exceed the internal or external supports and
coping resources that they are able to mobilize (Bontempo and Malcolm 2012). Research on
the stresses that translators can experience in the course of their work is fragmentary and has
usually been limited to accounts of the efforts required to deliver work of high quality within
time constraints (e.g. Eszenyi 2016), or to the stressful and ethically challenging situations that
translators can find themselves entangled in, for example when translating for politicians in times
of war (e.g. Apter 2007). However, empirical work on these pragmatic aspects of professional
translation is still relatively limited. In contrast, interpreting has often been conceptualised as
an inherently stressful occupation, and it has been empirically tested as such (Heller, Stansfield,
Stark, and Langholtz 1986; Moser-Mercer, Künzli, and Korac 1998; Kurz 2002, 2003; Kállay
2011; Korpal 2016). As Bontempo and Malcolm (2012, 107) observe:
interpreters often lack the contextual information to make sense of an interaction; they have
limited control over the workload and the pace of information delivery. Assignments that
conflict with personal goals, values, or beliefs can cause intense stress, and the management
of complex message transfer among parties can often be challenging.
Over the years, several experimental studies have investigated the notion of stress as experienced
by conference interpreters in particular. For example, as early as 1982 the Research Commit-
tee of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) conducted a landmark
study on stress in conference interpreting (Cooper, Davies, and Tung 1982); Klonowicz (1994)
analysed interpreters’ physiological stress responses and management of energy resources during
information processing; Moser-Mercer et al. (1998) investigated the effect of prolonged turns on
interpreters’ stress and the quality of interpretation; and, more recently, Roziner and Shlesinger
(2010) conducted a large-scale experimental study designed to evaluate the implications of the
use of remote interpreting (RI) in large multilingual conferences which included measures of
stress. While the majority of these studies have been concerned with physiological responses to
stress (e.g. heart rate, blood pressure), a few also tackled self-reported stress and anxiety with the
help of psychometric instruments (e.g. Chiang 2009, 2010; Kao and Craigie 2013). The stress
suffered by translators and interpreters in community settings (criminal justice, health, social
work, etc.) has also attracted increasing attention in recent years (e.g. Bontempo and Malcolm
2012; Ndongo-Keller 2015; Valero-Garcés 2015). Despite this growing interest in the pres-
sures that professional linguists experience, however, stress studies have predominantly revolved
around skill inadequacies or performance expectations (Schwenke, Ashby, and Gnilka 2014,
212). Very little research has been carried out on the psychological repercussions for translators
and interpreters of being enmeshed in ethical dilemmas, and no study has yet investigated the
impact of ethical stress specifically on translator or interpreter performance.
2.2 Defining ethical stress

Much of the work on ethical stress has occurred in the nursing and social work literature, pre-
sumably due to the frequency and manifest nature of ethical issues and moral quandaries occur-
ring in welfare-related work. The core ideas of existential theory – a branch of philosophy that
416
Ethical stress in T&I
deals with existential questions – provide the philosophical background for the conceptualisation
of ethical stress, as existential psychology emphasises the need to be true to oneself and to take
responsibility for decisions made (Taylor 2007, 91).
Ethics-related stress has been formally defined as an occupational stress “resulting from dis-
parities in the ethical values and expected behaviour of employees” (DeTienne, Agle, Phillips,
and Ingerson 2012, 377–378). Put simply, when one’s values and actions are at odds, this creates
a specific kind of stress which can lead to dissatisfaction or even to leaving one’s employment.
Ethical stress is thought to encompass two key components: disjuncture and ontological guilt
(Fenton 2015). While disjuncture (also known as dissonance) relates to the painful feelings of
inauthenticity that individuals experience when their values and feelings do not align with their
actions (e.g. value/practice congruence), ontological guilt refers more specifically to the associ-
ated guilt that one experiences when it is not possible to act in accordance with one’s values
(Taylor 2007). It is worth noting that ontological guilt differs from the concept of ontological
anxiety, which is “the healthy anxiety experienced when a person does what they believe is the
“right thing” and feels a consequential anxiety because of the element of risk involved” (Fenton
2015, 1417). We will return to the concept of risk-taking in the next section.
Together, disjuncture/dissonance and ontological guilt can cause moral distress, a term often
used interchangeably with ethical stress in the wider (psychological) literature (DeTienne et al.
2012, 378). Moral distress is accompanied by feelings of powerlessness and lack of control over
a situation, and this lack of control regarding ethical behaviour – combined with other factors
such as minimal social support – has a number of implications for both the individual and the
workplace (Ulrich et al. 2010; DeTienne et al. 2012; Davis et al. 2018).
It is worth bearing in mind that, although ethics can be equated with morality, the two con-
cepts have sometimes been differentiated in the Translation Studies literature. Koskinen (2000,
11) for instance has defined morality as a characteristic of individuals and ethics as a community’s
collective effort to devise codes of practice in relation to accepted moral behaviour. Regardless
of the terminology employed, this chapter will focus on the former concept, as the aim is to
shed light on translators’ experience(s) of moral dilemmas and on the personal consequences for
the individual of making certain moral choices.
According to O’Donnell et al. (2008, 32), three specific factors determine the nature of
ethical issues in organisational settings and the ways in which these are perceived and addressed:
(1) the person’s position or role in the organisation, (2) the resources or support available to
address ethical dilemmas, and (3) the sources of (dis)satisfaction within the work environment.
Indeed, the person’s role dictates the degree to which s/he is involved in ethical decision-making
and moral action; the availability of peers and ethics committees (also known as the “ethical
climate”) enables important consultations and discussions to take place; and individual factors
such as self-motivation, self-efficacy, or strong working relationships are powerful sources of
job satisfaction. These factors are linked and, together, they can be said to predict ethical stress
(see Figure 27.1). For example, if there is a positive ethical climate within an institution and
individuals have access to mentors to discuss ethical issues, it is likely that they will feel involved
in the decision-making process and be in a better position to take moral action. In turn, this
may impact positively on their self-confidence and career satisfaction. Conversely, a negative
ethical climate will engender ethical stress, make it less likely that moral action is taken, and lead
to frustration and potential intention to leave the workplace (e.g. O’Donnell et al. 2008, 43).
While the focus in this chapter is on the consequences for the individual translator/
interpreter of ethical stress suffered when there is no alignment between their values and their
actions, it is nevertheless important to understand the conditions that lead to a state of ethical
stress. In her research, Abdallah (2010, 41) pointed out three factors that discourage translators
417
Moral
action
Ethical stress
(disjuncture and
ontological guilt)
Ethical
climate
Individual
factors
Figure. 27.1 Factors influencing ethical stress
from exercising agency: lack of trust between involved parties, lack of support for the translator,
and lack of necessary information. These issues mirror those identified earlier and were also
shown to lead to ethical stress, to certain unethical behaviours, and to moral hazard, which results
from relevant information being withheld from translators, leading to unscrupulous or oppor-
tunistic behaviour (op. cit.). Similarly, in a study of signed language interpreters’ experience of
occupational stress, Hetherington (2011) indicated that occupational stress is compounded when
interpreters lack recognition for their work and do not have recourse to organisational support
structures or established frameworks for reflective practice, as these would provide support for
interpreters to work both safely and ethically.
Professional bodies, educational institutions, and others involved in the professionalisation of
the discipline undoubtedly have an important role to play in engaging translators and interpreters
in difficult ethical conversations and empowering them to make ethical decisions confidently. It
is important to recognise that ethical issues evolve from the social, cultural, and organisational
environment in which one is embedded (Ulrich et al. 2010).

The remainder of this chapter focuses on emerging issues and debates that have begun to attract
attention in the translation and interpreting literature, namely professional dissonance, moral
injury, vicarious trauma, and burnout.
3.1 Professional dissonance

The disjuncture and associated guilt that provoke ethical stress have recently been discussed
under the label of professional dissonance, that is, “a feeling of discomfort arising from the
conflict between professional values and job tasks” (Taylor 2007, 90). Professional dissonance
has its roots in cognitive dissonance theory and relates to the burnout literature as it attempts
to understand the inner lives of individuals and how their thoughts and actions may contrib-
ute to burnout (Taylor 2007, 95). While dissonance can eventually lead to greater professional
and personal growth, value collisions can also be a source of great psychological pain. Profes-
sional translator and scholar Francis Jones provides a good example of dissonance where ethical
418
considerations come into play. In an article written in 2004, Jones discusses the socio-ethical
dilemmas and decisions he faced while translating Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian literature into
English during the 1990s. Viewing translation as both a textual and an extra-textual action,
Jones highlights that the translator can struggle to take into account the interests and wishes of
all of the different parties involved, and that translation decisions do not always prevent a “sense
of inner conflict” (Jones 2004, 721). This cognitive dissonance is also apparent in the stories of
the professional translators interviewed by Abdallah, as their desire to produce quality work for
readers in line with their professional ethics often conflicts with an agency’s goal to keep costs
to a minimum: “conflicts of quality arise . . . when the translator as the agent tries to satisfy
the unaligned demands of . . . the reader and the translation company. [This] causes translators
much consternation, in some cases even ethical stress” (Abdallah 2010, 24). In fact, I would
wager that, more than ethical stress, working in these sub-optimal conditions where they have to
compromise their ethical or moral convictions could provoke what Fenton and Kelly call “moral
injury” which results from “sustained managerial, formulaic and procedural expectations that
constrain or inhibit value-based, responsive practice” (2017, 463). Indeed, Abdallah (2010, 37)
argues that capitalist institutions and global companies do not value experience, craftsmanship,
or accomplishment, and they have very hierarchical and rigid structures which create unbearable
working conditions for professional translators and engender feelings of powerlessness.
It would seem that translators and interpreters are more likely to experience ethical stress
and moral injury when they work in a rigid system where there is little opportunity to voice
concerns or to discuss ethical decisions with agencies, clients, and other involved parties. When
there are few opportunities to communicate with clients or to discuss risky translation decisions
and there is a perceived or real emphasis on making justifiable decisions, this creates a risk-averse
climate where individuals are encouraged to look after their own interests. As Fenton and Kelly
(2017) argue, ethical impulses and value-based practice are undermined in risk-averse environ-
ments, where it becomes more important to show that you “have done things right” rather than
that you “have done the right thing.”
Doing the right thing, however, is a risky business. According to Pym (2004), “risk” in transla-
tion is the probability of an undesired outcome in a communication situation, such as the risk of
not getting paid or of losing a client. There is risk involved in solving specific translation problems
too, with some problems involving low risks (limited possibility of an undesired outcome) and
others involving greater risks. To manage these risks, Pym (2015) explains that there should exist
a kind of mutual trust between the translator, the client, and the end-user. However, this trust car-
ries its own risks and is threatened by possible misunderstandings, betrayals, and non-cooperation
inherent in translation activities. As such, Pym (76–77) suggests that translators may be risk-averse,
playing it safe – for instance, explicating and simplifying texts to make comprehension easier and
reduce the risk of misunderstanding. The blame, however, does not lie solely with translators
but with the translation industry more widely. Abdallah’s work suggests that translators act in
self-protecting ways when they do not receive support from others in translation production net-
works. For translators to be able to offer risky solutions or to exercise agency, they need to work
with people and institutions who are not wholly preoccupied with risk or afraid of its complexity
in case something goes awry. More than a question of providing rewards for risk-taking, as Pym
suggests, translators and interpreters need to work in frameworks that value different perspectives,
have a flexible and positive view of risk-taking, and enable relationship building with the differ-
ent parties involved. Excessively bureaucratic, defensive, and procedural environments seem to be
where ethical stress and moral injury thrive (Fenton and Kelly 2017).
A word of caution is therefore perhaps in order for those involved in the translation and inter-
preting industries. Encouraging a risk-averse and defensive culture of practice will constrain and
419
inhibit ethical decision-making. Efforts to establish risk matrices and models of comprehensive
risk management for translations (e.g. Canfora and Ottmann 2018) are valuable enterprises, but
we must be careful that these structured processes aiming to identify, analyse, and evaluate “all the
risks which are related to translations” (Canfora and Ottmann 2016, 3) do not end up being used
as formulaic, procedural, managerial tools that contribute to further disassociating translators and
interpreters from the affective experience of ethical decision-making. Fenton and Kelly highlight,
“[breaking] processes down into discreet tasks means that people become only interested in the
completion of their task well, and feel dissociated from the eventual, actual outcome” (2017, 467).
As Abdallah notes (2010, 43), translators need to be able to participate as legitimate experts in
translation production networks in the interests of all parties and not be made to solve morality
conflicts on their own or to pass this responsibility entirely on to someone else.
When translators and interpreters can act in line with their conscience or values, they will
experience less ontological guilt (or ethical stress) but more ontological anxiety, a normal con-
sequence of being able to make the best possible decision for the client, rather than the most
easily defended one (Fenton 2015, 1421). Although one might question whether, in today’s
blame culture, taking risks and embracing anxiety is feasible, research carried out in other fields
(e.g. Ulrich et al. 2010; McLennan, Ryan, and Randall 2018) has shown that workers are less
ethically stressed and emotionally exhausted when they are trusted to make use of their own
professional and moral judgements in line with their moral compass.
The links between ethical stress and emotions are, therefore, worthy of further research. It
is noteworthy that emotional dissonance – a conceptual subset of cognitive dissonance – is well
known to be associated with employee psychological stress. Emotional dissonance refers to “the
psychological incongruence and conflict experienced by individuals who display emotions that
differ from the emotions they are experiencing internally” (Kenworthy, Fay, Frame, and Petree
2014, 95). It is said to occur when an individual’s expressed emotions are considered acceptable
by their organisation/employer but do not represent their own true feelings (Karimi, Leggat,
Donohue, Farrell, and Couper 2014, 3). A typical scenario would be one whereby interpreters
are faking emotional displays or expressions in an attempt to remain unemotional and neutral
with their clients at work. The internal conflict generated entails emotional labour, as regulating
emotions depletes the cognitive resources and energy of translators and interpreters, eventually
resulting in poorer intellectual performance (e.g. Kenworthy et al. 2014). The emotional dis-
sonance literature suggests that this type of discrepancy between expressed and felt emotions can
have a significant impact on ethical and moral behaviours, as well as general well-being (Nelson
and Merighi 2002; Berger 2014; Grootegoed and Smith 2018). As such, the emotional compo-
nent of ethical stress will be further explored in the next section.
3.2 Moral injury

Paying attention to issues of ethical stress is germane to the T&I professions as it can be argued
that translators and interpreters are especially vulnerable to its more distressing consequences,
that is, moral injury and burnout. Indeed, the inauthentic feelings associated with the profes-
sional dissonance component of ethical stress are already integral to this type of intercultural
mediation. Translators and interpreters are naturally wont to act and behave with a certain level
of inauthenticity as their work involves “guises and masks” (Allen and Bernofsky 2013, xix).
Their views, values, objectives, and feelings rarely align fully with those of their clients, particu-
larly when mediating between different stakeholders and cultures; yet, it is expected that they
reformulate and reproduce these views, values, objectives, and feelings in another language as
part of their everyday practice.
420
This regular exigence requires effortful self-control so as to prioritize work-related objec-

tives (Gross and John 2003; Mikolajczak, Menil, and Luminet 2007; Beal, Trougakos, Weiss,
and Dalal 2013). Translators and interpreters will have been trained to behave professionally
and abide by codes of conduct, and it is likely that they employ a range of coping strategies
to repress any dissonance, powerlessness, or guilt that may ensue from misalignments between
their values and their tasks. As noted elsewhere, translators “need to create such an attitude
toward their work so that they can tolerate the given conditions, retain their self-respect, and
find their role somehow meaningful” (Abdallah 2010, 30, citing Alasuutari). Nevertheless, the
inauthentic nature of their roles requires them to work hard to stay “in control,” particularly
if the work is emotionally laden. In Roberts’s 2015 study of the emotional and psychological
impact of interpreting within public service settings, participants reported being able to cope
with the emotional impact of the conversations they were interpreting because of the technical
and professional elements of the session which gave them focus. The intellectual input required
helped interpreters to manage the emotional demands of the interaction. Similarly, interpreters
employed at the International Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR)
reported using a range of cognitive coping strategies in order to be able to reproduce harrowing
testimonies, such as pretending the testimony was unreal or thinking about similar accounts read
in books (Swain 2011).
Similarly, there is ample evidence in both spoken-language and sign-language interpreting
that the demanding nature of their work often requires interpreters to carry out intense emo-
tional labour (Hetherington 2011; Bontempo and Malcolm 2012; Mehus and Becher 2016;
Valero-Garcés 2017). This cognitive and emotional work, as mentioned previously, strains their
mental resources and results in a state of fatigue which provides fertile ground for stress to take
root. When moral conflict is added to the mix, the psychological resources of translators and
interpreters are likely to become overly taxed and to trigger a situation of distress.
Some vivid examples of this concurrence of circumstances can be found in community
interpreting settings, and especially in trauma-informed interpreting which is a more intense
and emotionally demanding version of community interpreting. The requirement to continu-
ally balance competing and differing perspectives, manage complex interactions, and exercise
controlled empathy while making important translation decisions has been found to create
significant challenges for language professionals interpreting in public service settings. Bancroft
(2017) reports that community interpreters can find it difficult to maintain professional and
role boundaries and tend not to be prepared for their own emotional involvement. Indeed, the
author demonstrates that an important majority of interpreters for victims and refugees report
being emotionally impacted by their work, something which affects their impartiality and can
lead to situations of burnout and vicarious trauma. This situation is compounded when they
have to work with stakeholders in adversarial situations where interests are in conflict. For
instance, in Tryuk’s (2017) research on refugee hearings in Warsaw, she learnt that a number of
immigration officers believed that interpreters should take control and act without waiting for
permission in situations of high tension and conflict with so-called aggressive foreigners. Immi-
gration officers also asserted that they expected help from interpreters to conduct interviews
and maintain order during hearings (sometimes by reprimanding foreigners or evaluating their
credibility), and some officers even stated that “interpreters should ‘get close’ to the foreigner so
that the officer can achieve his/her goal” (Tryuk 2017, 186).
These practices clearly show that interpreters – who will already be dedicating significant
resources to the cognitive and affective demands of their task – can find themselves bearing wit-
ness to (or being pressured to take part in) unethical behaviours that violate their ideals, moral
values, and professional codes, and could thus easily trigger both ethical stress and moral injury.
421
Indeed, in the psychological trauma literature, moral injury is defined as (1) a betrayal of what’s
right, (2) by someone who holds legitimate authority, (3) in a high-stakes situation (Shay 2014,
183). Interpreters and translators working in various public service settings are likely to be par-
ticularly vulnerable, due to repeated exposure to these problematic situations. The interpreters
in refugee hearings in Poland, for instance, are regularly required to breach the principles of
invisibility, impartiality, neutrality, and faithfulness (Tryuk 2017, 191), thus habituating them to
experiences that fail to conform to their schematic beliefs about their role.
Taken to the extreme, this type of situation will result in altered beliefs about the world and
the self, deteriorate character, and impair capacity for trust:
when social trust is destroyed, it is replaced by the settled expectancy of harm, exploitation,
and humiliation from others. With this expectancy, there are few options: strike frst; with-
draw and isolate oneself from others . . . or create deceptions, distractions, false identities,
and narratives to spoil the aim of what is expected.
(Shay 2014, 186)
A clear example of the distressing consequences that taking part in morally injurious acts can
have is recounted in Lan’s 2016 research on Taiwanese individuals who performed interpret-
ing in military operations during wartime. These interpreters were for the majority convicted
as war criminals and sentenced to death. Lan (2016) reports that the executions were due to
ill-treatment, interrogations, and torture of local civilian residents, unethical actions which the
interpreters were generally forced into and had little control over. Placed in a situation where
trust had been destroyed and they were disempowered, the interpreters expected harm and
would “strike first,” i.e. participate in killings, for fear of retaliation. Civilian interpreter Yoneda’s
testimony illustrates how one such act of transgression unfolded:
I thought it was not my duty to kill . . . when I objected . . . Awano came very close to
me and told me that . . . he would kill me . . . I thought he would carry out the threat.
(Lan 2016, 216)
Taiwanese interpreters were clearly victims of moral injury, but not all of their unethical actions
were a result of coercion. Lan reports that some interpreters took it upon themselves to further
chastise, threaten, and humiliate the local populations. Similarly, Takeda (2016, 231) reports that
some Japanese interpreters and translators post-World War II were prosecuted for the torture,
assault, and killing of civilians in Japanese-occupied regions. In clinical psychology, this type of
harmful behaviour is considered a relatively common response to ethical stress and moral injury,
whereby negative emotions such as guilt and shame can lead to harmful acts for the self and
others and shape ongoing moral behaviours. Litz et al. (2009, 697–698) underscore the impor-
tance of these subjective responses to unethical behaviour which lead to lasting psychological
and social impacts:
moral injury involves an act of transgression that creates dissonance and confict because it
violates assumptions and beliefs about right and wrong and personal goodness. How this
dissonance or confict is reconciled is one of the key determinants of injury. If individu-
als are unable to assimilate or accommodate (integrate) the event within existing self- and
relational-schemas, they will experience guilt, shame, and anxiety about potential dire
personal consequences.
(698)
422
Reconciling dissonance and repairing moral injury is extremely difcult, but possible. As Shay
(2014, 189–191) indicates, the potential for successful recovery lies in recognising moral injury,
empowering individuals, and creating and supporting a safe environment with support and rec-
ognition by peers. The following example illustrates this process efectively.
Brander de la Iglesia (2017) recounts the experience of Camayd-Freixas, who was sum-
moned to interpret at the hearings of 306 illegal immigrant workers who had been arrested
and accused of falsifying social security documents. A guilty plea would send them to prison
for a month, but if they pleaded not guilty they would remain in prison for over a year pending
trial. Camayd-Freixas witnessed a number of irregularities during the trial, such as the chaining
of prisoners (unwarranted in the situation) and their lack of understanding of what they were
accused of. This set of circumstances qualifies as morally injurious as it consists of a betrayal of
what is right by an authority in a high-stakes situation. The interpreter witnessed an act that
violated his moral values but could not speak of it to anyone, in part because doing so would
have prolonged the trial and prevented the immigrants from returning home to their families.
Nevertheless, he found a way to cope with this destruction of social trust by publishing an article
in the local press about his experience once the immigrants were home safely. Despite the debate
that ensued in the interpreting community in relation to breaking the rule of confidentiality,
Brander de la Iglesia highlights that Camayd-Freixas also gained support and recognition from
his peers and was able to recover and grow from the experience. This situation is consonant with
the psychological literature which suggests that social support and recognition from peers is “an
essential ingredient of recovery from moral injury” (Shay 2014, 189).
Interpreters and translators are therefore able to grow and learn from morally injurious expe-
riences. However, the risks associated with maladaptive responses to ethical stress and moral
injury include vicarious trauma and burnout. These are addressed in the next section.
3.3 Vicarious trauma and burnout

In the psychological literature, ethical stress (or moral distress) has been associated with low job
satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, intention to quit, and compassion fatigue (O’Donnell et al.
2008; Mangoulia, Koukia, Alevizopoulos, Fildissis, and Katostaras 2015; Christodoulou-Fella,
Middleton, Papathanassoglou, and Karanikola 2017). Compassion fatigue is also sometimes
called secondary trauma syndrome or vicarious trauma (VC) and develops in individuals who
experience emotional distress as a result of coming in close and continuous contact with victims
of trauma (Figley 2002; Ledoux 2015; Gray 2017). It should be noted that, in spite of the many
similarities between the two concepts, particularly in terms of symptoms, compassion fatigue
is said to apply to a broad range of professionals whereas VC has been discussed in relation to
trauma specialists more specifically (Gray 2017, 121). VC has received some attention in the T&I
literature recently and has been linked to ethically stressful situations and burnout. In the con-
text of interviews with asylum seekers and the police in Finland, Määttä (2015) highlights that
interpreters’ decisions to intervene, for example to correct an error in a transcript, may result in
a conflict between the requirements of professional ethics, general ethical responsibility towards
a fellow human being, and the interpreter’s own sense of professionalism. He reports, “the con-
sequences of the interpreter’s decisions do not only affect the migrant but also the interpreter in
the form of increased ethical stress, general work stress, and potential vicarious trauma” (Määttä
2015, 32). Similarly, scholars in the field of signed language interpreting have found that expo-
sure to the distress of others and being powerless to prevent discrimination can have a marked
impact on interpreters and provoke psychological distress and “emotional drowning” (Dean and
Pollard 2001; Hetherington 2010, 2011; Bontempo and Malcolm 2012).
423
Environmental factors Transgressions/value Dissonance/ethical

• opportunity for moral collisions stress
action • moral conflict • ontological guilt
• ethical climate • moral injury • anxiety, shame
• individual factors • belief violation • powerlessness
Burnout Vicarious trauma Self-control/self-

• withdrawal, intention to • emotional exhaustion regulation
quit • reduced self/other • emotional labour
• failure to forgive self respect • surface acting
and others • low job satisfaction • attempts to regulate
• alterations in self-image feelings, e.g. empathy
• performance issues
Figure. 27.2 A process model of the conditions that can lead to vicarious trauma and burnout
In Figure 27.2, I have summarised the conditions that can lead to situations of VC and
burnout. Unlike burnout which develops over a period of time, vicarious traumatisation is
said to appear more rapidly, though its symptoms can be pervasive (Jordan 2010, 227). It has
been shown to result in reduced respect and concern for others and to be associated with poor
peer social support, doubting of one’s professional competence, and alterations in self-image
(Boscarino, Figley, and Adams 2004; Canfeld 2005; Gray 2017). Prolonged exposure to situ-
ations of ethical stress is also said to decrease the plasticity of the brain and render individuals
more susceptible to anxiety, depression, secondary traumatic stress symptoms, as well as burnout
(Christodoulou-Fella et al. 2017). This is borne out in the context of trauma-informed inter-
preting, as Bancroft (2017, 209) describes the symptoms of VC in the following terms:
interpreters reported getting dizzy, nauseated or fearful after sessions with survivors. They
had nightmares or disturbed sleep. Their concentration was disrupted during interpreting.
They had difficulty getting certain stories or images out of their head . . . they might shake
or tremble. Most distressing of all was the degree to which a number of interpreters simply
burned out.
Other common symptoms of VC can include social withdrawal, aggression, greater sensitivity
to violence, cynicism, numbness, sexual difculties, eating disorders, helplessness, difculty in
relationships, etc. The use of the frst person in interpreting can intensify the embodiment of
emotions and enhance its traumatic impact. Ndongo-Keller (2015, 337) provides a clear descrip-
tion of this predicament when discussing the experience of interpreters of surviving witnesses
at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda:
It is they who provided the first-person voices in these stories: “I killed,” “I raped,” “I
was raped,” “I slaughtered,” “I beat,” “I was stabbed,” “I was abused,” “I was beaten,” “my
child was hacked into pieces,” “my mother was buried alive,” “all my family members
424
were killed.” Repeatedly, the interpreters listened, visualised, analysed, understood and
re-expressed what they heard . . . She had become one of the victims, feeling everything
they narrated.
However, VC is not the sole prerogative of interpreters, and professional translators have also
been shown to borrow others’ emotions through processes of emotional sharing when translat-
ing and are therefore also susceptible to emotional contagion and manifestation of VC (Maier
2002, 2006; Hubscher-Davidson 2017). One clear example is reported in Ndongo-Keller
(2015) where the act of translating witness statements (or “gory narratives”) from interviews
with genocide victims is described as traumatising.
It is important to note, however, that different factors can influence well-being outcomes
(e.g. resilience, self-esteem, conscientiousness, life satisfaction, prior experience) and that situ-
ations of ethical stress and emotional labour do not always result in burnout. Those who have
experienced VC can also eventually experience vicarious transformation, that is, renewed hope,
spiritual growth, and a greater appreciation for life. There are also instances where dissonant
cognitions will not produce dissonance effects, for example when there is sufficient justification
for a particular behaviour (Pugh, Groth, and Hennig-Thurau 2011). Nevertheless, given certain
conditions, it is clear that translators and interpreters can be particularly vulnerable to VC and
to burnout, and there is currently a lack of information about the various ways in which they
can be affected by situations of ethical stress.
4 Conclusion
In summary, although there is an increasing body of literature describing ethical issues that
translators and interpreters can experience in the course of their work, there remains a dearth
of information when it comes to the moral conflict-tainted psychological repercussions on
professional linguists of being enmeshed in ethical dilemmas. Translation scholars have paid
little attention to the links between job stress and the body of research on cognitive dissonance,
despite the fact that conflict between personal values and job demands often leads to undesirable
consequences.
Translators’ and interpreters’ exposure to situations of ethical stress can exact a high personal
cost, and they may find themselves “making a trade-off between work they want to do and work
they have to do” (Leiter and Maslach 2008, 501). The implication is that linguists who are unable
to practice in accordance with their value base have a choice as to their level of engagement with
tasks, with ethical issues, and with the profession as a whole. Valero-Garcés (2015, 95) provides
a telling example of an interpreter who felt so uneasy when interpreting content that conflicted
with her moral and religious beliefs that she refused subsequent work on these topics. Transla-
tors and interpreters do not always have this option, however, and unchecked ethical stress may
cause irreparable damage to their mental health and well-being in the shape of moral injury,
vicarious trauma, and burnout.
The focus on translator psychology that is promoted here is consistent with Pym’s (2012)
aim to focus on the human actor in complex situations of cultural mediation and his argument
that translator ethics needs to address translators “in their inner core” (2012, 165). The idea that
translators should demand reasonable working conditions and that, in some situations, it may be
advantageous not to translate at all is also consonant with McAlester’s (2003, 226) argument that
“ultimately, translators’ responsibility is not to the author, or the reader, or the commissioner, or
to the translating profession but to themselves.”
425
Nevertheless, one might argue that educators, employers, and professional associations also
have a duty-of-care when it comes to supporting linguists. Translators and interpreters need to
become self-aware and learn about adaptive responses and coping strategies when encountering
ethically stressful situations; they need guidance when it comes to attending to their own emo-
tional, spiritual, psychological and physical needs; they need to be taught preventive measures
to manage their stress and solutions for processing challenging experiences. As Koskinen notes
(2016, 176), “when things become complicated, when the personal and the professional enter
into conflict, and when there seems to be no right course of action, . . . one needs solid bear-
ings.” These solid bearings can take many forms: social support networks of peers, role plays,
counselling sessions, ethics consultations, open discussions with clients and managers etc. Above
all, it is now clear that the provision of positive support for ethical reflection is an occupational
health and safety issue for the translation and interpreting professions.

Translator ethics; professional translator ethics; translating and interpreting in conflict and crisis;
ethics of collaboration and control in literary translation.
References
Abdallah, Kristiina. 2010. “Translators’ Agency in Production Networks.” In Translators’ Agency, edited by
Tuija Kinnunen, and Kaisa Koskinen, 11–46. Tampere: Tampere University Press.
Allen, Esther, and Susan Bernofsky. 2013. “Introduction: A Culture of Translation.” In In Translation: Trans-
lators on Their Work and What It Means, edited by Esther Allen, and Susan Bernofsky, xiii–xxiii. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Apter, Emily. 2007. “Translation-9/11: Terrorism, Immigration, and the World of Global Language Poli-
tics.” The Global South 1, no. 1: 69–80.
Bancroft, Marjory A. 2017. “The Voice of Compassion: Exploring Trauma-Informed Interpreting.” In
Ideology, Ethics and Policy Development in Public Service Interpreting and Translation, edited by Carmen
Valero-Garcés, and Rebecca Tipton, 195–215. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Beal, Daniel J., John P. Trougakos, Howard M. Weiss, and Reeshad S. Dalal. 2013. “Affect Spin and the
Emotion Regulation Process at Work.” Journal of Applied Psychology 98, no. 4: 593–605. https://doi.
org/10.1037/a0032559.
Berger, Jeffrey T. 2014. “Moral Distress in Medical Education and Training.” Journal of General Internal
Medicine 29, no. 2: 395–98. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-013-2665-0.
Bontempo, Karen, and Karen Malcolm. 2012. “An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure:
Educating Interpreters About the Risk of Vicarious Trauma in Healthcare Settings.” In In Our Hands:
Educating Healthcare Interpreters, edited by Karen Malcolm, and Laurie Swabey, 105–30. Washington,
DC: Gallaudet University Press.
Boscarino, Joseph A., Charles R. Figley, and Richard E. Adams. 2004. “Compassion Fatigue Following the
September 11 Terrorist Attacks: A Study of Secondary Trauma among New York City Social Workers.”
International Journal of Emergency Mental Health 6, no. 2: 57–66.
Brander de la Iglesia, María. 2017. “‘A Sea of Troubles’: Ethical Dilemmas from War Zones to the Class-
room.” In Ideology, Ethics and Policy Development in Public Service Interpreting and Translation, edited by
Carmen Valero-Garcés, and Rebecca Tipton, 84–103. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Canfield, Julie. 2005. “Secondary Traumatization, Burnout, and Vicarious Traumatization: A Review of
the Literature as It Relates to Therapists Who Treat Trauma.” Smith College Studies in Social Work 75,
no. 2: 81–101.
Canfora, Carmen, and Angelika Ottmann. 2016. “Who’s Afraid of Translation Risks?” In 8th EST Congress.
Aarhus. www.researchgate.net/profile/Carmen_Canfora/publication/313532670_Who%27s_afraid_
of_translation_risks_-_written_version_of_presentation/links/589da8a7aca272e6cd4d5a9a/
Whos-afraid-of-translation-risks-written-version-of-presentation.pdf
Canfora, Carmen, and Angelika Ottmann. 2018. “Of Ostriches, Pyramids, and Swiss Cheese: Risks in
Safety-Critical Translations.” Translation Spaces 7, no. 2: 167–201.
426
Chiang, Yung-Nan. 2009. “Foreign Language Anxiety in Taiwanese Student Interpreters.” Meta: Translators’
Journal 54, no. 3: 605–21.
Chiang, Yung-Nan. 2010. “Foreign Language Anxiety and Student Interpreters’ Learning Outcomes:
Implications for the Theory and Measurement of Interpretation Learning Anxiety.” Meta: Translators’
Journal 55, no. 3: 589–601.
Christodoulou-Fella, Maria, Nicos Middleton, Elizabeth D.E. Papathanassoglou, and Maria N.K. Karan-
ikola. 2017. “Exploration of the Association between Nurses’ Moral Distress and Secondary Traumatic
Stress Syndrome: Implications for Patient Safety in Mental Health Services.” BioMed Research Interna-
tional. https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/1908712
Cooper, Cary L., Rachel Davies, and Rosalie L. Tung. 1982. “Interpreting Stress: Sources of Job Stress
among Conference Interpreters.” Multilingua 1, no. 2: 97–107.
Dam, Helle V., and Karen K. Zethsen. 2016. “‘I Think It Is a Wonderful Job’: On the Solidity of the
Translation Profession.” The Journal of Specialised Translation 25. www.jostrans.org/issue25/art_dam.php
Davis, Anne J., Marsha Fowler, Sophia Fantus, Joseph J. Fins, Michelle Joy, Katherine Kruse, Alyssa Bur-
gart, et al. 2018. “Healthcare Professional Narratives on Moral Distress: Disciplinary Perspectives.” In
Moral Distress in the Health Professions, 21–57. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.
org/10.1007/978-3-319-64626-8_3.
Dean, Robyn, and Robert Pollard. 2001. “Application of Demand-Control Theory to Sign Language
Interpreting: Implications for Stress and Interpreter Training.” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education
6, no. 1: 1–14.
DeTienne, Kristen Bell, Bradley R. Agle, James C. Phillips, and Marc Charles Ingerson. 2012. “The Impact
of Moral Stress Compared to Other Stressors on Employee Fatigue, Job Satisfaction, and Turnover:
An Empirical Investigation.” Journal of Business Ethics 110, no. 3: 377–91. https://doi.org/10.1007/
s10551-011-1197-y
Eszenyi, Réka. 2016. “What Makes a Professional Translator? The Profile of the Modern Translator.” In
The Modern Translator and Interpreter, edited by Ildikó Horváth, 17–28. Budapest: Eötvös University Press.
Fenton, Jane. 2015. “An Analysis of ‘Ethical Stress’ in Criminal Justice Social Work in Scotland: The Place
of Values.” British Journal of Social Work 45, no. 5: 1415–32. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcu032
Fenton, Jane, and Timothy Kelly. 2017. “‘Risk Is King and Needs to Take a Backseat!’ Can Social Work-
ers’ Experiences of Moral Injury Strengthen Practice?” Journal of Social Work Practice 31, no. 4: 461–75.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2017.1394827
Figley, Charles R. 2002. Treating Compassion Fatigue. New York: Routledge.
Gray, Dawn. 2017. “Developing Professional Resilience: The Impact of Working with Violent Offenders on
Criminal Justice Social Workers Working in Scotland.” PhD diss., University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth.
Grootegoed, Ellen, and Mark Smith. 2018. “The Emotional Labour of Austerity: How Social Workers
Reflect and Work on Their Feelings towards Reducing Support to Needy Children and Families.”
The British Journal of Social Work 48, no. 7: 1929–47.
Gross, James J., and Oliver P. John. 2003. “Individual Differences in Two Emotion Regulation Processes:
Implications for Affect, Relationships, and Well-Being.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85,
no. 2: 348–62. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
Heller, Bruce, Millie Stansfield, G. Stark, and Daniel Langholtz. 1986. “Sign Language Interpreter Stress:
An Exploratory Study.” In Proceedings of the 1985 Convention of the American Deafness and Rehabilitation
Association. Little Rock: ADARA.
Hermans, Theo. 2009. “Translation, Ethics, Politics.” In The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies,
edited by Jeremy Munday, 93–105. London, New York: Routledge.
Hetherington, Ali. 2010. “Stress, Burnout and Vicarious Trauma: The Benefits of Supervision for Inter-
preters.” Supporting Deaf People, Online Conference, February 3–6. www.online-conference.net/
sdp2010/programme.htm#supervision
Hetherington, Ali. 2011. “A Magical Profession? Causes and Management of Occupational Stress in the
Signed Language Interpreting Profession.” In Signed Language Interpreting: Preparation, Practice and Perfor-
mance, edited by Lorraine Leeson, Svenja Wurm, and Myriam Vermeerbergen, 138–59. Manchester:
Hubscher-Davidson, Séverine. 2017. Translation and Emotion: A Psychological Perspective. London, New
York: Routledge.
Jones, Francis R. 2004. “Ethics, Aesthetics and Décision: Literary Translating in the Wars of the Yugoslav
Succession.” Meta: Journal Des Traducteurs 49, no. 4: 711. https://doi.org/10.7202/009777ar
Jordan, Karin. 2010. “Vicarious Trauma: Proposed Factors That Impact Clinicians.” Journal of Family Psy-
chotherapy 21, no. 4: 225–37.
427
Kállay, Eva. 2011. “Coaching and Stress Management in Interpretation.” Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai
Philologia 56, no. 1: 65–70.
Kao, Po-Chi, and Philip Craigie. 2013. “Evaluating Student Interpreters’ Stress and Coping Strategies.”
Social Behavior and Personality 41, no. 6: 1035–44.
Karimi, Leila, Sandra G. Leggat, Lisa Donohue, Gerald Farrell, and Greta E. Couper. 2014. “Emotional
Rescue: The Role of Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Labour on Well-Being and Job-Stress among
Community Nurses.” Journal of Advanced Nursing 70, no. 1: 176–86. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.12185
Kenworthy, Jared, Cara Fay, Mark Frame, and Robyn Petree. 2014. “A Meta-Analytic Review of the Rela-
tionship between Emotional Dissonance and Emotional Exhaustion.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology
44, no. 2: 94–105. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12211
Klonowicz, Tatiana. 1994. “Putting One’s Heart into Simultaneous Interpretation.” In Bridging the Gap:
Empirical Research in Simultaneous Interpretation, edited by Sylvie Lambert, and Barbara Moser-Mercer,
Korpal, Paweł. 2016. “Interpreting as a Stressful Activity: Physiological Measures of Stress in Simultaneous
Interpreting.” Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 52, no. 2: 297–316. https://doi.org/10.1515/
psicl-2016-0011
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2000. Beyond Ambivalence: Postmodernity and the Ethics of Translation. Tampere: Tampere
University Press.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2016. “Pym, Anthony. 2012. On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation between
Cultures.” Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 28, no. 1: 170–7.
Kurz, Ingrid. 2002. “Physiological Stress Responses during Media and Conference Interpreting.” In Inter-
preting in the 21st Century, edited by Giuliana Garzone, and Maurizio Viezzi, 195–202. Amsterdam,
Kurz, Ingrid. 2003. “Physiological Stress during Simultaneous Interpreting: A Comparison of Experts and
Novices.” The Interpreters’ Newsletter 12: 51–67.
Lan, Shi-chi Mike. 2016. “‘Crime’ of Interpreting: Taiwanese Interpreters as War Criminals of World
War II.” In New Insights in the History of Interpreting, edited by Kayoko Takeda, and Jesús Baigorri-Jalón,
Ledoux, Kathleen. 2015. “Moral Distress: A Study of Personal and Organizational Factors.” PhD Diss., the
University of Western Ontario, London (Ontario).
Leiter, Michael P., and Christina Maslach. 2008. “Early Predictors of Job Burnout and Engagement.” Journal
of Applied Psychology 93, no. 3: 498–512.
Litz, Brett T., Nathan Stein, Eileen Delaney, Leslie Lebowitz, William P. Nash, Caroline Silva, and Shira
Maguen. 2009. “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Interven-
tion Strategy.” Clinical Psychology Review 29: 695–706.
Määttä, Simo K. 2015. “Interpreting the Discourse of Reporting: The Case of Screening Interviews with
Asylum Seekers and Police Interviews in Finland.” Translation and Interpreting 7, no. 3: 21–35. https://
doi.org/10.12807/ti.107203.2015.a02
Maier, Carol. 2002. “Translation, Dépaysement, and Their Figuration.” In Translation and Power, edited by
Maria Tymoczko, and Edwin Gentzler, 184–94. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Maier, Carol. 2006. “Translating as a Body: Meditations on Mediation (Excerpts 1994–2004).” In The
Translator as Writer, edited by Susan Bassnett, and Peter Bush, 137–48. London, New York: Continuum.
Mangoulia, Polyxeni, Evmorfia Koukia, George Alevizopoulos, George Fildissis, and Theofanis Katostaras.
2015. “Prevalence of Secondary Traumatic Stress Among Psychiatric Nurses in Greece.” Archives of
Psychiatric Nursing 29, no. 5: 333–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apnu.2015.06.001
McAlester, Gerard. 2003. “A Comment on Translation Ethics and Education.” In Translation Today: Trends
and Perspectives, edited by Gunilla Anderman, and Margaret Rogers, 225–27. Clevedon: Multilingual
Matters.
McLennan, Vanette, Kerry Ryan, and Christine Randall. 2018. “Ethical Dilemmas Experienced by Austra-
lian Rehabilitation Counsellors.” Online Journal of Health Ethics 14, no. 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.18785/
ojhe.1401.07
Mehus, Christopher J., and Emily H. Becher. 2016. “Secondary Traumatic Stress, Burnout, and Compas-
sion Satisfaction in a Sample of Spoken-Language Interpreters.” Traumatology 22, no. 4: 249–54.
Mikolajczak, Moïra, Clémentine Menil, and Olivier Luminet. 2007. “Explaining the Protective Effect of
Trait Emotional Intelligence Regarding Occupational Stress: Exploration of Emotional Labour Pro-
cesses.” Journal of Research in Personality 41, no. 5: 1107–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2007.01.003
428
Moser-Mercer, Barbara, Alexander Künzli, and Marina Korac. 1998. “Prolonged Turns in Interpreting:
Effects on Quality, Physiological and Psychological Stress (Pilot Study).” Interpreting 3, no. 1: 47–64.
Ndongo-Keller, Justine. 2015. “Vicarious Trauma (VT) and Stress Management.” In The Routledge
Handbook of Interpreting, edited by Holly Mikkelson, and Renée Jourdenais, 337–51. London:
Routledge.
Nelson, Keith R., and Joseph R. Merighi. 2002. “Emotional Dissonance in Medical Social Work Practice.”
Social Work in Health Care 36, no. 3: 63–79. https://doi.org/10.1300/J010v36n03_04
O’Donnell, Patricia, Adrienne Farrar, Karlynn Brintzenhofeszoc, Ann Patrick Conrad, Marion Danis,
Christine Grady, Carol Taylor, and Connie M. Ulrich. 2008. “Predictors of Ethical Stress, Moral Action
and Job Satisfaction in Health Care Social Workers.” Social Work in Health Care 46, no. 3: 29–51. https://
doi.org/10.1300/J010v46n03_02
Pugh, S. Douglas, Markus Groth, and Thorsten Hennig-Thurau. 2011. “Willing and Able to Fake Emo-
tions: A Closer Examination of the Link Between Emotional Dissonance and Employee Well-Being.”
Journal of Applied Psychology 96, no. 2: 377–90. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021395
Pym, Anthony. 2004. “Text and Risk in Translation.” In Choice and Difference in Translation: The Specifics of
Transfer, edited by Maria Sidiropoulou, and Anastasia Papaconstantinou, 27–42. Athens: University of
Athens.
Pym, Anthony. 2012. On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation between Cultures. Amsterdam, Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Pym, Anthony. 2015. “Translating as Risk Management.” Journal of Pragmatics 85: 67–80. https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.06.010
Roberts, Gemma. 2015. “Public Service Interpreters: The Emotional and Psychological Impact of Inter-
preting within Public Service Settings.” PhD Diss., Cardiff University, Cardiff.
Roziner, Ilan, and Miriam Shlesinger. 2010. “Much Ado about Something Remote: Stress and Perfor-
mance in Remote Interpreting.” Interpreting 12, no. 2: 214–47.
Schwenke, Tomina J., Jeffrey S. Ashby, and Philip B. Gnilka. 2014. “Sign Language Interpreters and
Burnout: The Effects of Perfectionism, Perceived Stress, and Coping Resources.” Interpreting 16, no.
2: 209–32.
Shay, Jonathan. 2014. “Moral Injury.” Psychoanalytic Psychology 31, no. 2: 182–91.
Swain, Martyn. 2011. “The Professional Interpreter in Transitional Justice an Empirical Study.” PhD Diss.,
University of Cape Town, Cape Town.
Takeda, Kayoko. 2016. “Japanese Interpreters in the Postwar Occupation Period (1945–1952).” In New
Insights in the History of Interpreting, edited by Kayoko Takeda, and Jesús Baigorri-Jalón, 225–46. Amster-
Taylor, Melissa Floyd. 2007. “Professional Dissonance.” Smith College Studies in Social Work 77, no. 1: 89–99.
https://doi.org/10.1300/J497v77n01_05
Tryuk, Małgorzata. 2017. “Conflict. Tension. Aggression. Ethical Issues in Interpreted Asylum Hearings at
the Office for Foreigners in Warsaw.” In Ideology, Ethics and Policy Development in Public Service Interpreting
and Translation, edited by Carmen Valero-Garcés, and Rebecca Tipton, 179–94. Bristol: Multilingual
Matters.
Ulrich, Connie M., Carol Taylor, Karen Soeken, Patricia O’Donnell, Adrienne Farrar, Marion Danis,
and Christine Grady. 2010. “Everyday Ethics: Ethical Issues and Stress in Nursing Practice.” Journal of
Advanced Nursing 66, no. 11: 2510–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2648.2010.05425.x
Valero-Garcés, Carmen. 2015. “The Impact of Emotional and Psychological Factors on Public Service
Interpreters: Preliminary Studies.” Translation and Interpreting 7, no. 3: 90–102.
Further reading
A collection of chapters that brings together new perspectives on responses to ethical imperatives and
highlights how issues of professionalisation and policymaking can impact on the health and well-being
of translators and interpreters.
429
Abdallah, Kristiina. 2010. “Translators’ Agency in Production Networks.” In Translators’ Agency, edited by
Tuija Kinnunen and Kaisa Koskinen, 11–46. Tampere: Tampere University Press.
This chapter is rooted in the surrounding practices and professional environments of translators and
tackles concepts such as quality-related ethical stress, trust, and the role of agency in decision-making.
Takeda, Kayoko, and Jesús Baigorri-Jalón, eds. 2016. New Insights in the History of Interpreting. Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
A collection of essays which explore a variety of aspects linked to interpreting practice from fresh per-
spectives, such as the notions of guilt, ethical conduct, and risk analysis.
Hubscher-Davidson, Séverine. 2017. Translation and Emotion: A Psychological Perspective. London, New
York: Routledge.
A volume tackling professional translators’ experiences of translating emotion-laden texts, and which
addresses – amongst other issues – cognitive dissonance, burnout, and coping mechanisms.
430
28
Linguistic first aid
1 Introduction
This chapter deals with the concept of linguistic first aid. Linguistic first aid refers to a situation
in which a person with some proficiency in a foreign language can provide immediate help to
another person or a group of people who are not able to communicate in a language to help
them overcome linguistic barriers. The concept has emerged from the research on multilingual
communication that occurs on the international Allegro train running between St Petersburg,
Russia and Helsinki, Finland. It has been noticed that multilingual communication on the train
is partly based on mutual linguistic help between the passengers, border officials and the train
personnel (Probirskaja 2017).
According to Finnish border statistics, passengers on the Allegro train represent about 120
different nationalities. The train personnel and border officials are Finns and Russians. The
train is officially trilingual, with Finnish, Russian and English as its announcement and service
languages, but the language skills of the passengers, train personnel and border officials vary in
their quality and quantity. When the passengers, train personnel and border officials are unable
to find a common language through which to communicate, and the passengers are forced to
communicate at least with border officials, they tend to ask someone for translational help, or
someone can offer this linguistic first aid when they perceive language barriers between inter-
locutors. Linguistic first aid is also needed when information is given in a language that is not
comprehensible to all the passengers or officials. The motivation for helping may derive from
politeness, goodwill, a sense of self-significance and a personal interest in a smooth trip without
any conflict situations (Probirskaja 2017). It seems that the confined moving space of the train
and the common goals of its habitants to arrive at the destination safely and on time create a sense
of community. The findings might be also applicable to other communities of people united by
common space and/or common interests.
The concept of linguistic first aid is inspired by the concept of medical first aid, which is
usually defined as preliminary help provided in emergency circumstances by bystanders who do
not necessarily have the special training, education or knowledge for doing that (see First Aid
in the reference list). Essentially, linguistic first aid relates to ad hoc interpreting and translation,
but as a concept it is value-laden and raises ethical issues such as duty, responsibility, charity
431
and goodwill. These issues are also raised in activist translation, voluntary translation and non-
professional translation.1 In contrast to medical first aid, which is a civic duty the neglect of
which may in some circumstances lead to sanctions, linguistic first aid is completely voluntary,
and it rests on the dimensions of personal ethics and social responsibility. In other words, a person
provides linguistic first aid because of personal beliefs and habits, or because they feel responsible
for fellow human beings. What is still unexplored is the relationship between professional ethics
and linguistic first aid, that is, how professional interpreters and translators should respond to a
linguistic first aid request, what their attitude towards it is, how they should act when off duty
or outside their professional role, and whether provisions on higher values that extend beyond
their immediate professional context should be included in professional codes of ethics or as an
oath. These core issues and topics will be discussed in section 3, which will also provide a report
on a small-scale inquiry into Finnish translators’ attitudes to linguistic first aid. Related to this
discussion, I will also introduce the concept of community ethics. Recently, the issue of social
responsibility has gained the attention of researchers (see Translation, Ethics and Social Responsibil-
ity 2017). This relatively new issue will be considered in section 4 with regard to linguistic first
aid. In the Conclusion, I summarize the dimensions of linguistic first aid and indicate issues that
remain to be discussed.
Linguistic first aid typically takes the form of ad hoc interpreting. Ad hoc interpreting has existed
since time immemorial (Boeri 2012; Ghignoli and Torres Diaz 2015), but in many multilingual
contacts it has been so self-evident and intertwined with other activities that it has barely been
noticed, not to mention studied. Translation in multilingual societies is often habitualized, that is,
lived by and integrated in the course of everyday life (Wolf 2015). For instance, in multicultural
families, translation between family members is a matter of routine; those members who act as
translators take this role for granted, and other members also expect them to take it on (Angelelli
2016; Del Torto 2008; Hall and Guo 2012; Orellana, Dorner, and Pulido 2003). Furthermore,
assistance is taken for granted, if it is a part of a person’s social or institutional duties (Zinken and
Rossi 2016), such as in the case of family translators or professional translators. In other words,
even though translation is always a help in overcoming languages barriers, it might be taken for
granted if it is a normal work duty of a translator or a normal home task of a family member. In
contrast to this, linguistic first aid given to strangers is normally received with gratitude because
it does not belong to a helper’s mandatory duties. Volunteer work in general is associated with
nobler values than normal remunerated work, because it is seen as being conducted on an altru-
istic basis with no commercial interest involved.
The view of translation as a form of aid may be connected to the discussion of the roles of
translators in general. There are two opposing views. Traditionally, and this view is still valid in
many codes of ethics, translators are expected to stay neutral, impartial and invisible. The critics
of this view see translators as active participants in the communication, influencing the flow and
settings of the communication considerably (Angelelli 2004; Inghilleri 2012; Wadensjö 1998).
According to the latter view, translators do more than just mechanically translate – they actively
help participants overcome language and cultural barriers. The notion of translation as a form
of aid becomes especially evident in this participative aspect.
The participative view of translation has probably emerged from fields such as community or
public service interpreting, activist translation, voluntary translation and non-professional trans-
lation. Community interpreting has long been conducted by volunteers (Hale 2007, 28; Roberts
1997, 12). It still has connotations of social work, services, humanity and assistance (Hale 2007,
432
26–27; Roberts 1997, 11–12; Rudvin and Tomassini 2011, 21–22). One of the reasons for
these connotations is that community interpreting mainly serves immigrants and refugees, that
is, socially weak groups who largely depend on linguistic help. Community interpreters often
seek to find a balance between two roles imposed on them: that of a conduit and that of a
helper (Bancroft 2015, 224–226; see also Chapter 15 “Ethics in public service interpreting” in
this volume). The former restricts the interpreter’s role to only transferring a message from one
language into another, whereas the latter presupposes that the interpreter takes on an active role
and helps a client through cultural, social and other barriers to gain access to the service. Most
community interpreters make their own decisions about the role they apply depending on their
training, cultural community, institutional settings and personal values (Bancroft 2015, 225).
The aim of activist translation that gained attention in translation studies at the beginning
of the 2000s is to provide translational help especially for NGOs and humanitarian organiza-
tions, often with a strong political agenda involved (see Baker 2010; see also Chapter 17 “Ethics
of activist translation and interpreting” in this volume). Volunteer translation can take place in
emergency situations such as natural disasters (see, for instance, Bulut and Kurultay 2001; Munro
2010). In these situations, linguistic first aid is tightly intertwined with other kinds of aid even
to the extent that emergency and disaster interpreters in Turkey are taught, among other things,
to deliver medical first aid (Doğan 2016, 67). Non-professional interpreting and translation, and
particularly crowdsourcing, is believed to be based on the shared dominant values and ideals of
the service providers, such as making communication possible, sharing knowledge and having a
strong commitment to the community (Drugan 2011, 121; McDonough Dolmaya 2011, 101).
Another underexplored area is peer translation and interpreting within immigrant communities.
Immigrants with proficient language knowledge tend to act as interpreters for their family and
friends; they convey information about the local society, assist in filling out local authorities’ forms
and share their knowledge via social media (Probirskaja 2019b; Weisskirch 2017). However, trans-
lational activities of immigrants stay invisible for outsiders of immigrant communities. Although
all these settings can be considered forms of linguistic first aid, initially the concept was intended
for occasional everyday life situations with no dramatic scenarios (see Probirskaja 2017).

Lay people render linguistic first aid intuitively and spontaneously, whereas professionals might
stop to consider the consequences of their intervention, including the liabilities and limits of
their action (Probirskaja 2017). Indeed, one of the core issues of linguistic first aid is how pro-
fessional translators should respond to it outside their professional role in everyday settings. Is
it professional or personal ethics that should dictate the translator’s behaviour outside work set-
tings? Should they be the first to respond to a request for linguistic first aid in the same way as
a doctor responds to a request for medical help on board a train or plane, for example? It must
be mentioned that even doctors do not have unanimous answers to whether they should always
respond to requests for medical help in all situations. At least in the US, Canada and the UK,
physicians do not have a legal obligation to assist, but they “have a moral and professional obliga-
tion to act as Good Samaritans” (Peterson et al. 2013, 2081). The question continues whether
physicians are physicians all the time, such as “once a doctor, always a doctor,” or do they “shed
the mantle of being a physician” when they are not explicitly in that role? (Houston 2017). The
same questions can be asked with regard to translators: is a translator always a translator even
outside their professional role?
Andrew Chesterman (2001) attempted to elaborate the idea of higher values that govern the
act of translation in the form of the Hieronymic Oath. Chesterman’s idea was that translators and
433
interpreters should strive for virtues in their work, such as reducing communicative suffering
and promoting understanding, and make these points explicit in the form of an oath. However,
he limits his proposal to professional ethics that “govern a translator’s activities qua translator, not
qua political activist or life-saver” (147). Chesterman admits, anyway, that “there may sometimes
be more important things than professional ethics” (147) and that “any professional ethic must be
subservient to more general or universal ethics” (152). The problem is that it is difficult to draw
a line between distinct kinds of ethics inside the same person (see Rudvin 2007). Thus, personal
and professional ethics may overlap and sometimes even contradict each other.
In contrast to Chesterman’s professionally restricted view is the activist view, according to
which translators are active agents for social change, responsible for the narratives they dis-
seminate, for the suppression of injustice and inequality in the world and for the promotion
of diversity (Baker 2006; Tymoczcko 2010). In this view, translational ethics covers a larger
socio-cultural and political context and possibly places too much responsibility on the transla-
tor’s shoulders. Viewed in this light, linguistic first aid lies somewhere between the strictly
professional context and the responsibility for peace in the entire world. It rather presupposes
voluntary momentary help for the immediate community from the translator, be it a workplace,
a neighbourhood, a shop or a train. Thus, linguistic first aid could be classified as a type of com-
munity ethics. The concept of community ethics is used in theological frameworks meaning
“the intention to live together with others in bonds of mutual love, compassion, and service”
(Kirkpatrick 2001, IX). Community ethics is opposed to Western individualism that prioritizes
individual goals over the common good (Kirkpatrick 2001; Olthuis 2000). Compared to the
relationships in a society as a whole, personal relations in the community are more direct, inti-
mate, loving and mutual (Kirkpatrick 2001, XII).
In the translation studies context, Rudvin (2007, 62) speaks of a communitarian approach as
opposed to an individualist one. The former refers to the translator’s activity in terms of benefits
to a group or a community for whom they work, and the latter refers to the rather Western-
oriented neutral and independent position of a translator concerning the translation event.
Linguistic first aid presupposes a rather communitarian approach, emphasizing the non-neutral
position of intervening. In general, according to modernist and liberal thinking, emotional,
ethnic, religious and national neutrality promotes maximum efficiency of business – “business
is business” – and it should not be restricted by personal or ethnic concerns (see Olthuis 2000,
1–2). The translator’s neutrality, accuracy and fidelity may also be seen as a means of business
and marketing; it creates a positive image of translation and attracts clients who believe that their
original message will remain untouched and under their control (see Lambert 2018). In other
words, a translator’s neutrality is a good established brand. Linguistic first aid, on the other hand,
is rather a pro bono act, not a business transaction, even though it may enhance a positive image
of the provider and even lead to a work offer.
To consider the questions related to ethics of translators and interpreters outside their profes-
sional role, a small-scale inquiry was conducted in Finland (Probirskaja 2019a). The survey was
posted on the two largest Finnish Facebook groups that unite professional translators, interpreters,
translator and interpreter trainers and researchers. The survey contained two open-ended ques-
tions (in Finnish): (1) in your opinion, how should a professional translator or interpreter act if
they notice that somebody needs linguistic help in some (everyday) circumstances? and (2) how
does translation or interpreting in your leisure-time (for instance, when you translate or interpret
for your relatives, friends or strangers) differ from that when you act in your professional role?
Despite the small number of respondents (50), it was possible to identify several tendencies.
First, there was a polarity of opinions regarding the first question. On the one hand, 15 of the
respondents answered “of course, a translator or interpreter should help; isn’t it self-evident?”2
434
On the other hand, five of them answered that “providing help is not a translator’s or an
interpreter’s duty; it is not among translators’ duties.” Yet, the majority of the respondents (30)
considered linguistic first aid to be conditional and depending on circumstances, such as how
serious the situation is or how busy an interpreter or translator is at the moment. The diversity
of opinions tells us that there is a clear ethical dilemma which has not yet been resolved in pro-
fessional circles. Those who think that providing help is not a translator’s or an interpreter’s duty
probably rely on a professional code of ethics that states that “the interpreter shall not act as an
assistant or advocate for those being interpreted” (Code of Ethics of a Professional Interpreter,
The Finnish Association of Translators and Interpreters, art. 8). In other words, they seemingly
apply professional ethics outside their professional role in everyday circumstances. Sometimes
work identity influences personal identity: “what we do is what we will become” (Gini 1998,
707). Along with this thought, if translators pursue the neutrality principle in their professional
life, they probably also stay neutral in everyday circumstances. The other two groups of respon-
dents who are favourably disposed towards linguistic first aid seem to rely on situation ethics,
that is, ethics depending on the situation at hand, on the particular context and circumstances
rather than absolute rules (Li et al. 2016, 165–166). In Fletcher’s interpretation of situation eth-
ics, the love of one’s neighbour is the only rule one should follow, and it overrides other rules
(165–166). In this, situation ethics resembles community ethics.
Respondents to the survey generally appeared to consider linguistic first aid to be a personal
choice derived from the love of one’s neighbour (cf. community ethics) rather than a duty
derived from their profession. As some of them answered, “I help not because I am an interpreter
but because I am a fellow human being” or “I do not think there is any duty derived from the
profession” or “it is everyone’s personal choice whether to help or not.” In other words, unlike
doctors whose profession obliges them to render medical help in a case of emergency, most
translators do not feel that their profession obliges them to provide linguistic first aid. Some
of the respondents answered that they do not immediately offer their help when they perceive
problems in communication. In Sande’s (1998) research on refugee interpreters, who often have
a refugee background themselves, one of the interpreters realized after supervision sessions “that
interpretation is a profession rather than a duty” (Sande 1998, 406). It is interesting that profes-
sionalism somehow seems to spoil innocent goodwill and intention and narrows responsibility
to the professional context only, as if calling, passion, mission and professionalism were mutually
exclusive. On the other hand, professionalism protects interpreters from being misused. Some
translators (12) in the survey expressed their concern about some people asking for translational
help for free as if translation were not a profession at all. It is probably the concern about the pro-
fession, its prestige, reputation and remuneration that make translators less generous in rendering
help than doctors, for instance. Furthermore, because the translator’s profession does not require
accreditation, in other words, because anyone can practise translation, and because the com-
mand of language is not the exclusive skill of professional translators (Rudvin 2007, 61), this to
a certain extent releases them from the responsibility of being the first to render translational aid.
Considering the second question about translation during leisure time, opinions were also
divided. Some respondents (23) think that their translation style during leisure time is more par-
ticipative, more empathic and more relaxed than during work time. It sounds as if the straitjacket
of the professional role would not allow them to be participative, emphatic and relaxed, which
are essentially positive features. As one of them mentioned, “[during leisure time] I can really
help people much better than as an interpreter.” This situation when translators cannot act in
accordance with their values may cause ethical stress (see Chapter 27 “Ethical stress in transla-
tion and interpreting” in this volume). Ethical stress usually occurs in professions such as nursing
and social work, in other words, in caregiving professions in which personal values or work
435
morals do not always match the constraints of the reality of the work conditions, such as time or
cost constraints (see Fenton 2015; O’Donnell et al. 2008; Ulrich et al. 2007). Thirteen respon-
dents did not see any difference between translation during leisure time and when performing
professional duties, except that the latter is paid for. Furthermore, 14 respondents mentioned
that when they interpret during leisure time, they clearly mark their roles as an interpreter and
as a primary interlocutor, while others replied that they try to avoid interpreting and translation
for friends and family altogether, because it is their profession that they must be paid for. In other
words, business rules are not always compatible with community ethics and personal concerns.

The discussion on social responsibility is relatively recent in translation studies. The concept
of social responsibility is more familiar in the corporate world, where it broadly refers to the
business’s responsibility to the wider society and to the environment (OECD 2001). In transla-
tion studies, social responsibility is defined as “interpreters’ and translators’ responsibility to the
broader social context beyond the immediate translated encounter” (Drugan 2017, 128). The
concept of social responsibility overlaps with the activist view, but in contrast to that, it seems
to be less politically laden. The social responsibility of translators is more about making pro-
fessional choices that are good for society. However, the emerging discussion about the social
responsibility of translators seems to focus on revealing the social impact of translation rather
than on discussing the social responsibility of translators as such (see Translation, Ethics and Social
Responsibility 2017).
Discussion on social responsibility comes into conflict with numerous professional codes of
ethics which tend to emphasize translators’ neutrality and impartiality, whereas social respon-
sibility presupposes an active position, stepping out, responding to social challenges and not
remaining bystanders (Drugan and Tipton 2017, 120). As Baker and Maier (2011, 3) have noted,
the ethos of neutrality and non-engagement often blinds translators to the consequences of
their actions. Probably, the same ethos of non-intervention prevents translators from rendering
linguistic first aid.
Linguistic first aid relates to social responsibility in that it is also directed to the common
good; it also presupposes an intervention of some sort and an active position of a translator.
Pleading that one is “just a translator” might also be a way to escape social responsibility. For
instance, former interpreters of the Nazi regime tried to avoid responsibility by claiming that
they were “just interpreters” (see Pöchhacker 2006, 196). In his recent article, Chesterman
(2019) discusses the “loose ends” of translation ethics and examines professional choices alterna-
tive to the attitude, “I was only following orders, doing my duty.” This attitude is comparable
to that “providing help is not a translator’s or an interpreter’s duty” discussed earlier. Apparently,
a socially responsible translator intervenes more readily in the situation of misunderstanding or
non-understanding than a translator who has adopted the principle of being just a translator.
Chesterman (672) speaks of the priority of utilitarian ethics over contractual ethics related to
fidelity, accuracy, impartiality and so on, as a default. The balancing between different types of
ethics is the hard task of the translator. The problem is also that clients tend to expect translators
to be just translators, accurate, faithful and neutral, because the clients are not familiar with all
the nuances of the translation process (see Lambert 2018).
The position of being “just a translator” sometimes protects translators from being responsible
for the texts translated and for the acts of those being translated. In some delicate or conflict
situations, it would be easier for translators to provide linguistic first aid knowing that other
participants do not see them immediately as biased.
436
In some fields, social responsibility takes on the form of an oath. Thus, physicians have
their Hippocratic Oath with its famous “do no harm.” Now programmers and data scientists
have been discussing a kind of digital Hippocratic Oath (Simonite 2018). Rudvin and Tomas-
sini (2011, 11) see that the Hippocratic Oath of community translators and interpreters is the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, according to which all individuals should have equal
access to legal, social and health services. Viewed in this light, the responsibility of translators and
interpreters stretches over the immediate translation event to cover the social context. Promot-
ing understanding across language barriers is also one of the provisions of the Hieronymic Oath
proposed by Chesterman (2001). The still open issue is whether professionals should take care
of promoting understanding and providing access to information even when they are off duty
when they perceive such a need. Current codes of ethics only cover the professional context of
translators and say nothing about their social or cultural responsibility in general (Kruger and
Crots 2014, 152). What is apparently missing is a discussion about the overarching values that
stand behind the immediate professional context of translation. Once they become included in
the codes of ethics, this will also give translators food for thought in considering their off-duty
role, since the professional tenets seem to have impact on the off-duty role as well.
Principles of justice and equal access to resources, including information, belong to the rela-
tionships that are constitutive to a society and that are “normally indirect, impersonal, and deter-
mined primarily by law and contractual obligations” (Kirkpatrick 2001, XII), whereas linguistic
first aid is more about direct, intimate and personal relationships between people determined by
utilitarian sense and community ethics.
Chesterman (2019, 673) asks at the end of his article: “Are translators professionally respon-
sible for working towards a fairer world, or just personally responsible?” Well, at least according
to the small-scale inquiry related to linguistic first aid, translators seem to consider that this is a
matter of personal, not professional, ethics.
5 Conclusion
To sum up, the ethical dimensions of linguistic first aid seem to cover community ethics, a
communitarian approach and common sense. Offering linguistic first aid is a voluntary action
by nature, and it takes place in everyday occasional and emergency situations. It is language-
related help provided by fellow citizens on a mutual, direct and personal basis, not regulated
by society (cf. Kirkpatrick 2001). If a society promotes humanitarian values, this might influ-
ence the relationships between citizens. If a professional community promotes certain values,
this might influence the attitudes of professionals. In the same vein, if the translators’ social
responsibility gathers more attention in academic and professional circles, it might influence
translators’ actions outside the profession. After all, professionals should be more competent in
rendering linguistic first aid than ordinary people are, because they have mastered advanced
translation skills.
Linguistic first aid presupposes a communitarian approach prioritizing the common good
instead of individualistic benefits. The common good does not need to mean altruism; it may
eventually also benefit the individuals who render linguistic first aid. For instance, the fast solv-
ing of a communication problem enhances the smooth flow of travelling, shopping or negotiat-
ing between colleagues. It also brings a feeling of self-significance. Refraining from providing
linguistic first aid based only on neutrality and non-intervention seems to go against common
sense, or utilitarian ethics in Chesterman’s (2019) terms. What is needed instead is a discussion
about the responsibilities, liabilities and limits of action of professional translators in situations
of linguistic emergency (Probirskaja 2017). This discussion, like that held by physicians, can
437
include issues of competence, ability and liability in a situation in which something goes wrong,
or a translator makes a mistake.
Translation in general is always a help in overcoming language barriers. Compared to profes-
sional translation, linguistic first aid is not so sophisticated; it is just momentary immediate ad
hoc help. However, what makes it important is its emergency nature and sometimes the impos-
sibility of delaying translation. If the provision of linguistic first aid would someday be included
in a kind of Hieronymic Oath, it would become ethically binding on professionals. Until then,
translators provide assistance in overcoming language barriers in the course of exercising their
profession, and some of them additionally in the course of everyday life.

Virtue ethics in translation; professional translator ethics; ethics of volunteering in translation
and interpreting; ethics of activist translation and interpreting; ethics codes for interpreters and
translators; ethical stress in translation and interpreting.
Notes
1 I have used translation to cover both translating and interpreting.
2 All translations are author’s unless otherwise mentioned.
References
Angelelli, Claudia. 2004. Revisiting the Interpreter’s Role. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Angelelli, Claudia. 2016. “Looking Back: A Study of (Ad-Hoc) Family Interpreters.” EuJAL 4, no. 1: 5–31.
Baker, Mona. 2010. “Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community.” In Translation,
Resistance, Activism, edited by Maria Tymoczko, 23–41. Amherst, Boston: University of Massachusetts
Press.
Baker, Mona, and Carol Maier. 2011. “Ethics in Interpreter & Translator Training: Critical Perspectives.”
The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5, no. 1: 1–14.
Bancroft, Marjorie. 2015. “Community Interpreting: A Profession Rooted in Social Justice.” In The Rout-
ledge Handbook of Interpreting, edited by Holly Mikkelson, and Renee Jourdenais, 217–35. London:
Routledge.
Boeri, Julie. 2012. “Ad Hoc Interpreting at the Crossways between Natural, Professional, Novice and
Expert Interpreting.” In Interpreting Brian Harris: Recent Developments in Translatology, edited by María
Amparo Jimenez Ivars, and María Jesús Blasco Mayor, 117–32. Bern: Peter Lang.
Bulut, Alev, and Turgay Kurultay. 2001. “Interpreters-in-Aid at Disasters.” The Translator 7, no. 2: 249–63.
Chesterman, Andrew. 2019. “Post Errorem.” Perspectives 27, no. 5: 664–74.
Del Torto, Lisa. 2008. “Once a Broker, Always a Broker: Non-Professional Interpreting as Identity Accom-
plishment in Multigenerational Italian–English Bilingual Family Interaction.” Multilingua 27, nos. 1–2:
77–97.
Doğan, Aymil. 2016. “Anybody Down There? Emergency and Disaster Interpreting in Turkey.” In Medi-
ating Emergencies and Conflicts, edited by Federico M. Federici, 59–83. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
tice Apply to Non-Professionally Produced Translation?” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series–Themes in
Translation Studies 10: 111–27.
23, no. 2: 119–25.
Fenton, Jane. 2015. “An Analysis of ‘Ethical Stress’ in Criminal Justice Social Work in Scotland: The Place
of Values.” The British Journal of Social Work 45, no. 5: 1415–32.
438
First Aid. Wikipedia article. Accessed October 28, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_aid

Ghignoli, Alessandro, and Maria Gracia Torres Diaz. 2015. “Interpreting Performed by Professionals of
Other Fields: The Case of Sports Commentators.” In Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation in the
Media, edited by Rachele Antonini, and Chiara Bucaria, 193–208. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Gini, Al. 1998. “Work, Identity and Self: How We are Formed by the Work We Do.” Journal of Business
Ethics 17, no. 7: 707–14.
Hale, Sandra. 2007. Community Interpreting. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hall, Nigel, and Zhiyan Guo. 2012. “Child Language and Cultural Brokering.” In Interpreting Brian Har-
ris: Recent Developments in Translatology, edited by María Amparo Jimenez Ivars, and María Jesús Blasco
Mayor, 51–75. Bern: Peter Lang.
Houston, Muiris. 2017. “Is There a Doctor on Board?” Irish Medical Times 51, no. 24: 18.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2012. Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics and Language. New York: Routledge.
Kirkpatrick, Frank G. 2001. The Ethics of Community. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lambert, Joseph. 2018. “How Ethical are Codes of Ethics? Using Illusions of Neutrality to Sell Transla-
Li, Ping, Chuanmao Tian, and Zhonglian Huang. 2016. “Ethics, Identity and Ideology: A Study of the
Interpreters in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937–1945).” Linguistica Antverpiensia,
New Series–Themes in Translation Studies 15: 162–85.
McDonough Dolmaya, Julie. 2011. “The Ethics of Crowdsourcing.” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series–
Themes in Translation Studies 10: 97–110.
Munro, Robert. 2010. “Crowdsourced Translation for Emergency Response in Haiti: The Global
Collaboration of Local Knowledge.” Accessed October 22, 2019. https://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/
munro2010translation.pdf
O’Donnell, Patricia, Adrienne Farrar, Karlynn Brintzenhofeszoc, Ann Patrick Conrad, Marion Danis,
Christine Grady, Carol Taylor, and Connie M. Ulrich. 2008. “Predictors of Ethical Stress, Moral Action
and Job Satisfaction in Health Care Social Workers.” Social Work in Health Care 46, no. 3: 29–51.
OECD. 2001. Corporate Social Responsibility: Partners for Progress. Paris: OECD Publishing.
Olthuis, James H. 2000. Towards an Ethics of Community: Negotiations of Difference in a Pluralist Society. Water-
loo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Orellana, Marjorie Faulstich, Lisa Dorner, and Lucila Pulido. 2003. “Accessing Assets: Immigrant Youth’s
Work as Family Translators or Para-Phrasers.” Social Problems 50, no. 4: 505–24.
Peterson, Drew C., Christian Martin-Gill, Francis X. Guyette, Adam Z. Tobias, Catherine E. Mccarthy,
Scott T. Harrington, Theodore R. Delbridge, and Donald M. Yealy. 2013. “Outcomes of Medical
Emergencies on Commercial Airline Flights.” New England Journal of Medicine 368, no. 22: 2075–83.
Pöchhacker, Franz. 2006. “Interpreters and Ideology: From ‘between’ to ‘within’.” Across Languages and
Cultures 7, no. 2: 191–207.
Probirskaja, Svetlana. 2017. “‘Does Anybody Here Speak Finnish?’: Linguistic First Aid and Emerging
Translational Spaces on the Finnish-Russian Allegro Train.” Translation Studies 10, no. 3: 231–46.
Probirskaja, Svetlana. 2019a. “Kääntäminen tilanteessa kuin tilanteessa” [Translation in All Circumstances].
Presentation at the XVII Translation and Interpreting Studies Symposium, Tampere University, Finland,
April 12–13.
Probirskaja, Svetlana. 2019b. “Peer Translation Within Russian Immigrant Communities in Finland.” Pre-
sentation at the 9th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies, Stellenbosch University, South
Africa, September 9–13.
Roberts, Roda P. 1997. “Community Interpreting Today and Tomorrow.” In The Critical Link: Interpret-
ers in the Community, edited by Silvana Carr, Roda Roberts, Aideen Dufour, and Dini Steyn, 7–28.
Rudvin, Mette. 2007. “Professionalism and Ethics in Community Interpreting: The Impact of Individualist
versus Collective Group Identity.” Interpreting 9, no. 1: 47–69.
Rudvin, Mette, and Elena Tomassini. 2011. Interpreting in the Community and Workplace: A Practical Teaching
Guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sande, Hans. 1998. “Supervision of Refugee Interpreters: 5 Years of Experience from Northern Norway.”
Nordic Journal of Psychiatry 52, no. 5: 403–9.
Simonite, Tom. 2018. “Should Data Scientists Adhere to a Hippocratic Oath?” Wired Business, February 9.
Accessed August 2, 2018. www.wired.com/story/should-data-scientists-adhere-to-a-hippocratic-oath/
439
Tymoczko, Maria, ed. 2010. Translation, Resistance, Activism. Amherst, Boston: University of Massachusetts
Press.
Ulrich, Connie, Patricia O’donnell, Carol Taylor, Adrienne Farrar, Marion Danis, and Christine Grady.
2007. “Ethical Climate, Ethics Stress, and the Job Satisfaction of Nurses and Social Workers in the
United States.” Social Science & Medicine 65, no. 8: 1708–19.
Wadensjö, Cecilia. 1998. Interpreting as Interaction. London: Longman.
Weisskirch, Robert S., ed. 2017. Language Brokering in Immigrant Families: Theories and Contexts. London,
Wolf, Michaela. 2015. The Habsburg Monarchy’s Many-Languaged Soul. Translated by Kate Sturge. Amster-
Zinken, Jörg, and Giovanni Rossi. 2016. “Assistance and Other Forms of Cooperative Engagement.”
Research on Language and Social Interaction 49, no. 1: 20–6.
Further reading
The first attempt to elaborate the overarching ethical code for translators.
A comprehensive overview of the three kinds of ethics of translation: personal, professional and activist
(socio-cultural responsibility) ethics.
Probirskaja, Svetlana. 2017. “‘Does Anybody Here Speak Finnish?’: Linguistic First Aid and Emerging
Translational Spaces on the Finnish-Russian Allegro Train.” Translation Studies 10, no. 3: 231–46.
Probirskaja describes in detail the translational space of the cross-border train and first employs the con-
cept of linguistic first aid, referring to mutual linguistic help that train travellers provide to each other.
440
29
Ethics of translating
sacred texts
Hephzibah Israel
1 Introduction
Henri Meschonnic (2011), who both translated sacred texts and engaged with philosophical
questions posed by sacred text translation, remarked, “And religious texts, in comparison to
texts commonly deemed literary or philosophical probably push to their peaks the ethical and
political stakes of translating” (123; see also Chapter 6 “Ethics in Berman and Meschonnic” in
this volume). What is translational ethics in the religious context? And how can we engage criti-
cally with the debate on translation ethics as they manifest in different religious communities?
Although ethics is most often perceived as closely related to religious thought and philosophy,
there has not been much scholarly attention on translation ethics specific to the context of sacred
text translation. However, the translation of sacred texts is as implicated in ethics as other kinds
of texts, since any act of translation that involves choice immediately raises questions of ethics.
Notwithstanding this, “ethics” is not a stable category even though most religions seek to estab-
lish a set of core values as ethics emanating from the main principles of each tradition. Identify-
ing what is ethical in sacred text translation is not always a clear-cut process either, since there
are usually several, and often contradictory, considerations to take into account. Definitions of
ethics change over time and across cultures (see also Chapter 2 “Virtue ethics in translation”
in this volume). But while it may be considered desirable to have in place a certain code that
can hold translators accountable, it is important to keep in mind that the bases or relevance for
these codes change. Some ethics will have changed within each religious tradition in response
to historical and cultural permutations, and some sets of ethics may gain more prominence in
some religions than in others.
At the heart of the notion of ethics in translating religious texts are three key issues: attitudes
to what is perceived outside or alien to oneself, the availability of choice, and agency in terms of
the power and degree to which individuals feel they are able to exercise choice. These three ethi-
cal considerations operate in different permutations in each religious tradition. How a religious
community views itself in relation to other religious or non-religious communities impinges on
what is translated and how. This follows directly from the fact that there is no single uncontested
view of what constitutes a religion, let alone what comprises its sacred texts or objects, and
treated as such. The call to make the choice of “right” from “wrong” is amplified in sacred text
441
Hephzibah Israel
translation, but in some religions more than others, since these translation choices are mostly
perceived as either correctly or incorrectly representing the authoritative message of God. Trans-
lation in the religious context is faced with a range of ethical choices: which texts are truly
sacred? Should texts perceived to be sacred be translated in the first place? For instance, the
Qur’an is routinely claimed to be inimitable and untranslatable. Should translations convey the
“meanings,” “form and structure,” or “sounds” of a sacred text? Who should translate a sacred
text? Is there an ethics of reading a sacred text, specific sacred rituals that allow some individuals
and exclude others? Of equal importance is how translators perceive their role and how they
view ethical and religious responsibility. This impacts attitudes towards a range of actions and
whether their translations are approved or censured. But these considerations direct us to the
third issue, that of power within each religious tradition: who holds the power to choose or to
interpret a specific choice as acceptable? The question of ethics thus manifests in various con-
figurations in the different religious traditions that are accessible to scholars for academic study.
This chapter addresses the significant debates on ethics in translation studies as they pertain
to sacred texts and faith communities. It is important to point out early on that a specific discus-
sion of ethics in or of translation is not always immediately apparent in the existing scholarly
literature on translation in many of the religious traditions discussed in this chapter. By far the
longest and most substantial discussions directly addressing translation ethics have taken place in
the scholarship on Bible translation. For instance, the long-standing emphasis on faithfulness and
equivalence in transferring the “meaning” of the biblical text can be read as an ethical concern
in preserving its “original” message. This is not to say that translation ethics is not of interest or
relevance to the different religious communities discussed here or beyond but that the debate
over the translation of sacred materials does not always play out as a deliberation on translation
ethics or as articulated using the vocabulary of ethics. This is apparent also in the two relatively
recent edited volumes that focus on translation and religion. Although Long’s (2005) examina-
tion of sacred text translation in relation to several religious traditions refers to ethical issues
and questions of method which could well be discussed within the framework of translation
ethics, she does not refer to this category specifically in her introduction. Likewise, Dejonge
and Tietz (2015) state that the volume’s focus is on the process of translation, on the extent to
which “meaning” can be transferred and whether “certain things [are] untranslatable?” (6) but
make no mention of translation ethics. This unusual gap is difficult to account for, since after all,
translation ethics in its various aspects informs sacred text translations in several important ways.
Scholarly debates on the translation of sacred texts must therefore be read through the lens
of translation ethics to glean indications of what is most pressing or pertinent in each of these
traditions. However, rather than attempt to offer a comprehensive review of all issues relating
to translation ethics across the religious spectrum, this chapter focuses on translation ethics in
relation to translation agents and their agency. This entails an examination of who translates,
their status within interpretative communities, and the role of religious and state institutions
that have a bearing on sacred text translation. At this point it is pertinent to observe that the
category “sacred text” is defined here as any text perceived as sacred or used for any purpose
considered sacred by a faith community. This includes both the written and oral text, as well as
sacred texts as objects of veneration and so “handled” in special or ritualised ways. Sacred text
translation therefore refers to the translation and/or interpreting of any sacred text through any
medium or mode of communication. The first section focuses on issues addressed in current
scholarly discussions in relation to translators, faith communities as audiences, and institutions
that control sacred text translation. The second section offers an in-depth discussion of these
aspects in relation to a specific religious and historical context where issues of ethics have been
raised in scholarly discussions: Christian missionary translations.
442
Ethics of translating sacred texts
2 Translation agents: translators, readers, and institutions

Translators, their audiences, and the institutions that govern the translation of sacred texts are
key “agents” to consider in any discussion of translation ethics in the sacred context. For a trans-
lation to be considered successful in a religious context, it should be accepted as “sacred,” how-
ever this may be defined, by individuals or faith communities. Such a translation, acknowledged
as sacred by a faith community, usually implies that the community “trusts” the translation as
ethical and considers the translation as produced through ethical processes. But who can be
relied upon to interpret a text for the purpose of translation and who decides which transla-
tion is ethical and how do they arrive at this decision? These are important questions to ask in
this context as the answers depend very much on the relationships between the translator(s),
religious institutions, and the faith community, and especially on relations of power between
them. Translations of sacred texts are contested precisely because of their potential as sites for
competing interpretation. Each faith community has developed different ways to ensure that
the translation process and resulting interpretation is broadly acceptable to the entire com-
munity: this may be through formal religious institutions such as the Roman Catholic church
or formal translation organisations trusted by the faith community such as the United Bible
Societies, the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur’an, or the Buddhist Text
Translation Society. In other cases, individuals may be trusted by faith communities or insti-
tutions to deliver the desired translation, with or without checks by way of committees or
language experts to check the quality of the translation process as well as the sacred product.
The “authorisation” provided by these institutions (see Hermans 2007) is in effect a signal to
the community that the translation is ethical from the point of view of the specific religious
persuasion concerned. Sacred text translations are therefore inevitably collaborative processes
involving individuals, groups, and institutions.
The authorisation and acceptance of a translated text as sacred bears on an important point
that is relevant to each of the aspects of ethics discussed in this chapter, with regard to the posi-
tion of the translator as well as that of the scholar studying a sacred text translation project.
Considerations deriving directly from a key discussion in religious studies and anthropology
of religion are pertinent to the study of sacred text translation. Scholars of religion such as
McCutcheon have employed Kenneth Pike’s (1967) differentiation of emic (that is, a partici-
pant from within the social group being observed) from etic (an observer positioned outside
the social group) perspectives to argue that the study of religions is fundamentally informed by
the position of the investigator. There is an on-going debate in the study of religions regarding
whether the “insider/outsider” divide is valuable or necessary and what the ethical imperatives
to acknowledging the significance of one’s positioning are, including any movement across the
divide (Knott 2010, 259). This dovetails well with the increasing critical interest in the intel-
lectual, political, and personal standpoint of translators in (as well as scholars of) translation
studies and the awareness that rather than assume neutrality, taking positionality into account is
crucial to a critical understanding of translation ethics. The call for greater reflexivity, rather than
claim of scientific objectivity, in the study of religion and translation has important implications
for the discussion on translation ethics in a religious context. The questions that Knott (2010)
poses, “What is the difference between an account of a religion by an insider and one by an
outsider? Does translation from one language to another bridge a gap or create a barrier between
the person telling the story and the one reading it?” (259) can be extended to other aspects of
sacred text translation for a fuller examination of ethics. As the following discussion elaborates,
the translator’s as well as the researcher’s location within or outside a religious community is of
utmost importance for examining ethics in sacred text translations.
443
Hephzibah Israel
The location of the translator in relation to the faith community determines a number
of translation choices and strategies adopted, each with its own ethical implications. For the
emic or religious “insider,” translation ethics involves translating according to the principles of
the particular theological persuasion of their ingroup and to maintain their grouping through
translation. The emic translator therefore usually seeks to best represent in the target language
the teachings of the sacred text in order to consolidate, strengthen, and/or expand the group.
Similarly, etic or “outsider” translators, such as those undertaken by academics, tend to function
as academic or scholarly translations rather than sacred texts and therefore their primary transla-
tion ethics may be a commitment to the scholarly study of the sacred text and its appreciation
as a valuable literary, philosophical, or cultural text. Williams’s (2011) critical reflection on his
role as an academic translator of Rumi’s mystical Masnavi from the Persian, for instance, includes
ethical questions on the extent to which translators should interfere with sacred texts: “How
radically, if at all, does one ‘repair’ a text?” (422). Involving largely different translation choices,
academic translations are usually not used in sacred or ritual practices by the faith community
although they may value the efforts of the translator. In both cases the translators, although pro-
ducing very different translations in response to different audiences and demands, will consider
themselves to have acted ethically. Translators of one religious group translating the sacred texts
of another religious group may also use a range of devices to signal through their translations the
“non-sacred” nature of the source text. Either way, emic and etic translators and their immediate
audience may not be as willing to trust the other’s translation. Translation ethics in sacred text
translation, as in other types of texts, therefore, cannot be separated from the function that the
translated sacred text will be put to.
In some cases, however, translators located within a religious community have been willing
to challenge elements they perceived as unethical in their sacred narratives and traditions through
translation and re-writing, which should come as no surprise. The Ramayana,1 one of the Hindu
sacred texts widely accepted as first written down in classical Sanskrit, has been challenged repeat-
edly for its unethical treatment of gender and social order. Mandakranta Bose (2013) observes, “It
is useful to bear in mind that alterations to the Ramayana are an index to changing literary, ethi-
cal, philosophical and political attitudes” (3). From as far back as the late sixteenth century, Bose
argues, women poets such as Candravati, re-writing the Ramayana in Bengali, present the sacred
narrative from alternative ethical viewpoints. Her version focuses on the female protagonist, on
“the ethical issues that [Sita] raises through her self-reflection and memorializing” (39). Bose sug-
gests that Candravati’s version of the sacred narrative presents an alternative, female-centred ethic
to the claims of masculine force and violence deployed to rid the world of “evil”:
Instead of glorifying battles the poem mourns the victims. So pervasive is the concern for
victims that the poem thrusts into the background even the ethical necessity that is under-
stood in the majority of Ramayanas as the motive force of the story, that is, the need to rid
the world of [the evil] Ravana.
(32)
Likewise, in the early decades of the twentieth century there were several Telugu poets who con-
tested the social hierarchies entrenched in the Sanskrit Ramayana and produced Telugu versions
offering a radical ethics, sympathetic or even heroic renderings of Ravana, the chief “villain” of
the narrative, as the heroic representative of oppressed castes in India. Pollock (1993) and Rich-
man (2001), amongst others, point out that the Ramayana in its many language versions has been
as political as devotional, with different groups and individuals using the sacred epic as a point
of reference to either endorse or challenge status quo on ethical grounds.
444
The perception of the translator’s audience plays an equally important role. If a faith commu-
nity does not perceive the translator to be a trusted representative of the community engaged in
translating for the community and its faith, the translation may not be accepted as a sacred text.
A translation may be considered “blasphemy” instead of sacred if a faith community believes the
translator to be an outsider or an apostate. Equally, translators have used translation to challenge
rival groups or even start new communities of faith. Theological interpretation or disputation
may often be at the centre of such translation projects, where translation follows a theological
reinterpretation or the reinterpretation is exemplified through the process of translation, thus
displaying internal divisions and warring sectarian commitments from within a religious commu-
nity. Perhaps the best-known example of such a translator is Martin Luther whose act of translat-
ing the Bible into German in 1534 became central to the project of European Reformation in
the sixteenth century. His polemical “Open Letter on Translating” (1530) attacks the Roman
Catholic interpretation of the Bible, provides theological justifications for his translation, and
shows an acute awareness of detractors who challenged his claim to offer his own authoritative
interpretation through translation. His addition of the word “sola” or “alone” to Romans 3:28
in the New Testament, for instance, has been historically controversial, leading to allegations
that Luther deliberately changed the meaning of the Christian scriptures through his translation
(Jones 2017).2 Such “reforms” of a religious tradition through translation projects undertaken
by polemical religious leaders and critics can be seen in other religious traditions too. Arumuka
Navalar, a Tamil scholar and intellectual, translated and published in 1852 a key medieval Saiva
(a South India form of Hinduism) text, the Periya Puranam, “from medieval [Tamil] poetry into
modern [Tamil] prose” to reform Tamil Saivism and to prevent further conversions to Protestant
Christianity (Hudson 1992, 44). Such ethical claims made by or on behalf of a translator come
under greater scrutiny during periods of religious schisms.
In other cases, the translation labour of emic translators may be interpreted as ethical acts of
“service” to their faith community as well as to God. Siu (2008) has argued in favour of apply-
ing the “Buddhist perspective” of dana or “giving” to understand Buddhist sutra translation
in China. Siu proposes that “giving,” as an act central to Buddhist teaching, of accruing phala
[“merit” or “virtue”], can be used to understand the entire process of sutra translation from com-
missioning, to financial support, to completion of the translation project. This reading, which
places translators, sponsors, and readers within the cycle of “giving” (Sui differentiates between
primary, secondary, and tertiary giving) and receiving corresponding “merit” (that is, receiv-
ing appropriate rewards for each type of giving) seeks to understand the entire sutra translation
project as part of and informed by Buddhist ethics. Here, not only does the translation acquire
the status of a “gift” but also the translator’s decisions are justified as ethical because they are in
tune with the framework of “dana”-“phala.” In an entirely different religious context, Hokkanen
(2012) makes a similar case for the recognition of volunteer church interpreting as “serving rather
than volunteering” (299; emphasis original). Hokkanen points out that the faith community
itself, in this case the Tampere Pentecostal Church, sees simultaneous interpreting as one of
several services that the congregation can potentially provide to both God and fellow members,
as a reflection of Christ’s call to serve (303). While this, as seen earlier in Siu’s analysis, can be
read as a way of bringing religious ethics (Buddhist or Christian) into the critical discourse on
translation and interpreting, Hokkanen also ends with a discussion on a related but pertinent
ethical issue, that of “neutrality.” Unlike Siu where this must be inferred, Hokkanen is careful
to reveal her own position as an insider, with a “personal commitment to the ideology of the
church,” and is conscious of the dangers or “risk of an inability or unwillingness to be critical”
in her study of her own experience as an interpreter (306); this is indeed an important aspect to
the scholarly investigation of the question of ethics in sacred text translation. While she and other
445
Hephzibah Israel
translators are trusted by the community to produce “ethical” translations, their very location
within the community may be viewed as suspect by others, potentially perceived as resulting in
“skewed” translations or scholarship.
The issue of how to represent one’s own sacred texts through translation to an audience out-
side the religious group raises other kinds of ethical dilemmas. In a recently published article,
Moll (2017) has examined the subtitling of Islamic programmes at Iqraa, an Islamic satellite
channel based in Egypt. Moll undertakes a critical study of the contradiction in the self-percep-
tion of Iqraa translators who “see themselves as ‘cultural mediators’ responsible for countering
perceived Western stereotypes about Muslims through subtitles” while also acting as “‘preachers
by proxy’ transmitting correct and relevant religious knowledge to viewers” (Moll 2017, 334).
While translating audiovisual content into English, several Iqraa translators in her study refused
either to translate or to “manipulate” Islamic sermon texts that were explicitly critical of other
religions or gave, in their estimation, inaccurate interpretations of Qur’anic verses. The transla-
tors, who self-identified as pious Muslims, were uncertain whether to translate sermons as they
were or to correct and otherwise soften the tone of these sermons. Ethical arguments were given
in support of both, one favouring the translation of sermons as they were, thereby giving the
audience the opportunity to draw their own conclusions, and the other favouring a translation
that presented what they thought was a more acceptable image of Islam to the outsider. For
these translators, “translation became, most explicitly, a form of internal critique. Here the fact
that translators saw their work as da‘wa, a moral responsibility for which God will hold them
accountable, is key” (Moll 2017, 355). In this rare examination of ethics in subtitling religious
content and the disagreements it generated amongst the translators, the author points to the
struggle between competing epistemologies of what comprises moral responsibility or ethical
intentions to these translators positioned squarely within a religious community, yet translating
for a mixed Muslim and non-Muslim audience simultaneously. Moll too is aware of her ambigu-
ous position, perceived as both a religious insider (therefore, sympathetic?) and outsider (an
academic whose professional “objectivity” could be relied upon?) by the Iqraa translators. Both
Hokkanen and Moll address ethical concerns regarding their roles as participant/observers, func-
tioning to some extent as a “critical insider” (Knott 2010), and this critical reflexivity regarding
their own positionality is an important response to any reservations expressed on ethical grounds
regarding sacred text translation research. Such self-reflection is, however, not just within the
purview of sacred text translators; there are interesting parallels with ethical concerns in non-
religious contexts, in legal translation and literary retranslation, which invite further comparative
research into the subject.
In some instances, translators have retranslated sacred texts in order to “restore,” on ethical
grounds, what other translations have elided. Attention has been drawn to how the Hebrew
Bible has been presented primarily as a “Christian” rather than “Jewish” sacred text in its long
history of European-language translations. Barnstone (1993) notes,
the twentieth-century German version by Martin Buber, a Jew, refects both a paramount
aesthetic reform from Luther’s plain-speech translation as well as a major religious orientation
in which the Hebrew Bible in translation ceases to speak only to a sectarian Christian reader
but, rather, operates as a historical document for Jews and Christians – or anyone – alike.
(43)
Barnstone himself translated the New Testament, which he titled The Restored New Testament
(2009), where he “restores” Hebrew personal names to redress the effects of previous translation
446
projects. His point about the translation of personal names, especially the Hebrew “Yehushua”
as “Jesus,” has a strong ethical dimension to it:
As a result of the ethnic cleansing of his name through double translation, the name has
become absolutely disconnected from its Hebrew original, and indeed his name in Hel-
lenised translations is now so remote from the Hebrew original that were it simply trans-
literated directly from Hebrew into other languages, that name, Joshua, would for many be
apostacy.
(Barnstone 1993, 78)
Meschonnic (2011) in his essay, “Why I am retranslating the Bible,” which he views as central to
his discussion on the ethics of translation, similarly claims, “I am retranslating the Bible to make
heard what all, yes that is right, all other translations erase” (125).
Some translators have commented on their consciousness of an ethics in reading practices and
in their physical handling of sacred texts and their translation. These include preparatory ritual
acts such as washing, covering of the head, and the right posture to adopt while reading the
sacred text, all of which translators may feel continue to apply while undertaking their transla-
tion activity on a daily basis. Nikky Singh (1995, 31), in an introduction to her translation of
Sikh scriptures, recalls her training under a scriptural scholar, when she was “reprimanded for
having tea during our sessions or for not rinsing my mouth before I resumed after a tea-break.”
She wonders if while translating:
should I cover my head as I pick up the texts? Should I be listening to popular music while
I work? Should I even have a cup of tea as I hold and read through the sacred poetry? The
process of translation has been more than a conversion of a text from one language into
another.
(31–32)
Such an awareness of sacrality in the handling of sacred texts as sacred objects can also be noticed
in translators at times emphasizing that their readers follow ethical reading practices, that is,
obeying the same ritual rules observed when reading the source sacred text. Arumuka Navalar
delineated the proper ritual context within which his prose translation of Tamil Saivite verse
should be heard:
First, they must have received initiation from a Shaiva ācārya [teacher] and they must have
lived in purity by abstaining from meat and liquor, by applying sacred ash daily to their
bodies, by using consecrated rudrāksa beads for reciting the fve-syllable mantra, and by
worshipping regularly in the temple.
(Hudson 1992, 43)
Finally, institutions, both religious institutions within most organised religions and institu-
tions of the state, have had a role to play in asserting the ethical contours of sacred translation.
Both translators and institutions translating for the community usually work under a sense of col-
lective responsibility, that every translation choice made affects the spiritual, social, and political
lives of the entire community. The extent to which institutions may be willing to incorporate
interpretations from the faith community’s margins indicate where each institution will draw its
ethical lines in its role as representing the community through translation.
447
Hephzibah Israel
Religious and state institutions have either worked in conjunction to support a set of transla-
tion choices or have arbitrated in competing moves in favour of some but not other translational
acts (see also Chapter 30 “Ethics of collaboration and control in literary translation” in this
volume). There is a good deal of evidence, for instance, of historic imperial support of sacred
text translation in different parts of the world. The translation of Sanskrit and Pali Buddhist
sutras into Chinese was accomplished under the patronage of Chinese emperors who set up
and funded translation teams. But as the “influence of Buddhism grew,” writes Hung (2005,
88–89), “so did government attention and control.” While support for Buddhism in a divided
China was at least partly a political tool wielded by different ruling houses, a reunified China saw
greater need for control. Hung observes that although the Sui and Tang dynasties set up a sutra
translation academy at court, the increased regulations on translation forums also meant that the
number of participants and the role of the forum in Buddhist instruction was severely limited:
The motives of rulers who supported Buddhism were not necessarily spiritual. Some saw
it as a cohesive force to unite people of diverse origins, others as a source of supernatural
support. Monks credited with magical powers were highly valued by successive rulers.
(Note 55, 89)
A more recent instance of the direct involvement of a nation state in the project of translat-
ing sacred texts can be seen in twentieth-century Turkish history. This pertains to what came to
be seen as controversial translations of sacred texts such as the Ezan, the first call to prayer, and
the Qur’an into Turkish authorised in support of a modern nation state. In a keynote lecture
delivered at IATIS 2009, Sehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar noted that while both the Arabic and Turk-
ish calls to prayer had been in use before the 1930s, the “Turkification of Islam” project was
strengthened under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk only after the foundation of the Turkish Republic
in 1923. In 1932, the Turkish Ezan was declared as the standard translation for public use and
followed quickly by a ban on the singing of the Ezan in Arabic. This was a controversial move
which was not fully supported in Turkey, with the ban later lifted in 1950. However, the sing-
ing of the Turkish Ezan continues to be a topic of contentious debate in Turkey according to
Gürçağlar. Although this was viewed as an “imposition” by the republican government, Wilson
(2014) points out that the impetus for a Turkish version of the Ezan as well as a Turkish transla-
tion of the Qur’an had come from late Ottomon intellectuals:
In fact, state involvement in Qur’an translation occurred only after private publishers
printed translations of uneven quality in 1924 and ignited considerable controversy. The
public outcry over these translations would lead the parliament to sponsor the composition
of an ofcially sanctioned Turkish translation.
(158)
These attempts at the Turkification of key Islamic texts were seen as going against the very eth-
ics of Islam, within which the dominant view is that the Qur’an should be read in Arabic and
that all translations of the Qur’an can only be accepted as translations of the interpretations of
the Qur’an. Clearly, the coming together of religious and political interests in such cases raises
ethical questions regarding who sponsors sacred text translations and why.
The overlapping and yet at times competing ethical concerns of translators, their readers, and insti-
tutions that govern the translating, reading, and ritual practices of sacred texts are obvious from these
examples. It is possible to discern in a number of different religious traditions that ethical concerns in the
translation of sacred texts are complex, with multiple pulls. Therefore, translation strategies considered
448
ethical in one religio-cultural context may not be considered equally ethical in another. Atti-
tudes regarding the ethics of acknowledging that a text is a translation, ethics of faithfulness or
accuracy or of naming a translator may diversify considerably, as Ricci and Putten (2011) show in
a comparison of translation attitudes towards Islamic textual sources. They point out that in the
twelfth-century Spanish Toledo Project’s translation of Arabic texts into Latin, “a stress on the
individual translator went hand in hand with an idealised preoccupation with fidelity in transla-
tion,” and “the rhetorical stress on accuracy and precision was explicitly employed as part of an
effort to undermine and discredit the Arabic texts’ ‘teachings,’” whereas in Javanese translations
of Islamic texts, translators’ ethics of maintaining anonymity and self-erasure, with “a distancing
from the source in the form of creativity and poetic freedom was part of a powerful array of tools
used to accredit earlier sources and present them as legitimate” (70).
3 Missionary translations of the Bible, institutions, and their audiences

Translation has been a central and conscious focus in the debates, schisms, and theological argu-
ments of Christian communities. In other religions, however, the role of translation is more
hidden because theologians and religious leaders do not explicitly comment on the role of trans-
lation. Since a concern with ethics had been an integral part of the scholarship on the history
of Bible translation, it is not surprising that the transportation of the Bible into new language
and religious cultures by European missionary movements has also engendered much discussion
on the ethical implications of these translation projects. This concern with ethics in relation to
Bible translation has been the focus of scholarly attention in several disciplines besides transla-
tion studies – in sub-disciplines such as linguistic anthropology, anthropology of Christianity,
colonial history, and World Christianity. This section therefore draws on scholarly debates across
these fields to review in some detail the scholarship pertaining to the ethics of translators, their
audiences, and the institutions that have governed Bible translation projects undertaken as part
of European missionary ventures since the early sixteenth century.
Translation in one form or another was a firm feature of the European Christian missionary
enterprise across the denominational spectrum. While fewer missionaries engaged directly with
the translation of written sacred texts, most missionaries engaged in translating the Christian
message through a range of oral, musical, and written textual modes and literatures. Language
learning and translating as well as composing new Christian literatures was part of the fabric of
missionary work. This included the writing of bilingual grammars, catechisms, and dictionar-
ies, all of which entailed translation, accompanied by an evaluation of linguistic and conceptual
presentation of sacred terminology or texts, with far-reaching consequences. But as the editors
of a recent volume on missionary linguistics point out, scholarly interest in this cultural and
linguistic history has not been as concerted or strong in translation studies as in other fields
such as anthropology or missionary linguistics (Zwartjes 2014, 2). While missionary linguistics
is not without its limitations, and this point is expanded on further later, investigating subjects
of common interest with other disciplines will certainly enrich the discussion on ethics from
translation studies perspectives.
By and large, scholarly debates within history, mission studies, and missionary linguistics
on missionary translations of the Bible has been primarily concerned with ethics since the
missionary project has been heavily implicated in the history of colonialism. It is difficult to
delink European missionary movements from the European colonial project, although as has
been pointed out by several historians, the two did not always collude (the historian Andrew
Porter 1992, 1999, 2002, 2004, 20153 has been the strongest proponent of this revisionist his-
tory; Copeland 2006). But it is undeniable that since Christian missions either accompanied,
449
Hephzibah Israel
followed, or in some cases even paved the way for further imperialist conquests, it is impossible
to view it entirely independent of colonialism and its concomitant effects. As a result, the ethical
argument levelled against European colonialism has usually also been directed at the European
Christian missions and their translation projects. This makes a focus on the ethical dimension of
missionary translation particularly pertinent to engage with here.
Scholars across the various fields of enquiry can broadly be divided into two categories in
their approach to missionary translation history: those who see colonialism and Christian mis-
sion as inextricably linked and those who separate Christian mission from the colonial project
to argue that missionary translation projects are mainly positive in function and effect, and
therefore ethical, unlike colonialism. A good example of the latter is offered by Adrian (2007),
who believes that although “Christian missionary activity has been viewed as cultural imperial-
ism, a tool to impose Western values on non-Western societies and destroy indigenous cultures
in the process,” what is in fact the case is that “biblical translation movements and Christian
missionary activity have served to preserve and enrich native cultures” (289). He affirms, “the
principal effect of biblical translation has been to preserve and enrich cultures” (293, 296).
With little evidence given to support this claim (except of a ninth-century Slovak translation
of the Bible, which was not undertaken in the same historical and economic context as that of
nineteenth-century European colonialism), his assertions that missionary Bible translation was
entirely ethical holds little weight. In other instances, scholars show little interest in the colonial
context when discussing missionary translations, which aligns them more closely with this criti-
cal position. In a seventeen-page chapter offering an overview of Bible translation in Africa,
Noss (2004, 22) makes only a passing reference to colonialism and merely argues, “Scripture
translation . . . establishes languages in written and standardised form,” without considering
whether this was necessarily beneficial to the speakers of those languages. The opposite scholarly
view is that missionary translators and their translation work colluded with imperial and colonial
interests either explicitly or implicitly, and therefore must be viewed as primarily unethical in
their translation conceptualisation and practice. As will be apparent from the rest of this section,
there are also scholars who argue that while missionary translations were undertaken within the
framework of colonial dominance, the faith communities were not mere passive victims but
showed various forms of resistance and resilience in their challenging of missionary ethics. These
divisions in perspective can be observed whether scholars focus on individual translators, their
audiences, or institutions of control (see also the chapter “The ethics of postcolonial translation”
in this volume).
It is pertinent to start with how this debate has shaped within translation studies. Writing
as a linguist leading the translation programme of the United Bible Societies, Eugene Nida
recognised that the framework of formal equivalence under which missionaries had long been
labouring was flawed. Instead, he promoted what he called functional or dynamic equivalence
(Nida 1964, 1968; Nida, Taber, and United Bible Societies 1969), which he argued would make
the Bible meaningful and relevant to new audiences. This emphasis on taking into account the
languages and cultures of the target audience moved the focus away from source sacred texts and
languages in Bible translation. Although Nida paved the way for what seems to be an increasing
and ethical interest in the audience rather than the formal structures of the Bible (a somewhat
controversial proposition to his missionary contemporaries), his theory has also come under
attack on ethical grounds. His “dynamic’ equivalence” has been viewed by Venuti (1995) as
another form of fluent, “domesticating” translation that is deeply unethical in creating effects
of transparency, naturalness, and completeness. As opposed to the “ethnocentric violence” of
domesticating translations into English, Venuti favours foreignizing translations as the more ethi-
cal option for signalling source-language culture to readers of the English translation (see also
450
Chapter 10 “Venuti and the ethics of difference” in this volume). Although this may indeed
apply to some translation situations, Venuti’s foreignizing translation would in fact have had
the opposite effect on translations out of English or other European languages associated with
Christian missions (Latin, Spanish, French, and Portuguese) into languages of the global south.
Foreignised Bible translations would have further reified, confirmed, and imposed a Christian-
ity filtered through a Europeanised cultural lens on cultures at the receiving end of transla-
tions, therefore negating Venuti’s argument on ethical translations.4 This prompts the question
whether Nida was indeed correct in his recommendations of dynamic equivalence. While it
may seem that in the case of Bible translation “domesticating,” dynamic equivalence is not an
ethical choice, neither is “foreignising translation,” and the problem lies in another direction.5
Writing in the post-World War II era when there were few European colonies remaining, Nida
neither situates his analysis in the context of the historic links between missionary translation
and colonialism nor addresses contemporaneous unequal relations of power between languages
(even less unequal cultures and economies). Further, in assuming that the same “effects” can be
re-created over and over again, whatever the target language or culture, one of the inevitable
consequences, should such a project succeed, is that Nida’s dynamic equivalence seeks to efface
cultural differences between the different audiences in the very act of recognising it. The ethical
issue lies in the prescriptive assumption (i.e. if a translator follows rules of dynamic equivalence,
effects of the source and the target texts will remain the same) that such an endless duplication
of source text values and their effects through translation is identical and desirable. Added to this,
the persisting cultural and political power imbalances under which Bible translation continues
to be carried out makes Nida’s recommendations of dynamic equivalence in Bible translation
ethically suspect. Moving beyond the immediate context of Christian mission, this translation
strategy may not be viewed as ethical if applied to sacred text translation in other religious con-
texts either. Abdul-Raof (2005), for instance, while discussing how culture and language “influ-
ence our conceptual and ethical judgements,” points out that dynamic equivalence as proposed
by Nida for a more ethical Bible translation “robs the Qur’anic text of its distinctive religious
character” (163, 172).
There is a similar difference in critical perspective between scholars of missionary linguistics
and those of colonial linguistics, reflecting the extent to which each engages with issues of
power. Scholars of missionary linguistics treat imperial ideology and colonialism as a backdrop
against which missionary translations and linguistic activities takes place. By not acknowledg-
ing that the logic of colonialism ideologically informed linguistic treatment and by isolating
linguistic work from wider cultural networks, missionary linguistics also ignores the relations of
power which affect how languages interact. As Stolz and Warnke (2015) point out, “ML [mis-
sionary linguistics] is largely a ‘monodisciplinary’ project which aims at determining the impact
the linguistic work of missionaries has had on the development of linguistics in general” (12).
Colonial linguistics, on the other hand,
counts among its tasks (ideally) the entire range of phenomena which interconnect lan-
guage and colonialism, most of which are irrelevant for the goals of ML. Colonialism in CL
[colonial linguistics] therefore is no background phenomenon for an interest in languages
but a precondition for linguistic constellations, from language contact through to language
politics and fnally language analysis and documentation.
(13)
Colonial linguists are interested, for instance, in the phenomenon that Latin invariably served as
the main reference point against which all non-European languages were compared, resulting in
451
Hephzibah Israel
the presentation of a “lack” in most languages in terms of vocabulary, grammar, or orthography.

Pertinent to a discussion on ethics, colonial linguists such as Mortamet and Amourette (2015)
studying bilingual grammars written by four French missionaries point out that the Swahili
selected and described by them is a “colonial Swahili,” serving “asymmetric interactions, power
and control of the natives” (45).
Some scholars have focused specifically on the ethics of institutions of power that have
governed missionary translations. On the Protestant side, scholars have studied the effects of
the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) that financially and ideologically dominated
Bible translation practices from the early nineteenth century. Zemka (1995) has argued that
the BFBS was “the quintessential Victorian colonial business, combining commercial organ-
isation with moral conviction” (115) which “based and justified its existence on the belief that
the exposure to Holy Scriptures created an abstract Christian subject with similar attributes of
behaviour and belief regardless of cultural conditions, material environment, or pre-existing
religious beliefs” (104). In her opinion, BFBS’s self-image in its own historiography was
based on an unethical representation of the “demand” for translated Bibles from working-class
“British” and “Foreign”/colonial audiences.
Mak’s (2010) examination of the role of the BFBS as patrons of the Chinese Union Version
in the early decades of the twentieth century reveals that the organisation put the translation
committee under pressure to choose the Greek Textus Receptus (TR) as the acceptable “original”
New Testament for translation into Chinese, despite the Shanghai Conference of 1890 voting
against it. The BFBS hesitated to abandon the Textus Receptus
[s]ince the BFBS relied heavily on donations from members of the Protestant churches in
England for its funding, the latter’s attitude towards the Textus Receptus, which was indeed
mainly derived from their reverence for the KJV [King James Version], was instrumental in
deciding BFBS’s position.
(182)
Mak’s argument that there was a contest between nineteenth-century scholarship (support-
ing the use of the Codex Sinaiticus as the basis for New Testament translation) and tradition
(supporting the continued use of the Textus Receptus despite the many problems associated
with it) with stronger influence coming from conservative financial patrons shows the
ethical dilemma that sacred text translators can be put under when working with or under
institutions.
The work of a number of scholars makes it clear that the translated Bible’s audiences were
not always compliant with translation decisions made by translators. To engage with how the
response of the faith community, the third aspect of this debate, has been interpreted, it would
be pertinent to turn to an on-going debate on the link between Bible translation and colonial-
ism in the African context. One scholar’s work has dominated the debate on African Chris-
tianity and Bible translation: Lamin Sanneh ([1989] 2009), theologian and World Christianity
scholar with a special interest on West African Christianity, offers a positive account of Bible
translation as one that renewed indigenous African languages and cultures. Sanneh’s argument
is more subtle, however, than Adrian’s quoted earlier in that Sanneh is strongly critical of those
European missionaries with shortsighted and paternalistic attitudes, who were often undone by
their own inability to set aside cultural superiority. Nevertheless, Sanneh is equally convinced
that the “vernacular translation” of the missionaries “overshadowed colonial assumption and
presumptions” and “outdistanced and outlasted the forces of ephemeral colonial rule” (163). He
argues that the power and cultural chauvinism of missionaries and of Western Christianity were
452
dismantled by Christianity’s “force of translatability” which rendered the missionary enterprise

ethical in his estimation:
Translation creates a pluralistic environment of incredible variety and possibility, and invests
culture with an ethical and qualitative power. That power may be defned as the capacity
to participate in intercultural and interpersonal exchange, as the recognition that whatever
and however we are doing now, we can do diferently and, under certain circumstances, we
must do diferently in order to live ethically as neighbours. . . . Christianity promotes two
sorts of universal appeal in its mission: the universal truth of one God is represented by the
ethics of commitment to local specifcity.
(242)
The similarities between Sanneh’s and Nida’s positions are clear. Sanneh’s theological interpre-
tation of the politics of Bible translation as an egalitarian process has been welcomed by many
Christian theologians for re-orienting critical attention on the peoples and languages of Chris-
tianity in the global south. However, his wholehearted celebration of translation in the “African
vernaculars” is also based on an acceptance of the claim (unethical, some might say) that these
cultures and languages were intrinsically inferior in the frst place, needing “religious renewal
and indigenous revitalisation” (Sanneh [1989] 2009, 219). This contradiction is echoed in the
less nuanced work of other scholars such as Salawu (2007), who states that the “enthusiasm, ded-
ication, and courage of the missionaries who helped to develop local languages to written level
are worthy to be emulated to further enrich African languages to an international standard” (33).
By arguing that the “vernacular Bible was the divine imprimatur on otherwise inferior cultures”
(Sanneh [1989] 2009, 193), Sanneh ofers a theological solution for the assumed inequality
and inferiority of African languages, apparently stimulated and renewed by the superior power
of Christianity: “There is radical pluralism associated with vernacular translation wherein all
languages and cultures are in principle equal in expressing the word of God” (251). Despite his
strong reservations, Sanneh draws a picture of (missionary) translators undone by (Bible) transla-
tion, that is, although the translators may have taken unethical translation decisions, the biblical
message he perceived as ethical always survived untarnished. Sanneh’s Christian ethics dictate that
for him meaning is transferred faithfully, where the message of God is preserved intact whatever
the choice of the human translators.
It is left to other African theologians to push the ethical argument further. Kwame Bediako
(1998), a Ghanian theologian, taking his cue from Sanneh, argues for the increasing need for
a “mother-tongue theology” to ensure translation is not based on simple “word equivalents.”
He advocates against “theology” shaped by “Western Christian history and experience” that
rejects Ghanian idioms and images as inappropriate (110).6 Kinyua argues that “Bible transla-
tion in colonial Africa, though in most cases defended as a neutral, legitimate, and benevolent
act of redemption, disguises the colonial power situation” (Kinyua (2013, 58–59). Bringing to
attention the work of parallel African translators, whose work was not accepted by the Bible
Society, he argues,
translation was not immune to the ambivalence and contradictions of the discourse of colo-
nialism. Like any other colonial discourse, Bible translation betrays instability. By choosing
to translate the Bible into the vernacular languages, the colonial church fung wide open the
interrogatory interstices where biblical texts, hermeneutics, doctrines, culture, and power
could be negotiated, contested, and hybridized.
(65)
453
Hephzibah Israel
4 Conclusions
That the subject of translation ethics in sacred text translation is complex, presenting multiple
vectors for analysis, is abundantly clear. What is also evident is that there is much further to
be investigated regarding translation ethics than the select issues discussed here. In the field of
Bible translation alone, there are other significant areas where ethical questions have been raised
by theologians and scholars working on the Bible and the Anthropocene,7 Dalit theology,8 and
feminist scholars of translation who have critiqued the masculinist slant of most modern transla-
tions of the Bible. The issue of ethics, for instance, is central to the controversy over “gender
neutral” or “gender inclusive” language that seeks to challenge the tradition of using masculine
pronouns to represent both male and female terms. Gender-neutral translations of the Bible
such as the New International Version Inclusive Language Edition (1995) have been heavily criticised
and rejected by conservative evangelical communities in the US on the grounds that they are
unethical distortions of God’s truth. However, both feminist scholars as well as those who do not
support a feminist critique or translations have been critical of such translation efforts, arguing
that such a translation gives a false impression of the Bible’s attitude to gender (Simon 1996). It
is impossible to delve in-depth into the stimulating scholarly discussion each of these areas offer
on translation ethics in an article of this length but worth pointing out that there is much scope
for further research on Bible translation and ethics.
While the discussion of ethics in relation to sacred text translation has been dominated by Bible
translation over a 400-year period of European colonisation, there are other religions operating
within other political economies of domination that have also deployed translation to control,
influence, or direct the travel of sacred texts. There are hints of this in the existing scholarship;
for instance, Hung (2005) records the periods when Buddhist sutra translation was suppressed,
the translation bureau dismantled, and Buddhism banned or reinstated by successive Chinese
emperors, but this information relegated to an appendix at the end of her chapter could easily be
overlooked by the reader not looking specifically for information relating to translation ethics.
Without sufficient collaborative investigations into translation ethics in relation to religions other
than Christianity, any discussion on ethics in sacred text translation will remain predominantly
focused on the recent history of Christianity, as the latter half of this chapter has done.
Further, there is as yet little by way of comparative studies of translation ethics across two or
more religious traditions. Do the translation practices and strategies, considered ethical in one
religion, hold true in another? Studies examining how ethical debates have manifested across
the religions have potential to throw light on both the study of translation ethics and the study
of religion.

Translator ethics; Venuti and the ethics of difference; ethics in Berman and Meschonnic; the
ethics of postcolonial translation; feminist translation ethics; research ethics in translation and
interpreting studies.
Notes
1 This epic poem narrates the story of the prince, Ram, tricked into being banished from his kingdom,
living fourteen years in the forests with his wife Sita and younger brother. The evil Ravana abducts Sita
and Ram follows to wage a war, accompanied by a monkey army, to rescue her. Although they enjoy a
triumphant return to their kingdom Ayodhya, aspersions are later cast on Sita’s chastity during her incar-
ceration in Ravana’s palace and Rama’s solution was to banish her (in some versions, put her through a
test of fire).
454
2 For a full discussion of the controversy, see Anna Vind, “The Solas of the Reformation,” in David M
Whitford ed. Martin Luther in Context, Cambridge University Press 2018: 267–271.
3 See in particular Andrew Porter (2004) for a book-length discussion on the subject pertaining to all parts
of the British empire.
4 See Israel (2011, 226, note 30) for a critique of Venuti’s “domestication-foreignising” dichotomy.
5 This chapter does not discuss other problems presented by Nida’s theory as these do not relate directly to
ethics.
6 My thanks to Sara Fretheim for bringing Bediako’s work to my attention.
7 The Green Bible published by Harper Bible in 2008 was the answer to critiques from environmentalists that
the Bible is damagingly anthropocentric. Rather than a new translation, it presents the New Revised Stan-
dard Version Bible as a “study Bible” with verses referring to the earth or environment in green, to highlight
the Bible’s concern for the environment, and includes essays by established theologians supporting the cause.
This publishing effort has also been controversial both amongst Christian and non-Christian groups.
8 Dalit theology is a theological movement amongst theologians of South Asia who have developed (from
the better known “liberation theology” of South America) what they considered an alternative, more
equal theology to redress social difference within the Christian community. Although they have chal-
lenged the use of language in many Indian-language translations, they have not yet developed a systematic
Dalit translation critique to better reflect their theological position.
References
Abdul-Raof, Hussein. 2005. “Cultural Aspects in Qur’an Translation.” In Lynne Long edited, Translation and
Religion: Holy Untranslatable? Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Adrian, William. 2007. “Is Bible Translation ‘Imperialist’? Challenging another Anti-Christian Bias in the
Academy.” Christian Higher Education 6: 289–97.
Barnstone, W. 1993. The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. New Haven, London: Yale University Press.
Bediako, Kwame. 1998. “The Doctrine of Christ and the Significance of Vernacular Terminology.” Inter-
national Bulletin of Missionary Research: 110–11.
Bose, Mandakranta. 2013. “Introduction.” In A Woman’s Rāmāyana: ̣ Candrāvati’s Bengali Epic, edited by
Mandakranta Bose, Sarika Priyadarshini, and Valmiki. RoutledgeCurzon Hindu Studies Series. Abing-
don, MD: Routledge.
Copeland, Ian. 2006. “Christianity as an Arm of Empire: The Ambiguous Case of India under the Com-
pany, c.1813–1858.” The Historical Journal 49, no. 4: 1025–54.
Dejonge, Michael, and Christiane Tietz. 2015. Translating Religion: What Is Lost and Gained? London, New
York: Routledge.
Hermans, Theo. 2007. The Conference of the Tongues. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Hokkanen, Sari. 2012. “Simultaneous Church Interpreting Service.” The Translator 18, no. 2: 291–309.
Hudson, Dennis. 1992. “Arumuga Navalar and the Hindu Renaissance among the Tamils.” In Religious
Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages, edited by Kenneth Jones, 27–51. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Hung, Eva. 2005. “Translation in China: An Analytical Survey: First Century B.C.E. to Early Twentieth
Century.” In Asian Translation Traditions, edited by Eva Hung, and Judy Wakabayashi, 67–107. Man-
chester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Israel, Hephzibah. 2011. Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: The Making of Protestant Tamil Identity.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jones, H. 2017. “Martin Luther: An Open Letter on Translating.” Translated by Howard Jones. Ein sendbrieff
D.M. Lutthers. Von Dolmetzscheñ vnd Fürbit der heiligenn: 1–92. Johann Petreius für Georg Rottmaier
[Nürnberg: 1530], edited by H. Lähnemann, and E. Huber. Oxford: Taylor Institution Library.
Kinyua, Johnson Kiriaku. 2013. “A Postcolonial Analysis of Bible Translation and its Effectiveness in Shap-
ing and Enhancing the Discourse of Colonialism and the Discourse of Resistance: The Gĩkũyũ New
Testament–A Case Study.” Black Theology 11, no. 1: 58–95.
Knott, Kim. 2010. “Insider/Outsider Perspectives.” In The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion,
2nd edition, edited by John Hinnells, 259–73. London, New York: Routledge.
Long, Lynne. 2005. Translation and Religion: Holy Untranslatable? Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Mak, George Kam Wah. 2010. “‘Laissez-Faire’ or Active Intervention? The Nature of the British and
Foreign Bible Society’s Patronga of the Translation of the Chinese Union Versions.” Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society 20, no. 2: 167–90.
455
Hephzibah Israel
Meschonnic, Henri. 2007. “Religious Texts in Translation, God or Allah.” In Éthique et politique du traduire.
Lagrasse, Éditions Verdier. English trans. 2011. Ethics and Politics of Translating, Pier-Pascale Boulanger.
Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Moll, Yasmin. 2017. “Subtitling Islam: Translation, Mediation, Critique.” Public Culture 29, no. 2: 333–61.
Mortamet, Clara and C. Amourette. 2015. “Missionary Descriptions in a Colonial Context: The Gramma-
tization of Swahili through the Study of Four Missionary Grammars from 1885 to 1944.” In Colonialism
and missionary linguistics. Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics, Vol. 5, edited by Klaus Zimmermann,
and Birte Kellermeier-Rehbein, 29–49. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Nida, E.A. 1964. Toward a Science of Translating: With Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in
Bible Translating. Leiden: Brill.
Nida, E.A., 1968. Religion Across Cultures: A Study in the Communication of Christian Faith. New York:
Harper & Row.
Nida, E.A., C.R. Taber, and United Bible Societies. 1969. The Theory and Practice of Translation, Leiden:
E.J. Brill for the United Bible Societies.
Noss, Philip. 2004. “Traditions of Scripture Translation: A Pan-African Overview.” In Bible Translation and
African Languages, edited by Gosnell Yorke, and Peter Renju, 7–24. Nairobi: Acton Publishers.
Pike, Kenneth. 1967. Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behaviour, 2nd edi-
tion. The Hague: Mouton.
Pollock, Sheldon. 1993. “Ramayana and Political Imagination in India.” Journal of Asian Studies 52, no. 2:
261–97.
Porter, Andrew. 1992. “Religion and Empire: British Expansion in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History 20.
Porter, Andrew. 1999. “Religion, Missionary Enthusiasm and Empire.” In The Oxford History of the British
Empire, vol. III, edited by Porter. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Porter, A. 2002. “Church History, History of Christianity, Religious History: Some Reflections on British
Missionary Enterprise since the Late Eighteenth Century.” Church History 71, no. 3: 555–84.
Porter, Andrew. 2004. Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–
1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Porter, Andrew. 2015. “Betraying Empire: Translation and the Ideology of Conquest.” Translation Studies
8, no. 1: 82–106.
Ricci, R., and J. van der Putten. 2011. Translation in Asia: Theories, Practices, Histories. Manchester; Kinder-
hook, NY: St. Jerome Publishing.
Richman, Paula. 2001. “Questioning and Multiplicity Within the Ramayana Tradition.” In Questioning
Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition, edited by Paula Richman, 1–21. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:
University of California Press.
Salawu, Adewuni. 2007. “The Spread of Revealed Religion in West Africa and Its Implications for the
Development of Translation.” Journal of Translation 3, no. 2: 29–34.
Sanneh, Lamin. [1989] 2009. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, 2nd edition. Maryk-
noll, New York: Orbis Books.
Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation. London: Routledge.
Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur. 1995. trans. and introduction. The Name of My Beloved: Verses of the Sikh
Gurus. San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco.
Siu, Sai Cheong. 2008. “Theorising Buddhist Scripture Translation as an Act of Giving: A Buddhist Per-
spective.” New Voices in Translation Studies 4: 1–14.
Stolz, Thomas, and Ingo H. Warnke. 2015. “From Missionary Linguistics to Colonial Linguistics.” In
Colonialism and Missionary Linguistics, edited by Klaus Zimmermann, and Birte Kellermeier-Rehbein,
3–25. Berlin, München, Boston: De Gruyter.
Venuti, L. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge.
Vind, Anna. 2018. “The Solas of the Reformation.” In Martin Luther in Context, edited by David M. Whit-
ford, 267–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, Alan. 2011. “Translation.” In The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion,
edited by Michael Stausberg, and Steven Engler, 421–32. London, New York: Routledge.
Wilson, Brett. 2014. Translating the Qur’an in an Age of Nationalism: Print Culture and Modern Islam in Turkey.
London: Oxford University Press.
Zemka, Sue. 1995. “The Holy Books of Empire: Translations of the British and Foreign Bible Society.” In
Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, edited by Jonathan Arac,
and Harriet Ritvo, 102–37. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
456
Zwartjes, Otto. 2014. “The Missionaries’ Contribution to Translation Studies in the Spanish Colonial
Period: The mise en Page of Translated Texts and Its Functions in Foreign Language Teaching.” In
Missionary Linguistics V: Translation Theories and Practices, edited by Klaus Zimmermann, and Martina
Schrader-kniffki, 1–50. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Further reading
Green, Nile, and Mary Searle-Chatterjee. 2008. “Religion, Language, and Power: An Introductory Essay.”
In Religion, Language and Power, edited by Nile Green and Mary Searle-Chatterjee, 1–23. New York,
London: Routledge.
Although this introductory article does not focus specifically on translation ethics, it offers an excel-
lent overview of how the category “language” intersects with that of “religion” in academic and wider
contexts. Its emphasis on the role of institutions and power across a range of religious contexts offers
important critical considerations for readers examining translation ethics in religious contexts.
Mandair, Arvind-pal Singh. 2009. Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the
Politics of Translation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Mandair’s book examines the re-invention of Sikhism as a “world religion” in colonial India through
the lens of translation. In doing so, it launches a critical enquiry into the ethics of several intellectual
movements and the effects of translations conducted under the inequities of imperial rule.
Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. “Translation as Disruption: PostStructuralism and the PostColonial Context.”
In Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context, 163–86. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Niranjana’s chapter offers a postcolonial critique of the translation of medieval Saiva poetry from Kan-
nada into English as part of her wider engagement with the politics of colonial translation.
Seidman, Naomi. 2006. Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation. Chicago,
London: The University of Chicago Press.
In particular, the “Introduction” and Chapter 3, “False Friends: Conversion and Translation from
Jerome to Luther,” examine Bible translation and the ethics of domesticating translation strategies in the
context of historic asymmetrical relations between Jewish and Christian communities.
457
30
Ethics of collaboration and
control in literary translation
1 Introduction
Translation and interpreting are almost never the product of one individual only; they reflect the
interventions of several agents and are the result of various and multiple causes. These “various
hands, minds and hearts” (Simeoni 1998, 32) that are responsible for the final product might
intervene directly into the process of the creation of translation, but more often they influ-
ence the production of the final output indirectly and/or invisibly. These other agents who
are involved in the selection of source texts, and editing, reviewing and promoting translated
texts, are, for example, commissioners of the translation or interpreting, source text or dis-
course authors, readers or receivers of interpreted discourse, publishers, editors, literary agents or
patrons promoting the publication of the translation (and/or the dominant ideology or poetics)
in the target society and culture. The interventions of these agents and their collaborations have
ethical implications and may sometimes be in conflict with each other and with the traditional
ethical principles in translation, such as loyalty. This chapter aims to provide an overview of how
Translation Studies literature sheds light on the ethical issues that arise from literary translational
practices where conflicts in collaboration with different agents occur.
Since translation as a collective performance is not unique to one text type, ethical issues
arising from the dynamics of the collaboration between different actors can be found in various
fields of translation. For example, Ji-Hae Kang’s analysis (2007) of the process of production
of translated news stories on North Korea in the Korean edition of Newsweek reveals that the
editors or “top checkers” are in fact in charge of the most significant omissions and naturaliza-
tions of the target text and should therefore be considered as most crucial in the production of
a translated news story. Editorial interventions have also been studied in translations of English
business articles (Bisiada 2018), while the influence of patrons, such as the EU institutions, was
detected in the interpreted discourse of the interpreters working for the EU (Beaton 2007).
Here we focus on agency and interaction in translation of literary texts only: literary translation
was among the first fields where research was initiated on ethical issues arising from the interplay
of different agents responsible for the production of the target text (see e.g. Hermans 1985).
The practices we are looking at, thus, are editorial and censorship practices, two potentially
ethically conflicting collaborative enterprises which affect literary translation. The collaboration
458
Ethics of collaboration and control
and conflict between different agents in the production and publishing of a translation are often
hidden: the actors involved in it tend to be invisible (Solum 2015). As there is often very little
documentation of the practices in question, scholars we cite have resorted to a number of meth-
ods to unearth these practices: textual studies and comparisons, translators’ accounts, interviews
and questionnaires with translators and other agents, ethnography and archival research. Much
of this research does not address ethics directly, but ethical concerns can be discerned, especially
in accounts of conflict situations. In addition to that, the practices we are studying here are often
hidden and therefore engender an ethical problem in itself: hidden practices can more easily slip
into a grey area not regulated by commonly agreed principles.
The fact that the final product of the transfer of any form of discourse from one language and
culture to the other is not the result of the efforts and intentions of the translator or interpreter
only, but may reflect the interests, agendas and interventions of other agents in the field, was
first systematically discussed within the so-called manipulation school or Descriptive Transla-
tion Studies group, a group of scholars responsible for the publication of the seminal work The
Manipulation of Literature (Hermans 1985). In this publication André Lefevere (1985, 215–243)
drew attention to the fact that literature, and consequently also translations of literature, operate
under different constraints, among them also that of patronage. In his subsequent analyses he
further reiterated the fact that translations, besides being the translator’s interpretations of the
source text, are created under the constraints of the ruling ideology and poetics, and may also
reflect the interests of different patrons (Lefevere 1992). Patrons can be individuals (such as an
absolute ruler like Louis XIV or other influential individuals like the Medici or Maecenas) or
groups of individuals or institutions (e.g. a totalitarian state, a religious body, a political party,
a social class, a royal court, publishers and the media) (15). They would typically exert their
influence on the authors of rewritings through ideological pressure, and in return they would
provide economic stability and grant their protégés a higher social status. For example, patrons
would expect their protégés to uphold their patron’s norms, conventions and beliefs. And if
the protégés act as expected, the patrons financially provide for them and also enable them to
access a particular selected group of the society. Thus, if literary authors or translators want to
acquire these benefits, they are expected to “work within the parameters set by their patrons”
(18). However, the norms, conventions and beliefs of literary authors and translators might not
completely overlap with those of their patrons, and this co-existence of different agendas can be
seen as leading to ethical dilemmas.
André Lefevere defined patronage as “something like powers (persons, institutions) that can
further or hinder the reading, writing, and rewriting of literature” (Lefevere 1992, 14–15),
which means that he saw patrons assuming a positive or a negative role in the production of
literary works and translations. Some scholars argue that despite his initial openness to the poten-
tially positive nature of patronage, Lefevere saw the role of patrons as predominantly a negative
one, influencing the production of translations through censorship and ideological control and
limiting the freedom of translators (Bai 2009). And indeed, André Lefevere’s work does draw
attention to the cases where the influence of different constraints on the production of transla-
tions is more invisible (and hence problematic), and thus emphasizes the hidden changes in the
target text that are made in accordance to the ideology of the patron and remain unknown to the
recipients. This focus is intentional: André Lefevere argues that translation scholars have an ethi-
cal obligation to draw the attention of the public to such cases. In fact, he calls upon TS research-
ers to fulfil their ethical obligation and conduct research that will inform the general public of
459
the manipulative shifts occurring in translation (Lefevere 1990, 27), and through their scholarly
work ensure that the public would not be “kept in the dark” (Lefevere and Bassnett 1990, 13).
For Lefevere, thus, the ethically important tasks were primarily Translation Studies scholars’
realm, not translators’; although ethical considerations are central to his thought, he did not
focus explicitly on the ethics of translation production. In fact, this topic was not overwhelmingly
present in the research of the scholars belonging to the Descriptive Translation Studies group.
The issue of the ethical tensions occurring between different agents working in the field of trans-
lation and interpreting became more prominent in the work of some of the scholars belonging
to the functional school in TS, in particular in the theoretical thought developed by Christiane
Nord, who introduced the notion of loyalty as an interpersonal category (see also Chapter 5
“Functional translation theories and ethics” in this volume). Ethics was thus established as a
practice of translators and their fellow agents.
More recently, a number of TS researchers that are presented more in detail later have been
focusing on different stages in translation, such as the production, revision and editing processes,
bearing in mind potential ethical conflicts that may occur when different agents with conflicting
expectations and agendas interact with each other in the field of translation.

The core ethical topics in contemporary TS literary research are, first, issues related to censor-
ship, and, second, to the role of other agents, such as authors, publishers, editors, revisers, copy
editors, publishers’ agents, even printers in the translation process. The two overlap to some
extent; we will here first deal with political censorship and then go on to explore the role of
agents of translation in the publishing business.
3.1 Censorship
The term censorship in Translation Studies refers to the change or reformulation of the target text
or to the suppression of potentially subversive parts of the text, or else to the prohibition of trans-
lation if it is considered subversive, dangerous or non-normative to the Establishment in the target
culture. Censorship may be exercised before or during the process of translation or interpreting
(this is called preventive or prior censorship) or after the translation has already been made (this is
called post-censorship, negative, punitive or repressive censorship) (e.g. Merkle 2004; Tan 2019);
it may be done by translators or interpreters themselves (this is called self-censorship) or by other
agents involved in the production of translation (e.g. by editors, official censors, language revisers
etc.) (see also Gambier 2002; Wolf 2002; Thomson-Wohlgemuth 2009).
There is a considerable corpus of censorship research in TS, and much of it is implicitly
or openly concerned with ethical issues. Totalitarian regimes have been an important topic
for censorship studies in TS. There are book-length treatises which address the mechanisms
of censorship in Franco’s Spain (see the TRACE [Traducciones Censuradas] project, Merino
Alvarez and Fernández 2007), Salazar’s Portugal (e.g. Seruya and Lin Moniz 2008; Pięta 2018),
Nazi Germany (e.g. Sturge 2004), Fascist Italy (e.g. Rundle and Sturge 2010), and in Social-
ist states (Thomson-Wohlgemuth 2009; Popa 2010; Pokorn 2012; Sherry 2015; Looby 2015;
Schippel and Zwischenberger 2017; Pild 2017; Kamovnikova 2019)). In addition, special issues
of journals have been published on censorship (e.g. a special edition of TTR: traduction, termi-
nologie, rédaction in 2010 (Merkle 2010) and of Perspectives in 2016 (McLaughlin and Muñoz
Basols 2016)) and there are studies on individual aspects of censorship, such as censoring queer
texts (Baer 2011). In all these works censorship is mainly seen as an ultimate breach of loyalty
460
principle; that is of the tacit understanding that links in a trustful relationship the creators and
producers of the target text and its receivers and the author of the source text (e.g. Cembali
2006; Merkle 2010; Pokorn 2012; Tymoczko 2009).
Since censorial practices involve the breach of loyalty principle, TS researchers predomi-
nantly view censorship as a negative phenomenon. Not all censorship research, however, deals
with totalitarian or repressive regimes and their institutionalized practices, and “censoring” has
different interpretations in different contexts. When it is a question of translations for children,
the target society is generally more open to a kind of an adaptive censorship resulting in deliber-
ate changes in the target text. For example, in numerous contemporary societies, elements of
explicit cruelty are taken out of fairy tales by brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen; in
the contemporary USA offensive terms for African and Native Americans are replaced by more
neutral terms in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer; in Finland 19th-century patriotic and
moralistic overtones have been subdued in children’s tales translated today, to name just a few.
The acceptance of censorship in these cases stems from a belief that children should be encour-
aged to grow up into “model citizens” and that they should be spared, in line with the “protect
and control” imperative, of anything that could harm or endanger their development into ideal
citizens (see e.g. Stephens 1992; Knowles and Malmkjaer 1996; Oittinen 2006).
The question whether censorship is a negative phenomenon or a norm-governed activity
becomes even more central in the case of self-censorship, since translators often internalize the
dictates of their patrons, adopting the “servitude volontaire” (see Simeoni 1998) to the extent
that their willingness to change the text in line with the dominant values and ideology becomes
their second nature. Pokorn (2012, 152) argues, however, when analyzing different cases of
Socialist translations, that even if we accept that Socialist translators may have internalized the
norms of the Socialist society and consequently eliminated religious elements from the translated
texts for children, their behaviour constitutes an ethical breach because their translation strategy
was not in line with the expectations of the recipients of their translations, who were unaware
of the ideological shifts in their translations. Here again, we notice the invisibility which is at the
core of the ethical problem, with the readers not knowing on what premises the text was being
translated. It is a particular area of interest for TS to study self-censorship of translators and the
ethical dilemmas caused by this practice (e.g. Santaemilia 2008).
3.2 Multiple translatorship: publishers, editors, revisers, copy editors

and publishers’ agents
Another core issue in contemporary TS research is connected to the ethical conflicts arising from
collaboration in literary translation. Hanne Jansen and Anna Wegener (2013) term this collabo-
ration “multiple translatorship” (modelled along Stillinger’s “multiple authorship” (1991)), cov-
ering “united labour” as well as “strife, division and divergent allegiances” (Jansen and Wegener
2013, 5), which may often result in ethical tensions between the different agents in translation.
The term multiple translatorship refers not only to translators’ collaboration with each other, but
to an “array of individuals contributing to the ‘birth’ of a translation” such as “literary agents,
scouts, sales agents, editors, proof readers and graphic designers,” in addition to authors.
Publishers, editors, revisers or copy editors and publishers’ agents may assume the role of
censors or edit the target text without the knowledge of the translator and thus breach the
copyright owned by the translator. For example, Pokorn (2018) describes a case of reprints
of translations of Johanna Spyri’s Heidi into Serbian and Slovene, where editors ideologically
changed the text (in Serbian Socialist reprint the editor removed all religious references from
the translation, while in the Slovene post-Socialist reprint the editor reintroduced the religious
461
elements back into the text) and attributed these changes to the translators despite the fact that
these changes were made after the death of the translators. In another case, Anna Bogic (2011)
analyzes the correspondence between the publisher Knopf and Howard Parshley, the translator
of Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal text Le Deuxième Sexe into English. Her analysis shows that
the translator had been wrongly criticized for years for over-simplifying Beauvoir’s text and that
it was the publisher who wanted her philosophical text to be transformed into an easy-reading
text for mainstream US readers. Yet another example is Alex Matson, whose translation from
Finnish into English of Väinö Linna’s novel The Unknown Soldier was changed by the American
publisher to such an extent that Matson refused to have his name in the published translation
and never translated again (Robinson 2011, 42). The translator’s decision to dissociate himself
from his translation was most probably a reaction to the fact that the publisher turned “a novel
about war” into “a war novel,” changing the genre of the novel into pulp fiction in the process
(Suominen 1999, 5–6). We can thus assume it was the decision of the publishers and not the
translator to have a Finnish officer shoot one of his own soldiers in cold blood contrary to the
original novel. The fact that the translator’s name is absent from the book has caused many a
critical reader to presume that it is because of the poor quality of the translation, when in fact it
seems the deficiencies may be attributable to the publisher. These three cases reveal that critics,
readers and sometimes TS scholars as well all too often assume that the changes in the target text
are the result of the translator’s free choices, not taking into account the collaborative nature of
published literary translations.
3.3 The influence of the source-text authors

Authors of the source texts, obviously, form one of the first groups whose work is intertwined
with that of translators – the ultimate loyalty relation, mentioned earlier, comes to the fore here.
The (presumably) fond and assimilating relation of a translator to his (her) author, as expressed by
the Earl of Roscommon (Venuti 2008, 238), may give way to or be replaced with a much more
mundane or even conflicting stance. Martin Ringmar (2009) reports on conflicts between the
Icelandic author Halldór Kiljan Laxness and his translators. The Swedish translator was blamed
by Laxness for the “flop” of his novel Salka Valka in the rest of Scandinavia, while the German
translator was dismayed because despite years of sacrifice in order to promote Laxness’s work,
Laxness did not trust him (262, 266). Discussing the case, Ringmar deals with issues such as
the authors’ control over their work, the difficult issue of translation criticism and the sensitive
dealings between the parties concerned.
Laxness is an example of an author who expressed his vexation in no uncertain terms. Not
always are author-translator relations so acrimonious, even if there clearly is controversy in the
interpretation of the literary work. Discussions between authors and translators may adopt a
more conciliatory or even friendly stand, trying to avoid conflicts and steer clear of difficult or
sensitive issues. Such is the case of Selma Lagerlöf and her American translator Velma Swanston
Howard (Sundmark 2013): the author’s interventions are most often subtle and diplomatic; the
translator, for her part, makes a point of representing Lagerlöf ’s work as faithfully as possible
(even if this entails “omissions and little changes in titles etc. . . . that all was meant for the best
interests of all concerned”) (Swanston Howard to Selma Lagerlöf, letter cited in Sundmark
2013, 170).
Another tactic was adopted by Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. Arzu Eker Roditakis (2017)
reports on how the Turkish author, after having gained fame in the West, became involved in the
production of the retranslation of his novel The Black Book into English. When the first English
translation (in 1994, by the Turkish translator Güneli Gün) received unfavourable criticism from
462
the reviewers, Orhan Pamuk initiated the retranslation of the book by Maureen Freely in 2006.
He ensured that the target text avoided complex sentence structures and used unmarked, stan-
dard English. He intervened with the translation to such an extent that Freely in her afterword
to the translation described the whole process as “collaboration,” although the author was not
officially stated as a co-translator of the text.
Authors are considered as having the right to intervene, but their ways of doing so may differ
greatly; likewise, translators may either feel the need to defend themselves or at least think it is
in their competence, not in that of the author, to judge the audience and reader responses, as
well as the literary and linguistic quality of the target text.
The study of author-translator relations has recently benefited from the rise of the so-
called genetic translation studies, where emphasis is on careful archival and textual study in
order to shed light on the translation process. Charting collaboration throughout history
of translation, the collection Collaborative Translation edited by Anthony Cordingley and
Céline Frigau (2016) paves way to a new understanding and methodology for the study of
these processes. In the collection, the article by Patrick Hersant (2016) provides a typology
of different author-translator collaborations, including “closelaboration”; the Cuban author
Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s term for his work with the translator Suzanne Jill Levine (see
also Levine 1984).
3.4 Collaboration between translators: ghosting and/or

supportive practices
Translators may have their idiosyncratic ways of dealing with the author and other agents in the
field of publishing when defending their translation solutions and/or demanding their rights;
similarly, they also have different ways of collaborating with each other. The processes include
agreed and settled collaborative deals (which can be very affective experiences, Filippakopoulou
2008), or they may involve an imbalance in the cooperation, hidden agendas or exploitation of
the more vulnerable, perhaps younger partners. Such is the case discussed by Arnaud Laygues
(2007) in his PhD dissertation, which explored explicitly the translator’s ethics and an “ethics
deficit” (déficit éthique) in translatorial practice and environment and the choices and responsibil-
ity of different agents involved (15).
The case in question (also published separately in Laygues 2001) focused on two translators, a
newcomer to the field and a senior translator, working on the same novel. In this collaboration,
everything seems to have gone wrong from the start: the division of labour, the accreditation
of the translator and financial reimbursement. Many of the routine practices in translating were
haphazard, the wording of the contracts was unclear or simply wrong, and the whole process
evolved in a highly ad hoc manner. The younger colleague was in the dark on what was tak-
ing place and that she was being used as a “ghost” translator, that is, as someone who does the
translation (in collaboration or on their own) for someone else who is named or presumed to
be the sole translator of the work in question, while the “ghost” translator is not credited for
the work done.
That “ghosting” is not an unknown phenomenon in the publishing industry in general was
recently shown by a survey conducted by Kristina Solum (2015) in Norway. She found that a
great number of translators had either “ghosted” (taking on work for a nominal translator with-
out being credited for it) or used the work of other translators who helped them as “ghosts.”
Contrary to Laygues’s case, Solum’s respondents, rather than feeling exploited, saw themselves
as showing solidarity in helping out a translator colleague – but as ghosting is an unregulated
and highly invisible practice, it is not without problems. Solum (2015, 28) makes an interesting
463
observation on the difference between the (perceived) invisibility of the translator, who is,
however, usually duly acknowledged and credited, and the (total) invisibility of “ghosts,” whose
existence may only become known through anonymous interview data.
3.5 Translators and/as revisers

In addition to translating, translators often multitask and perform several duties or carry out
different jobs, such as those of critics, journalists, authors, teachers, researchers etc. They often
work for publishers as scouts, editors or revisers, and in this role, influence the outcome of a
publishing enterprise. Jeremy Munday (2013) presents a detailed study of translation drafts of a
translator-reviser. The target text was so much changed in the process that it ended up under
the name of the reviser as a new translation (retranslation). This example witnesses to the fact
that the line between revising and retranslating is often not very clear; this is not the only case
where a reviser has started revising and ended up with a text that is so different on so many
accounts – lexis, syntax and cohesive devices, for example – from the previous translation that
it makes sense to attribute it to the reviser and not to the original translator (Munday 132; see
also Paloposki and Koskinen 2010).
Sometimes the term “retranslation” is used for sugarcoating an ethically extremely problem-
atic practice of plagiarism. Sahin, Duman and Gürses (2015) describe such a practice in the field
of literary translation by looking at 40 Turkish translations of classical books that were distributed
by a Turkish national newspaper as a part of their promotional campaign. Although the books
were presented as retranslations, the analysis revealed that these publications, in fact, were in
large part just reprints, plagiarizing existing translations without crediting them. Sahin et al.
emphasize the ethical dimensions of such a practice and argue that these plagiaristic forms of
retranslation not only violate translators’ copyrights and blur the translator’s voice in translation,
but also produce defective cultural artifacts and negatively impact the target culture in general.
Xu and Tian (2017) draw attention to the fact that also pseudo-originals, i.e. the translations that
are presented or accepted as original works in the target culture, also involve partial or complete
plagiarism of a text by a predecessor or a contemporary from another language-culture (3).
Often the role of revisers, who may textually change translations before or after their pub-
lication, is not given to translators but to editors working at a publishing house (Solum 2018).
Their invisibility, however, causes problems both for research and for the general public when
studying or evaluating the translation. The paratextual and bibliographical attribution of revi-
sions is far from clear: often revisions remain unmarked, and when they do appear, there are
multiple terms for the practice of revising or editing, with no clear difference of meaning
(Paloposki and Koskinen 2010; Koskinen 2018). Revising may also cause ethical dilemmas as
to the first translators’ rights: who owns the translation? And to what extent can it be edited
and/or “improved”?
There are cases where the networks and collaboration between different agents become
ever more entangled. Indirect translation is one case in which the mediating translation is not
always acknowledged and thus becomes invisible (Ivaska and Paloposki 2018). There are also
cases where the text production has involved several other anonymous agents: Lintao Qi (2016)
describes the English translation of a classic Chinese text where an extra layer was added by the
Latin translations of some sexually explicit passages. In addition to recognizing the contribution
of an unknown Latin scholar involved in the process, the research process also uncovered the
significance of the actual printer in including, deleting or rendering into Latin specific parts of
the text (49–50). The text, thus, was a collaborative endeavour by several different agents, who
remain anonymous and hidden.
464

More recently, new issues that have ethical implications have emerged through research. The
financial dependence of the translator on the goodwill of the patron and its implications on tex-
tual choices have been acknowledged earlier (cf. Lefevere in section 2); now, studies are appear-
ing on the concrete issues of pay and work conditions and “factory” production of translations in
history and at present (see e.g. Milton 2004). Norbert Bachleitner (2013) discusses the German
women translators’ role at the point where commercial publishing and translating emerged in the
18th century, offering work and pay for women who needed it for their sustenance. Translation
was regarded as a “mechanical” activity, and metaphors such as translation machines were used
about translators, who entered “translation factories” (175, 178). Susan Pickford (2012, 170)
deals with the issue of the French 19th-century publishers’ and translators’ competition when
trying to get the latest popular novels issued to the market as fast as possible, using the production
methods later associated with conveyor belts and factory production: sub-contracting and the
segmentation of tasks. In Finland, the 19th-century and early-20th-century publishers usually
had the upper hand in negotiating fees and in handing out tasks (Paloposki 2019). These kinds
of cases are never straightforward: the work and the pay (even if meager) on one hand help
people to scrape together their daily bread; on the other hand they contribute to establishing an
unequal and one-sided employment relation. Present-day commercial concerns have become
a focus of investigations of an increasing number of recent publications: the concern has been
voiced that translating is only a profit-earning activity for publishers and that commercial voices
seem to be winning in the field (see Jansen and Wegener 2013, 10). Decent working conditions,
an adequate compensation and sufficient time for completing assignments are also likely to go
under in the increasingly profit-driven translation market of today. The issue has been broached
by for example Lawrence Venuti, who in the latest edition of his The Translator’s Invisibility
(2008, 10) recaps and updates some of the information on the blight of literary translators who
need to negotiate fees and compete for projects (see also Chapter 21 “Ethics in the translation
industry” in this volume).
And last but not least, there is an increased interest in how gender issues interact with censor-
ship (Herrero López et al. 2018; Yu 2015). The phenomenon of censorship (in particular that of
self-censorship) has been re-evaluated: some scholars approach the practice of self-censorship as
a form of norm-governed, and consequently as an expected, behaviour in a particular cultural
and historical situation, downplaying thus the ethical implications.
5 Conclusion
As usual with ethics, there is no definitive “rule” or code that would tell us who is right and who
is wrong (Koskinen 2000, 11). Often the negotiations on how to translate, circling around such
issues as loyalty, have different shades to them, and concerned parties may entertain very differ-
ent ideas and opinions on what kind of a translation serves best the interests – of the author, of
the readers, of the patron or of the editors. Our main concern throughout the chapter has been
to highlight issues where ethical problems may arise and to make them more visible to transla-
tion researchers, thus enabling scholars to “see from both sides” and judge their own positions.
The ethical dilemmas discussed in this chapter also concern our own understanding of our
role as researchers and the potential ahistoricity with which we approach situations considered
as ethically challenging. The current demand for authorial permission and acknowledgement
practices when editing texts may prevent us from seeing the contingencies of past situations.
It is difficult to disentangle phenomena such as plagiarizing from more benign and also less
465
problematic and problematized forms of collaboration; however, our understanding of the ethi-
cal facets of collaboration is widening as more research and evidence are being presented.
Although already some of the seminal texts in Translation Studies showed that the target texts
are the result of many different and often conflicting voices, research that would specifically focus
on ethical issues connected with the conflicting agendas of different agents responsible for the pro-
duction of target texts or discourses is still rare in Translation Studies. A particular challenge for TS
researchers in the future seems therefore to be not only to describe and reveal the different agendas,
but also to explicitly and critically describe the ethical dimensions of this conflicting situation.

Professional translator; literary translator; functional theories and ethics.
References
Bachleitner, Norbert. 2013. “From Scholarly to Commercial Writing: German Women Translators in the
Age of the ‘Translation Factories’.” Oxford German Studies 42, no. 2: 173–88.
Baer, Brian James. 2011. “Translating Queer Texts in Soviet Russia: A Case Study in Productive Censor-
ship.” Translation Studies 4, no. 1: 21–40.
Bai, Liping. 2009. “Patronage as ‘a Productive Network’ in Translation: A Case Study in China.” Perspectives
17, no. 4: 213–25.
Beaton, Morven. 2007. “Interpreted Ideologies in Institutional Discourse: The Case of the European
Parliament.” The Translator, special issue edited by Sonia Cunico, and Jeremy Munday, Translation and
Ideology: Encounters and Clashes 13, no. 2: 271–96.
Bisiada, Mario. 2018. “The Editor’s Invisibility: Analysing Editorial Intervention in Translation.” Target 30,
no. 2: 288–309.
Bogic, Anna. 2011. “Why Philosophy Went Missing: Understanding the English Version of Simone de
Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe.” In Translating Women, Perspectives on Translation, edited by Luise von
Flotow, 151–66. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
Cembali, Maria Elena. 2006. “I traduttori nel Ventennio fascista: fra autocensura e questioni deonto-
logiche” [Translators in the Fascist Ventennio: Autocensorship and Deontological Issues]. Intralinea 8.
Accessed April 27, 2020. www.intralinea.it/volumes/eng_more.php?id=474_0_2_0_M51%
Cordingley, Anthony, and Célia Frigau Manning, eds. 2016. Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance
to the Digital Age. London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury.
Eker Roditakis, Arzu. 2017. “Reviewers as Readers with Power: What a Case of Retranslation Says about
Author, Translator and Reader Dynamics.” Mémoires du livre 9, no. 1. DOI: 10.7202/1043124ar
Filippakopoulou, Maria. 2008. “Translation Drafts and the Translating Self.” In Translating Selves: Experience
and Identity between Languages and Literatures, edited by Paschalis Nikolaou, and Maria-Venetia Kyritsi,
19–36. London: Continuum.
Gambier, Yves. 2002. “Les censures dans la traduction audiovisuelle.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédac-
tion 15, no. 2: 203–21.
Hermans, Theo, ed. 1985. The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation. London, Sydney:
Croom Helm.
Herrero López, Isis, Cecilia Alvstad, Johanna Akujärvi, and Synnøve Skarsbø Lindtner, eds. 2018. Gender and
Translation: Understanding Agents in Transnational Reception. Montreal: Éditions québécoises de l’oeuvre.
Hersant, Patrick. 2016. “Author-Translator Collaborations: A Typological Survey.” In Collaborative Transla-
tion: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age, edited by Anthony Cordingley, and Céline Frigau Manning,
91–110. London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury. Accessed April 27, 2020.
https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.utu.fi/docview/1873698183?accountid=14774
Ivaska, Laura, and Outi Paloposki. 2018. “Attitudes towards Indirect Translation in Finland and Translators’
Strategies: Compilative and Collaborative Translation.” Translation Studies 11, no. 1: 33–46.
Jansen, Hanne, and Anna Wegener. 2013. “Multiple Translatorship.” In Authorial and Editorial Voices 1:
Collaborative Relationships between Authors, Translators and Performers, edited by Hanne Jansen, and Anna
Wegener, 1–39. Vita Traductiva. Montréal: Éditions québécoises de l’oeuvre.
466
Kamovnikova, Natalia. 2019. Made under Pressure: Literary Translation in the Soviet Union, 1960–1991.
Amherst: Massachusetts University Press.
Kang, Ji-Hae. 2007. “Recontextualization of News Discourse: A Case Study of Translation of News Dis-
course on North Korea.” The Translator: Translation and Ideology 13, no. 2: 219–42.
Knowles, Murray, and Malmkjær, Kirsten. 1996. Language and Control in Children’s Literature. London, New
York: Routledge.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2000. Beyond Ambivalence. Tampere: University of Tampere.
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2018. “Revising and Retranslating.” In Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation, edited
by Kelly Washbourne, 315–24. London, New York: Routledge.
Laygues, Arnaud. 2001. “Death of a Ghost: A Case Study of Ethics in Cross-Generation Relations between
Translators.” The Translator 7 (Special issue: The Return to Ethics, edited by Anthony Pym), no. 2:
169–83.
Laygues, Arnaud. 2007. “Pour une éthique du traducteur poéticien.” Unpublished PhD thesis, University
of Helsinki. [Article 1 Translated from the French in collaboration with Martin Fougère].
Lefevere, André. 1985. “Why Waste Our Time on Rewrites: The Trouble with Interpretation and the
Role of Rewriting in an Alternative Paradigm.” In The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary
Translation, edited by Theo Hermans, 215–43. London, Sydney: Croom Helm.
Lefevere, André. 1990. “Translation: Its Genealogy in the West.” In Translation: History & Culture, edited by
André Lefevere, and Susan Bassnett, 14–28. London: Pinter.
Lefevere, André. 1992. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London, New York:
Routledge.
Lefevere, André, and Susan Bassnett. 1990. “Introduction: Proust’s Grandmother and the Thousand and
One Nights: The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Translation Studies.” In Translation: History & Culture, edited by
André Lefevere, and Susan Bassnett, 1–13. London: Pinter.
Levine, Suzanne Jill. 1984. “Translation as (Sub)Version: On Translating Infante’s Inferno.” SubStance 13,
no. 1/42: 85–94.
Looby, Robert. 2015. Censorship, Translation and English Language Fiction in People’s Poland. Approaches to
Translation Studies 41. Leiden, Boston: Brill, Rodopi.
McLaughlin, Martin, and Javier Muñoz Basols, eds. 2016. “Ideology, Censorship and Translation Across
Genres: Past and Present.” Perspectives 24, no. 1: 1–6.
Merino Alvarez, Raquel, and Marisa Fernández, eds. 2007. Traducción y censura en España (1939–1985).
Estudios sobre corpus TRACE: cine, narrativa, teatro. Leon: Universidad de Leon.
Merkle, Denise. 2004. “External and Internal Pressures on the Translator: Relationship to censorship.” The
International Comparative Literature Association. Accessed April 27, 2020. www.ailcicla.org/2004/
Denise%20Merkle.doc
Merkle, Denise, ed. 2010. “Censure et traduction en deça et au-dela du monde occidental/Censorship
and Translation within and beyond the Western World.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 23,
no. 2: 9–290.
Milton, John. 2004. “The Figure of the Factory Translator: University and Professional Domains in the
Translation Profession.” In Claims, Changes and Challenges in Translation Studies, edited by Gyde Hansen,
Kirsten Malmkjær, and Daniel Gile, 169–79. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Munday, Jeremy. 2013. “The Role of Archival and Manuscript Research in the Investigation of Translator
Decision-Making.” Target 25, no. 1: 125–39.
Oittinen, Riitta. 2006. “No Innocent Act: On the Ethics of Translating for Children.” In Children’s Lit-
erature in Translation: Challenges and Strategies, edited by J. van Coillie, and W.P. Verschueren, 35–45.
Manchester, New York: St Jerome.
Paloposki, Outi. 2019. “Kääntämisen hinta” [The price of translation]. MikaEL, Electronic Proceedings
of the Kätu Symposium on Translation and Interpreting Studies 12: 9–28. www.sktl.fi/@Bin/1924751/
MikaEL12+-+Paloposki.pdf
Paloposki, Outi, and Kaisa Koskinen. 2010. “Reprocessing Texts: The Fine Line between Retranslating
and Revising.” Across Languages and Cultures 11, no. 1: 29–49.
Pickford, Susan. 2012. “Traducteurs.” In Histoire des traductions en langue française: XIXe siècle, edited by Yves
Chevrel, Lieven D’hulst, and Christine Lombez, 149–87. Lagrasse: Verdier.
Pięta, Hanna. 2018. “Friend and Foe: On the Role of Indirect Literary Translation in the Construction
of the Conflicting Images of Communist Poland in Para-Fascist Portugal.” Target 30, no. 3: 345–82.
Pild, Lea, ed. 2017. Стратегии перевода и государственный контроль – Translation Strategies and State
Control. Acta Slavica Estonica 9. Tartu: University of Tartu Press.
467
Pokorn, Nike K. 2018. “Who Are the Real Guardians of Translated Texts? Translators, Editors and Oth-
ers.” Hieronymus 5: 1–25. Accessed April 27, 2020. www.ffzg.unizg.hr/hieronymus/wp-content/
uploads/2019/01/H5-2018_1_Pokorn.pdf
Popa, Ioana. 2010. Traduire sous contraintes: Littérature et communisme (1947–1989). Paris: CNRS Editions.
Qi, Lintao. 2016. “Agents of Latin: An Archival Research on Clement Egerton’s English Translation of Jin
Ping Mei.” Target 28, no. 1: 42–60.
Ringmar, Martin. 2009. “Laxness’ Relations with Translators and His Views on Translations.” In Northern
Lights: Translation in the Nordic Countries, edited by B.J. Epstein, 259–76. Bern: Peter Lang.
Robinson, Douglas. 2011. Translation and the Problem of Sway. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Rundle, Christopher, and Kate Sturge, eds. 2010. Translation under Fascism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sahin, Mehmet, Derya Duman, and Sabri Gürses. 2015. “Big Business of Plagiarism under the Guise of
(Re)translation: The Case of Turkey.” Babel 61, no. 2.: 193–218.
Santaemilia, José. 2008. “The Danger(s) of Self-Censorship(s): The Translation of “Fuck” into Spanish and
Catalan.” In Translation and Censorship in Different Times and Landscapes, edited by Teresa Seruya, and
Maria Lin Moniz, 163–73. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Schippel, Larisa, and Cornelia Zwischenberger, eds. 2017. Going East: Discovering New and Alternative Tradi-
tions in Translation Studies. Transkulturalität–Translation–Transfer 28. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Seruya, Teresa, and Maria Lin Moniz, eds. 2008. Translation and Censorship in Different Times and Landscapes.
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Sherry, Samantha. 2015. Discourses of Regulation and Resistance: Censoring Translation in the Stalin and Khrush-
chev Era Soviet Union. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Solum, Kristina. 2015. “Multiple Translatorship: Identifying the Ghost Translator.” In New Horizons of
Translation Research and Education 3, edited by Kaisa Koskinen, and Catherine Way, 24–40. Joensuu:
University of Eastern Finland. Accessed April 27, 2020. https://prevajalstvo.ff.uni-lj.si/assets/files/
Horizons_3.pdf
Solum, Kristina. 2018. “The Tacit Influence of the Copy-Editor in Literary Translation.” Perspectives 26,
no. 4: 543–59.
Stephens, John. 1992. Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction. London: Longman.
Stillinger, Jack. 1991. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. New York, Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Sturge, Kate. 2004. The Alien Within: Translation into German during the Nazi Regime. Munich: Iudicium
Verlag.
Sundmark, Björn. 2013. “‘Dear Selma’: ‘Dear Velma’: Selma Lagerlöf ’s Translation Instructions to Velma
Swanston Howard.” In Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation 1: Collaborative Relationships between
Authors, Translators, and Performers, edited by Hanne Jansen and Anna Wegener, 165–82. Montréal: Édi-
tions québécoises de l’œuvre.
Suominen, Marja. 1999. “The Unknown Soldiers: Translating a Heteroglot Novel.” Unpublished MA
thesis, University of Helsinki.
Tan, Zaixi. 2019. “The Fuzzy Interface between Censorship and Self-Censorship in Translation.” Transla-
tion and Interpreting Studies 14, no. 1: 39–60. https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.00029.tan
Democratic Republic. London, New York: Routledge.
Tymoczko, Maria. 2009. “Censorship and Self-Censorship in Translation: Ethics and Ideology, Resistance
and Collusion.” In Translation and Censorship: Patterns of Communication and Interference, edited by Cormac
Ó Cuilleanáin, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and David Parris, 24–45. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd edition. New York:
Routledge.
Wolf, Michaela. 2002. “Censorship as Cultural Blockage: Banned Literature in the Late Habsburg Mon-
archy.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 15, no. 2: 45–61.
Xu, Mingwu, and Chuanmao Tian. 2017. “Exploring the Traces of Translation: A Chinese Perspective.”
Babel 63, no. 1: 3–20.
Yu, Zhongli. 2015. Translating Feminism in China: Gender, Sexuality and Censorship. Routledge Advances in
Translation Studies. London, New York: Routledge.
468
Further reading
Cordingley, Anthony, and Célia Frigau Manning, eds. 2016. Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance
to the Digital Age. London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury.
The volume collects a wealth of information on collaboration research. It includes a historical account
on collaborative practices and sections for author-translator collaborations and for different environ-
ments where collaboration takes place (online, crowdsourcing etc.). Without explicitly researching
ethics, it addresses various issues that have ethical implications.
Jansen, Hanne, and Anna Wegener, eds. 2013. Authorial and Editorial Voices 1: Collaborative Relationships
between Authors, Translators and Performers. Vita Traductiva. Montréal: Éditions québécoises de l’oeuvre.
Although not explicitly focusing on ethics, this volume nevertheless offers a many-faceted insight into
the ethical challenges connected with collaborative translation.
Merkle, Denise, ed. 2010. “Censure et traduction en deça et au-dela du monde occidental/Censorship
and translation within and beyond the Western World.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 23, no.
2: 9–290.
This special issue of TTR offers a selection of articles on censorship to acquaint the reader with some
particular and illustrative cases.
469
31
Accessibility and linguistic
rights
1 Introduction
This chapter outlines the discussion in translation and interpreting studies (henceforth T/I)
focusing on the ethical issues related to accessibility and linguistic rights, therefore addressing
the ideal of enabling the participation of all people via translating and interpreting. A variety
of communicative means and activities will be discussed here as instruments for ensuring equal
participation by providing access to different areas of life.
Accessibility has various dimensions, from overcoming physical, linguistic, and social barriers
to coping with sensory and communicative impairments. In T/I, the most prevalent themes have
been sensory and linguistic accessibility, along with media accessibility and access to informa-
tion. In this chapter, we discuss accessibility (focusing on sensory, cognitive, and other functional
restrictions) and linguistic rights (focusing on linguistic restrictions) in parallel, although national
legislation usually regulates them separately. For example, issues regarding sign languages are
often treated as disability-based rights and as medical matters. However, from a socio-cultural
perspective, both sign languages and spoken minority languages could be treated as issues of
language rights or as questions of marginalised groups and their human rights (Reagan 2019,
272–273).
Accessibility is traditionally related to persons with special needs (Matamala and Orero 2016,
15), such as the visually impaired, the hard-of-hearing, and the Deaf, although this view is
changing towards perceiving all users and the whole of society as beneficiaries of accessibil-
ity. In this sense, accessibility is a transadaptive measure (Gambier 2003) that enables the use
of products, communication, and services across different abilities and contexts. To illustrate,
anyone can be momentarily “impaired,” for instance in hearing because of a noisy environment,
but can still follow a TV show with the sound off thanks to the intralingual subtitles that were
originally designed for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing. In their introduction to one of the very
first monographs about media accessibility, Díaz-Cintas, Orero, and Remael (2007, 13–14) state
that “accessibility is a form of translation, and translation is a form of accessibility.” This statement
crystallises the complex relationship that the two areas share. First, many forms of accessibil-
ity utilise translatorial techniques or methods. These methods involve meaning-transfer inter-
lingually between languages (e.g. sign language interpreting), intralingually between language
470
Accessibility and linguistic rights
modalities (e.g. speech to text in subtitling for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing) or intersemiotically
or -modally between semiotic systems or communication modes (e.g. audio description from
images into words, description of non-verbal sounds in subtitling, and translation of verbal text
into pictures) (cf. Jakobson [1959] 2000). Second, translation is a means of providing accessibil-
ity because it overcomes linguistic, cultural, and sensory barriers to understanding. Translation
is one tool or method for accessibility, and accessibility translation is one measure to improve
human rights so that everyone is able to participate in society.
Linguistic rights belong to the concept of accessibility especially in the context of present-
day multilingual societies and mobile people. Linguistic rights can be either individual human
rights, for example similar to the right of the defendant to use an interpreter in court free of
charge, or the collective rights of a linguistic minority to use their own language or have pub-
lic services in their own language (see e.g. Spolsky 2003,119). A minority language can be an
indigenous language that possibly has a legally protected status and its (citizen) speakers can have
a right to access services in their language (an old minority language), or alternatively, a language
spoken by migrants or refugees that does not have a similar status in legislation (a new minority
language). In addition to these groups of people, there are also subjects who are on the move
across national or linguistic borders for different purposes and need social communication in
the environment in which they work or spend their leisure time. The rights to use translation
and interpreting services are in each case an essential tool for people with different linguistic
backgrounds to find and use services, to establish communication, and to engage in interaction.
Researchers working in the field of language-based inequality and linguistic disadvantage
or injustice (Piller 2016) distinguish between speakers who have differential access to oppor-
tunities, who lack linguistic competence in the favoured language, or are even “linguistically
handicapped” on the one hand, and the linguistically privileged members of a community on the
other hand (Van Parijs 2011, 92–97). It must be stressed that many people have different kinds
of linguistic competences in languages other than their own. These competences are not static.
One can read a popular magazine in another language but may still not be fluent in the spoken
language when receiving medical advice from a doctor in a medical encounter. The linguistic
proficiency of minorities and emergent language communities are facts that need consideration
from the point of view of linguistic rights if everybody’s social participation is to be valued in
society.
Accessibility has been used to characterise translation in general, and these characterisations
include many ethical considerations. Bassnett (2014, 169) describes the task of the translator as
allowing “readers to have access to texts that would otherwise be incomprehensible to them.”
Pöchhacker (2018, 45) defines interpreting as “expressing or giving access to the meaning of
something.” Chesterman (2001, 144) mentions accessibility as a parameter in the ethical contem-
plation of translation and interpreting: accessibility means clarity – the ease of understanding a
text – and thus it constitutes “good” service and communication in translation. The parameter of
accessibility also features in Chesterman’s proposal for a universal ethical promise of translators,
the Hieronymic Oath: “5. I will respect my readers by trying to make my translations as accessible
as possible, according to the conditions of each translation task. [Clarity]” (Chesterman 2001,
153). The orientation to the target user and the service character of translating and interpreting
are thus reflected in many discussions of accessibility by T/I scholars. However, this entails a con-
tradiction: serving the target users in an appropriate manner may involve aspirations and strategies
that are generally thought of as unacceptable in the professional community of translators and
interpreters. The identical reproduction of source material is considered impossible in translation
studies, while the ideal of accessibility postulates that everyone must have the opportunity to
access the same information. We will discuss this with examples later on in this chapter.
471
The chapter begins with an overview of how accessibility and linguistic rights became an
issue in T/I. We outline the conventions and legislation upon which accessibility and linguistic
rights are grounded. Then, we discuss some central aspects and research in T/I related to ethical
issues in accessibility and linguistic rights. In conclusion, we consider some implications of the
ethical consideration of accessibility for the professional and theoretical development of T/I.
The role of institutions is relevant as they create the framework – that is, the legislation and
policies – to support the choice of accessible practices in different situations of life. The frame-
work guides actors to make the right decisions when fulfilling their responsibilities. In addition,
it gives many rights to people who otherwise would be discriminated against. Today, there is a
wealth of policies and legislation affecting the practical application of accessibility and linguistic
rights.
2.1 Human rights as the basis

Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) stipulates that everyone “is entitled
to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such
as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, prop-
erty, birth or other status.” The Declaration then goes on to specify human rights as rights that
allow anyone to take part in all the basic fields of human life: work, education, and cultural life,
as well as the community and public services. Human rights have affected both societal values as
well as the policy and planning of accessibility and linguistic rights. The two areas partly diverge
and partly converge, as we will explain next. We start with linguistic rights because they have a
longer legislative tradition compared to accessibility.
2.2 Linguistic rights

Linguistic rights are the means of accessing other fundamental human rights, e.g. the right to
healthcare or the right to a fair trial. From the viewpoint of T/I research, it is therefore impor-
tant to consider the role of linguistic barriers as an important aspect of accessibility in all fields
of translation and interpreting. Regarding the linguistic rights of minorities, there is a notable
difference whether a minority language speaker is “a rights holder” on the basis of the country’s
legislation or a person who is a “carrier of deficiency,” i.e. a person that has insufficient profi-
ciency in the official language (Córdoba Serrano and Diaz Fouces 2018, 6). In the former case,
for example in Finland, Swedish and Finnish are both national languages, and their speakers
have similar legislative rights. Similarly, citizens of the European Union have a right to access
EU legislation in the official 24 languages. In both situations, language policy management and
linguistic justice require a lot of institutional translation and interpreting and public funding. In
the latter case, for a person defined as a “carrier of deficiency,” translation and interpreting are
a means of overcoming temporary linguistic barriers. A minority language speaker’s access to
translation and interpreting services in such a case is then typically a societal question of ethical,
political, and financial decisions: to what extent societal resources are distributed to help people
who are not competent speakers of the majority language (González Núñez and Meylaerts
2017)? These decisions affect translation policy, i.e. “as a set of legal rules that regulate translation
in the public domain: in education, in legal affairs, in political institutions, in administration, in
the media” (Meylaerts 2011a, 165).
472
A linguistic minority’s access to public services – or its exclusion from society – is a topic that
has been politically debated for many years (Edwards, Temple, and Alexander 2005; González
Núñez 2016; Pokorn and Čibej 2018, 113). According to investigations in the United Kingdom,
health, legal, social welfare, and education services could not be accessed by migrants whose
language proficiency was not sufficient for formal language use in official settings (Edwards et al.
2005). From this perspective, i.e. regarding accessibility, linguistic minorities can be compared
to other minorities in society who do not possess a certain competence required for participa-
tion in social life. However, while a linguistic lack of proficiency can usually be corrected, a
disability cannot. Linguistic non-proficiency in the dominant language is therefore considered
a political language problem that should be corrected, and translation and interpreting services
are conceived of as forms of accommodation (Córdoba Serrano and Diaz Fouces 2018, 7). It
has also been claimed without any research evidence that the availability of interpreting services
hinders the inclusion of migrants in society, as they do not learn the dominant language (Pokorn
and Čibej 2018).
Overall, translation and interpreting activities find their base in legislation or international
provisions and standards (Meylaerts 2011b; de Shutter 2017; Mowbray 2017; Pokorn and Čibej
2018). In general, the policies and practices of guaranteeing access to translation and interpreting
services reflect the application of human rights agreements and regulations in a society. After
reviewing international human rights agreements that explicitly or implicitly include provi-
sions that mandate translation and interpreting as linguistic human rights, Mowbray (2017, 33)
concludes that from the perspective of accessibility and linguistic rights, the most important
provisions are those that “require translation in order to ensure that linguistic minorities can
participate fully in the democratic process and public life of the state.”
2.3 Accessibility
Accessibility cannot be considered comprehensively without the framework of human rights
(Diaz-Cintas, Orero, and Remael 2007, 14), since accessibility is a constitutive part of safeguard-
ing equality and an instrument for putting certain human rights into effect (Greco 2016). In the
United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), the purpose of Article 9
on Accessibility is to “enable persons with disabilities to live independently and participate fully
in all aspects of life.” According to the Convention, parties are requested to eliminate obstacles
and barriers to accessibility, including information and communications that are not available
in a suitable form. Access to information and information technologies should be promoted, as
should assistance to persons with disabilities.
In T/I, accessibility is typically discussed in connection with audiovisual translation, such
as media accessibility (e.g. Diaz-Cintas, Orero, and Remael 2007). Gambier (2006) describes
accessibility as a factor in audiovisual translation overall and, for him, accessibility concerns a
wider audience than the disabled: accessibility means that information and services are avail-
able to all users, “irrespective of issues such as where they live, their level of experience, their
physical and mental capacity, or the configuration of their computer” (Gambier 2006, 4). In The
Handbook of Translation Studies Online, accessibility as a keyword is discussed in the article entitled
“Media Accessibility” by Aline Remael (2012). Media accessibility refers to the ways in which
“information and entertainment disseminated via audiovisual media, including the Worldwide
Web, is [made] accessible to all” (Remael 2012). Remael’s definition of accessibility is similar
to that offered by Yves Gambier (2006) in entailing a comprehensive context in which access
is made possible: “the concept of accessibility refers to the degree to which a product, service,
environment, concept or even person can be used, reached, understood or accessed for a specific
473
purpose.” Thus, accessibility touches upon various ways of communicating between people and,
ultimately, all areas of life, including work, education, citizenship and societal participation, and
culture (see Maaß and Rink 2019; Hirvonen and Kinnunen 2020).
In the 21st century, accessibility has become an important part of European Union policy.
Even before this, there were European declarations (see Wehrens 1991) and joint projects to
foster accessibility (see Hernández-Bartolomé and Mendiluce-Cabrera 2004). In the 2010s,
several directives were put into force to mandate the accessibility of digital services and media.
The Audiovisual Media Services Directive (Directive 2010/13) states that member states should take
measures to implement accessibility services in television broadcasting. The Directive on the Acces-
sibility of the Websites and Mobile Applications of Public Sector Bodies (Directive 2016/2102) aims at
making the public sector accessible to all. It provides a legal definition for accessibility: “Acces-
sibility should be understood as principles and techniques to be observed when designing, con-
structing, maintaining, and updating websites and mobile applications in order to make them
more accessible to users, in particular persons with disabilities” (Article 1, Directive 2016/2102).
Thus, accessibility no longer concerns only the disabled but everyone using these services,
taking into account possible functional deficiencies of digital platforms (e.g. the inability to
perceive visuals or hear sounds). The latest addition to the accessibility directives is the European
Accessibility Act (Directive 2019/882). It aims to improve the functioning of the EU market for
accessible products and services, with benefits to both users (persons with disabilities and the
elderly) and businesses.1 In consequence, accessibility is spreading from the public sector into
private business. The EU directives are converted to legal obligations as they are implemented
in national legislation.
To conclude this section, we would like to recognise the extensive research on accessibility in
fields other than T/I, such as information and communication technology (ICT) and human–
computer interaction, in which accessibility has been conceptualised under the notion of Design
for All (or universal design, inclusive design, etc.). This work has been ongoing since the 1950s.
An important forum for such research is the journal Universal Access to Information Society. A
paper by Persson, Åhman, Yngling, and Gulliksen (2015) is of special interest; it addresses the
terminological, historical, political, and philosophical aspects and developments of accessibility
as a concept.

Apart from sign language interpreting, T/I research that directly addresses the ethics of acces-
sibility is scarce. Ethical issues related to linguistic rights have been dealt with especially in the
study of public service interpreting, and as this handbook includes a separate chapter on this,
our focus in the present chapter is on accessibility. Furthermore, the focus of this subsection is
on two forms of accessibility that have received the most attention in T/I in the past: subtitling
for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing and audio description for the blind and partially sighted. Two
issues relating to ethics have been dealt with extensively: professionalisation and norms. Both
are expressions of the need for a collectively defined status for this rather novel area of (transla-
tory) expertise.
3.1 Professionalisation
Badía and Matamala (2007) call for the professionalisation of the profiles of audio describer, sub-
titler (for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing), and sign language interpreter, and they describe differ-
ent models in which Spanish universities have introduced media accessibility in their curricula.
474
Adequate professionalisation occurs when the training reaches the university level; experts are
thus trained who can develop the field also by conducting research (Badía and Matamala 2007,
68). At present, the ADLAB PRO project (ADLAB = Audio Description: Lifelong Access for
the Blind) is developing the professional profile of audio describers. It explicitly advocates the
strengthening of the social and professional status of the audio description expert (Perego 2017b,
134). Overall, involving (media) accessibility in the area of Translation Studies and therefore in
the universities changes the position of this formerly non-academic field to an academic one,
thus heightening its status. Professionalisation – the development of the professional profile –
relates to the communal level of ethics (see Koskinen 2000, 15), as the desired model of an
accessibility professional reflects the moral values of the community.
3.2 Norms
Norms have been the subject of active investigation in the form of defining guidelines for differ-
ent accessibility services. The European research and development project ADLAB has created
a set of common guidelines (Remael, Reviers, and Vercauteren 2015) for the audio description
of audiovisual products (especially films and television) in Europe. The project was preceded by
other research that studied the possibility of internationally valid guidelines (see e.g. Mazur and
Chmiel 2012; Mazur 2017) that would achieve the status of a standard in order to meet a desired,
uniform quality (see Perego 2017a, 218). Now, however, it is maintained that such universally
applicable genre-specific guidelines – such as general rules for describing films – should leave
enough freedom for localisation, as “each country has its own needs, language specificities,
stylistic idiosyncrasies, rhetorical preferences” (Perego 2017a, 219). Different agents are cur-
rently in the position of defining audio description guidelines: some guidelines are drafted by
a country’s officials, while others are prepared by professionals, associations, or academics (see
Perego 2017a, 218). The striving for normativity relates to Chesterman’s (2001) model of the
norm-based ethics of translation, which emphasises loyalty and ethical conduct according to the
prevailing norms.
3.3 Quality
Normativity is reflected also in the research into quality – i.e. what kind of accessibility is good
and on what grounds. In this context, the relevance of the target audience is often emphasised.
A particular feature of accessibility is the value assigned to the target audience, whether in the
willingness to learn from it in reception studies (e.g. Romero-Fresco 2015; Szarkowska, Krejtz,
Pilipczuk, Dutka, and Kruger 2016; Tiittula, Kurimo, Mansikkaniemi, and Raino 2018) or as
concrete cooperation in the translation practice (Hirvonen and Schmitt 2018). Matamala and
Orero (2016, 15) give end-users a key role by endowing them a foundational status in the new
research field called Accessibility Studies. This relates to user-centred approaches to translating
(Suojanen, Koskinen, and Tuominen 2015) and the ethics of service (Chesterman 2001): the
interest is in serving the audience properly, i.e. in defining translation quality from the viewpoint
of those using it.
As accessibility aims at ensuring agency and an independent life for differently abled people,
one core issue is defining good service and the functions of the accessibility service (provider) as
a mediator: how much should the service be geared towards the capacities of users, helping them
to assimilate the information given? Should the service instead perhaps focus on mediating the
characteristics of the source material, disregarding the effects of semiotic and modal differences
on the reception and use? In subtitling for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing, this contradiction is
475
reflected in the dilemma of choosing between a verbatim rendering of “all” that is said and heard
and an edited rendering that is a condensed and/or simplified version of the audio in order to
foster comprehension by the readers (Szarkowska et al. 2011). Users and broadcasters typically
favour verbatim rendering, albeit for different reasons: users demand equal access and consider
edited subtitles as censorship, while broadcasters are motivated by the lower production costs
of verbatim subtitles (which are often possible to produce via speech recognition technology).
Researchers, for one, have traditionally spoken in favour of edited subtitles to ensure compre-
hension and adequate reading time (Szarkowska et al. 2011, 364). One of the important findings
of Szarkowska and colleagues (2011) is that “objective” performance does not always go hand
in hand with “subjective” preference: in this case, the edited or standard subtitles may be easier
to understand but they are less favourable. A recent study by Tiittula et al. (2018) indicates that
a verbatim rendering of speech is preferred by all of the different users (Deaf, hearing-impaired
people, and language learners), albeit for different reasons. Interestingly, equality may overrun
understandability even deliberately: some users wish to preserve a foreign language (that they
may not understand) in the subtitles so as to have equal access to the “otherness” (Tiittula et al.
2018, 25). The research results described previously demonstrate that the ethics of being loyal
to the Source (i.e. representing the source material faithfully) and being loyal to the Target (i.e.
serving users “correctly”) can converge (cf. Chesterman 2001). Thus, in accessibility, faithful-
ness to the Source can be regarded as a good service, as it prohibits censorship and the with-
holding of information.
Withholding or manipulating information, i.e. censorship, is a key issue in accessibility. It
also relates to how to deal with sensitive content (see Sanz-Moreno 2017). In audio descrip-
tion and subtitling, one must deal with the verbalisation of sex, pornography, violence,
and the like (see Fryer 2016, 141–154). In sign language interpreting, on the other hand,
sensitive issues have to be embodied and visualised, which is likely to have negative impact
on the translator who has to, for instance, embody pornography (see also Chapter 27 “Ethi-
cal stress in translation and interpreting” in this volume). How to audio describe sensitive
issues can be instructed to some extent in the guidelines, so norms are an important tool for
exercising ethical power. There might also be cultural issues involved in the ways in which
sensitive material is represented and which styles of mediating it are considered acceptable
(Fryer 2016, 142).
3.4 Role
Research on sign language interpreting repeatedly brings up the issue of the (new) definition of
the interpreting profession and the role expectations involved in it (Janzen and Korpinski 2005;
Shaw 2014). Janzen and Korpinski (2005) discuss the various roles sign language interpreters
have had over the years in North America. The “ally” role they describe emerges with the need
to genuinely take part in the interaction for the benefit of the Deaf consumer; the interpreter as
an ally works with the Deaf clients, not for them, “supporting their goals and interests as they see
them” (Janzen and Korpinski 2005, 171; however, on the problem of allying, see Boéri 2015,
37). These roles emerge and blend in the practices of accessibility as well. For instance, audio
describers who meet their audience face-to-face at live events, such as museum tours or theatre
performances, may take a helper role as they instruct the partially sighted audience in practical
matters, such as mobility on site, but shift to serve as a conduit as soon as the audio descrip-
tion begins. The role of ally is complicated because users of accessibility are so versatile and,
consequently, problems may arise when there is more than one client for whom the service is
designed and provided.
476

This section tracks ethically challenging issues that are emerging either in research or in practice.
They deal with questions of equality in social, cultural, and political participation and have deep
roots in the distribution of financial resources.
A Finnish service of cultural accessibility gives the following accessibility checklist to the
organisers of cultural events, which can also be read from the general point of view of translation
and interpreting services management (Kulttuuria kaikille 2019, orig. in Finnish, reformulated
into English by the authors of the article):
• Accessible attitudes: Are employees and service providers open-minded?

• Accessible communication: Is information provided in different ways?
• Accessible pricing: Are fees reasonable and scaled to different socio-economic groups?
• Accessible physical environment: Are the facilities physically accessible?
• Sensory accessibility: Have the ways in which people use their senses been considered?
• Cognitive accessibility: Have different types of learning and cognitive abilities been con-
sidered?
• Social access: Have the experiences and interests of different groups been considered?
In refecting on the checklist in terms of some ethical discussions in T/I, we recognise familiar
topics, such as the costs and the availability of the translation and interpreting service for minori-
ties. Only the usual question of quality is missing from the checklist. It is not yet commonplace
for organisers to anticipate the audience experience from the viewpoint of the audience’s lin-
guistic backgrounds, let alone from the perspective of the intermodal ways of communication
needed in the audience. Thus, it is not always the question of the actors’ negative attitudes but
rather of the general awareness of these issues as a part of the stock-in-trade. The problem refects
the difculty in perceiving the wide spectrum of recipients and their sensory or cognitive skills.
Additional or alternative communication methods and modes are probably considered costly or
time-consuming if their benefts are not realised as tools of social equality and common under-
standing. There is much more room for researchers to look into questions like who should take
the role of supporting such eforts fnancially, or who should help with technological solutions,
assistive devices, and service platforms for audiences consisting of the diferently abled, for
example in the media.
Accessibility converges with linguistic rights in the context of access to information. In the
face of mass migration and global crises, access to (foreign-language) information seems to have
the position of a human right, and linguistic barriers need to be overcome in addition to physical
and sensory ones (see Matamala and Orero 2016, 16). Different types of agents are involved in
translation in the humanitarian context, ranging from human interpreters (Moser-Mercer 2015)
to machine translation (Nurminen and Koponen 2020). For the former, issues such as inter-
preter roles and professional status come in to play. For the latter, the key questions are the (re-)
definition of quality (e.g. “first-aid quality” where the translation is adequate enough to function
as a linguistic first aid), the status of different languages in the development of machine transla-
tion (well-resourced, major languages vs. under-resourced, minor languages), and certainly also
the responsibility of the provider offering a non-human, machine translator or interpreter; the
consequences of false information must be carefully reflected upon before embarking on the use
of raw machine translations (Nurminen and Koponen 2020).
The ethics of technology must also be considered (see Chapter 18 “Translation technology
and ethics” in this volume). First of all, machines are substituting for human translators in some
477
tasks, as happens in translation and interpreting overall. For instance, speech recognition is being
used to render speech to text (Tiittula et al. 2018), and automatic machine vision methods are
being developed to describe masses of images and videos (Braun and Starr 2019). Moreover,
with sensory accessibility, we are dealing with broader effects, such as the danger that machine
vision is used to control people for hostile purposes (e.g. video surveillance). The development
of automatic methods is in many ways dependent on human work. They are designed and
programmed by people, and their learning requires vast amounts of human-produced data. For
instance, speech recognition that is automatising intralingual subtitling may not perform well
when its algorithms learn from inadequate data, such as using written language that is read out
loud to teach recognition of colloquial speech (see Tiittula et al. 2018, 27). The development
of automatic video description also suffers from the lack of data (Braun and Starr 2019, 14, 32).
One obvious issue for professional ethics is whether translators and interpreters want to take part
in the development of technologies that aim to replace human translators.
The social ethical question of the distribution of resources remains to be negotiated. Although
conventions and legislation exist, ethical problems considering linguistic rights keep arising
because of governmental cost reductions that affect minorities in law, healthcare, social care, and
education. Many cost reductions relate to the public procurement of translation and interpreting
services, and cost saving can lead to the use of cheaper, non-qualified interpreters. Therefore,
one way of restricting access to the fulfilment of human rights is refusing to finance the use
of competent interpreters. For example, after the Dutch government stopped the funding of
qualified interpreters in health care in 2012, the use of interpreters reduced radically (de Boe
2015; Mikaba 2018). Generally, also the reception centres of asylum seekers have identified the
lack of interpreters “as one of the main challenges about healthcare provision” (FRA 2016, 14)
in European Union member states. One of the most important debates in this area is thus the
price of human rights: at what level is one entitled to claim one’s rights are to be fulfilled, if at
all? Moreover, the concept of cost has many dimensions; it involves not only the financial costs
but also psychological and other immaterial costs, such as a decrease of working efficiency and
exclusion from society (Gazzola and Grin 2013; Persson et al. 2015).
In the light of strengthening accessibility legislation and policies, one emerging issue is the
definition of how much accessibility is ethically “enough” or required to cater for the human
right of participation, and along with that, how limited resources should be divided. To illustrate,
in Finland, hearing- and visually impaired people are in unequal positions in spite of various
national laws on the accessibility of broadcasting. While the proportion of intralingually subtitled
programmes is mandated by law, the proportion of audio-described content is not (Hirvonen
2014, 22–23). Another example comes from Poland, where legislation obliges the broadcasting
industry to make 10% of their content accessible to people with sensory impairments, but the
specific proportions of how to divide this between the different modalities (subtitling for Deaf
and hard-of-hearing, audio description, signing) are lacking (Mliczak 2015, 204). In addition
to legislation, local traditions may create divides between accessibility services. In Spain, the
commercial and therefore free distribution of films with audio description is still not happening
because of the controlling position of organisations that are used to distributing accessible prod-
ucts solely to their members (Sanz-Moreno 2017, 50). In Germany, a country where dubbing is
the norm, it is the hearing impaired and Deaf who are generally quite dissatisfied with television
accessibility (Bosse and Hasebrink 2016, 10). The opposite is likely to be true in countries like
Finland where subtitling is the norm, because the regular interlingual subtitles that appear in for-
eign-language programmes can be used by anyone who needs the conversion of speech to text.
Finally, new debates are likely to surface from the fact that translation ethics is a problematic
field: “none of the models is very clear about what the appropriately ethical action might be in
478
a situation where values (or loyalties) clash” (Chesterman 2001, 142). Indeed, some research on
accessibility seems to take the ethics of service as its context, while other research views it from
the viewpoint of the ethics of representation. The ethics of representation and service can be
hard to manage simultaneously, for instance when the there is a demand for a faithful transmis-
sion of information but the client or the client’s representative (e.g. an NGO that is financing
the accessibility service) prefers quantity to quality. What is more, the ethics of communication
have been inadequate for the area of accessibility translation and interpreting, because it has
thus far been conceptualised as a one-way service rather than as a relationship of equal cultures
cooperating. Here, sign language interpreting is an exception, because Deaf communities are
cultural and linguistic entities (see Schembri and Lucas 2015), and thus communication with the
communities of spoken languages can be defined as intercultural. The aspect of user-centredness
in accessibility practices and in reception research, however, points to the possibility of consider-
ing the ethics of communication in this context as well.
5 Conclusion
In this chapter, we have discussed ethical viewpoints to accessibility and linguistic rights. Acces-
sibility is bound to societal changes and is currently on the rise thanks to national and interna-
tional policies. At the same time, accessibility is being redefined as beneficial not only for the
differently abled – or people with specific needs – but for all.
Our focus has been on the research that has emerged or is emerging in the context of
Translation Studies. While “giving access” is used in various definitions of translation in gen-
eral, accessibility – in particular media accessibility – has become the topic of intense T/I
research. We noted that research explicitly treating issues of ethics in accessibility is scarce so
far, but several research topics have an ethical grounding: professionalisation, norms, reception/
user-centeredness, and roles. More recent topics include censorship and the overcoming of
linguistic barriers, and future research should include debates on the distribution of resources
for accessibility, collaborative practices with users, and the connection between technology and
accessibility. Possible clashes between ethical models in accessibility are also worth studying.
T/I is in fact a suitable framework for the ethical-philosophical contemplation of accessibil-
ity because a vital component in the theory of translation is “otherness.” Giving “otherness” an
existentially necessary role creates good grounds for accessibility: it is contrary to the position
of “normality” that is popular in the philosophical tradition of ICT-related accessibility consid-
erations (e.g. “the normal user,” see Persson et al. 2015, 521). We believe that future theories of
interpreted and translated communication should also include ethical considerations of acces-
sibility. An example of the implications is the change of the interpreter’s role from a neutral
mediator to an “ally” with the differently abled customer to whom they give voice in the work-
place (see Shaw 2014). This involves a discussion of the ethical premises of the theoretical posi-
tions that are used in defining accessibility, such as audience design, adjustment, and adaptation
according to the recipient group, but also a critical review of well-founded translation theories
(e.g. for the ethics of Skopos theory, see Kopp 2012). Nevertheless, this transformation is bound
to produce controversy. Accessibility challenges the disciplinary boundaries of T/I and widens
the spectrum of modalities and role expectations. An example of such a challenging practice is
environmental description (Lahtinen and Palmer 2012): it is a communicative aid primarily tar-
geted at people who are impaired both in sight and hearing. It is an utterly multimodal form of
interpreting, as the interpreter’s and the user’s bodies function as communicative resources fully:
language (spoken, signed, and/or written), voice, and the body (e.g. pointing, touch, draw-
ing, and movement) are used in transmitting information from the environment (Lahtinen and
479
Palmer 2012, 107). This kind of interpreting, just like audio description, which involves non-
human entities as a source, challenge Translation Studies and invite debate about the boundaries
of the discipline (cf. Mossop 2016; Pöchhacker 2018).
Apart from investigating accessibility in the framework of translators’ ethics, T/I research-
ers and translator educators should draw from social ethics. The role of accessibility as enabling
participation is in line with recent ethical notions of interpreting ethics, which consider inter-
preting services to benefit not only the market but society as a whole (Boéri 2015, 40), and the
perspective of T/I ethics can include the social sphere along with the professional one (Drugan
and Tipton 2017). Accessibility applies to all of the roles of translation listed by Drugan and
Tipton (2017, 121): (1) increasing human understanding, (2) enabling communication, and (3)
fostering survival. In crises, the role of accessibility is often about survival: guaranteeing enough
communicative resources to cope during migration to a foreign land, for instance. In other cases,
like in the access to cultural products through media accessibility, the question is not immediately
fatal but more of increasing human understanding and enabling communication between people
so as to improve quality of life. Accessibility as an activity thus converges with the ethical goal of
“how translation can support better living together” (Drugan and Tipton 2017, 121).
We may now conclude that the striving for accessibility can be considered ethical in the first
place because it fosters the autonomy of groups that have been or are currently being margin-
alised in society. Accessibility is a way of improving the agency of people to meet the presup-
position of self-determination and to make them active members – and not just beneficiaries – of
society (see Eurich 2008; Persson et al. 2015). Other than this, if we are to accept the assump-
tion that accessibility involves everyone and that anyone can be “impaired” under some cir-
cumstances, then defining accessibility as something for “people with specific needs” could well
be replaced by communication for all for specific purposes (see Remael 2012; emphasis added).
Outside T/I, scholars note that defining accessibility seems to be a continuing challenge (Pers-
son et al. 2015). In reviewing international legislation and standards, Persson et al. (2015, 524)
suggest the following new definition of accessibility:
the extent to which products, systems, services, environments and facilities are able to be
used by a population with the widest range of characteristics and capabilities (e.g. physical,
cognitive, financial, social and cultural, etc.), to achieve a specified goal in a specified context.
In practice, the shift is already happening, as accessibility services are being used for various
purposes and not only by disabled people. Thus, instead of perceiving accessibility as yet another
cost, it can be seen as an opportunity to do things differently and as an effective way of working
together. Differences in ability may be considered opportunities rather than problems. Enabling
people to participate in culture, politics, and society creates new possibilities for societal devel-
opment, as previously unknown resources and expertise are discovered. These are important
societal issues that deserve more attention.

Public service interpreter; volunteering; non-professional translating and interpreting; human/
ethics issues in fully computerised/automated communication.
Note
1 https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1202 (27 Feb 2020).
480
References
Badía, Toni, and Anna Matamala. 2007. “La docencia en accesibilidad en los medios.” TRANS. Revista de
Traductología 11: 61–71.
Bassnett, Susan. 2014. Translation. London: Routledge.
Boéri, Julie. 2015. “Key Internal Players in the Development of the Interpreting Profession.” In The Rout-
ledge Handbook of Interpreting, edited by Holly Mikkelson, and Renée Jourdenais, 29–44. London:
Routledge.
Bosse, Ingo, and Uwe Hasebrink. 2016. Mediennutzung von Menschen mit Behinderungen, Research Report.
Berlin: Aktion Mensch e. V. Bonn and ALM GbR.
Braun, Sabine, and Kim Starr. 2019. “Finding the Right Words: Investigating Machine-generated Video
Description Quality using a Corpusbased Approach.” Journal of Audiovisual Translation 2, no 2: 11–35.
Córdoba Serrano, Maria-Sierra, and Oscar Diaz Fouce. 2018. “Building a Field: Translation Policies and
Minority Languages.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 251: 1–17.
De Boe, Esther. 2015. “The Influence of Governmental Policy on Public Service Interpreting in the Neth-
erlands.” International Journal of Translation and Interpreting Research 7, no. 3: 166–84.
De Shutter, Helder. 2017. “Translational Justice. Between Equality and Privation.” In Translation and Public
Policy Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Case Studies, edited by Gabriel González Núñez, and Reine Mey-
laerts, 15–31. London: Routledge.
Díaz-Cintas, Jorge, Pilar Orero, and Aline Remael. 2007. “Media for All: A Global Challenge.” In Media for
All: Subtitling for the Deaf, Audio Description, and Sign Language, edited by Jorge Diaz-Cintas, Pilar Orero,
and Aline Remael, 11–20. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Directive 2010/13 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 10 March 2010 on the coordination
of certain provisions laid down by law, regulation or administrative action in Member States concerning
the provision of audiovisual media services (Audiovisual Media Services Directive).
Directive 2016/2102 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 October 2016 on the accessibil-
ity of the websites and mobile applications of public sector bodies.
Directive 2019/882 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on the accessibility
requirements for products and services.
23, no. 2: 119–25.
Edwards, Rosalind, Bogusia Temple, and Claire Alexander. 2005. “Users’ Experiences of Interpreters: The
Critical Role of Trust.” Interpreting 7, no. 1: 77–95.
Eurich, Johannes. 2008. Gerechtigkeit für Menschen mit Behinderung. Ethische Reflexionen und sozialpolitische
Perspektiven. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.
European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). 2016. April 2016 Monthly Report. Accessed
May 20, 2020. https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/fra-august-2016-monthly-migration-
disability-focus_en.pdf
Fryer, Louise. 2016. An Introduction to Audio Description: A Practical Guide. London: Routledge.
Gambier, Yves. 2003. “Introduction.” The Translator, 9, no 2: 171–89.
Gambier, Yves. 2006. “Multimodality and audiovisual translation.” MuTra 2006–Audiovisual Translation
Scenarios: Conference Proceedings. Accessed January 31, 2019. www.euroconferences.info/proceedings/
2006_Proceedings/2006_proceedings.html
Gazzola, Michele, and Francoixe Grin. 2013. “Is ELF More Effective and Fair than Translation? An Evalu-
ation of the EU’s Multilingual Regime.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 23, no. 1: 93–107.
González Núñez, Gabriel. 2016. “On Translation Policy.” Target 28, no. 1: 87–109.
González Núñez, Gabriel, and Reine Meylaerts. 2017. Translation and Public Policy: Interdisciplinary Perspec-
tives and Case Studies. London: Routledge.
Greco, Gian Maria. 2016. “On Accessibility as a Human Right, with an Application to Media Acces-
sibility.” In Researching Audio Description, edited by Anna Matamala, and Pilar Orero, 20–32. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Hernández-Bartolomé, Ana Isabel, and Gustavo Mendiluce-Cabrera. 2004. “Audesc: Translating Images
into Words for Spanish Visually Impaired People.” META 49, no. 2: 264–77.
Hirvonen, Maija. 2014. “Multimodal Representation and Intermodal Similarity: Cues of Space in the
Audiodescription of Film.” PhD diss., University of Helsinki, Helsinki.
Hirvonen, Maija, and Tuija Kinnunen, eds. forthcoming in 2020. Saavutettava viestintä. Yhdenvertaista yhteiskun-
taa edistämässä [Accessible Communication: Building an Equal Society for All]. Helsinki: Gaudeamus.
481
Hirvonen, Maija, and Reinhold Schmitt. 2018. “Blindheit als Ressource: Zur professionellen Kompetenz
eines blinden Teammitglieds bei der gemeinsamen Anfertigung einer Audiodeskription.” Gesprächsfor-
schung 19: 449–77.
Jakobson, Roman. [1959] 2000. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In The Translation Studies Reader,
edited by Lawrence Venuti, 113–18. London: Routledge.
Janzen, Terry, and Donna Korpinski. 2005. “Ethics and Professionalism in Interpreting.” In Topics in Signed
Language Interpreting: Theory and Practice, edited by T. Janzen, 165–99. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Publishing Company.
Kopp, Ruth Katharina. 2012. “Skopos Theory and Ethics: A Paradox?” mTm 4: 145–66.
of Tampere.
Kulttuuria kaikille. 2019. Kulttuuria kaikille: Mitä on saavutettavuus? [Culture for all: What is accessibility?]
Accessed March 22, 2019. www.kulttuuriakaikille.fi/saavutettavuus_mita_on_saavutettavuus
Lahtinen, Riitta, and Russ Palmer. 2012. “Environmental Description.” In Emerging Topics in Translation,
edited by E. Perego, 105–14. Trieste: Edizioni Universita di Trieste.
Maaß, Christine, and Isabel Rink. 2019. Handbuch Barrierefreie Kommunikation. Berlin: Frank Timme.
Matamala, Anna, and Pilar Orero. 2016. “Audio Description and Accessibility Studies: A Work in Prog-
ress.” In Researching Audio Description, edited by Anna Matamala, and Pilar Orero, 15–18. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Mazur, Iwona. 2017. “Audio Description Crisis Points: The Idea of Common European Audio Descrip-
tion Guidelines Revisited.” In Fast-Forwarding with Audiovisual Translation, edited by Jorge Diaz-Cintas,
and Kristijan Nikolic, 127–40. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Mazur, Iwona, and Agnieszka Chmiel. 2012. “Towards Common European Audio Description Guide-
lines.” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 20: 5–23.
Meylaerts, Reine. 2011a. “Translation Policy.” In Handbook of Translation Studies 2, edited by Yves Gambier,
and Luc Van Doorslae, 163–8. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Meylaerts, Reine. 2011b. “Translational Justice in a Multilingual World: An Overview of Translational
Regimes.” Meta 56, no. 4: 743–57.
Mikaba, Paola. 2018. “Migrant Health Across Europe: Little Structural Policies, Many Encouraging
Practices.” European Web Site on Integration. Accessed January 31, 2019. https://ec.europa.eu/migrant-
integration/feature/migrant-health-across-europe
Mliczak, Renata. 2015. “Signing and Subtitling on Polish Television: A Case of (In)accessibility.” In Audio-
visual Translation in a Global Context, edited by Rocío Baños Piñero, and Jorge Díaz Cintas, 203–24.
Moser-Mercer, Barbara. 2015. “Interpreting in Conflict Zones.” In The Routledge Handbook of Interpreting,
edited by Holly Mikkelson, and Renee Jourdenais, 302–16. London: Routledge.
Mossop, Brian. 2016. “‘Intralingual Translation’: A Desirable Concept?” Across Languages and Cultures 17,
no. 1: 1–24.
Mowbray, Jacqueline. 2017. “Translation as Marginalisation? International Law, Translation and the Status
of Linguistic Minorities.” In Translation and Public Policy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Case Studies,
edited by Gabriel González Núñez, and Reine Meylaerts, 32–57. London: Routledge.
Nurminen, Mary, and Maarit Koponen. 2020. “Machine Translation and Fair Access to Information.”
Translation Spaces 9, no. 1: 150–69.
Perego, Elisa. 2017a. “Audio Description Norms in Italy: State of the Art and the Case of Senza Barriere.”
Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica della Traduzione 19: 207–28.
Perego, Elisa. 2017b. “Audio Description: A Laboratory for the Development of a New Professional Pro-
file.” Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica della Traduzione 19: 131–42.
Persson, Hans, Henrik Åhman, Alexander Arvei Yngling, and Jan Gulliksen. 2015. “Universal Design,
Inclusive Design, Accessible Design, Design for All: Different Concepts–One Goal? On the Concept
of Accessibility–Historical, Methodological and Philosophical Aspects.” Universal Access to Information
Society 14: 505–26.
Piller, Ingrid. 2016. Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. New York:
Pöchhacker, Franz. 2018. “Moving Boundaries in Interpreting.” In Moving Boundaries in Translation Studies,
edited by Helle Van Dam, Matilde Nisbeth Brøgger, and Karen Korning Zethsen, 45–63. Abingdon,
Oxon: Routledge.
482
Pokorn, Nike K., and Čibej Jaka. 2018. “Interpreting and Linguistic Inclusion: Friends or Foes? Results
from a Field Study.” The Translator 24, no. 2: 111–27.
Reagan, Timothy. 2019. “Language Policies, Language Rights, and Sign Languages: A Critique of Disability-
Based Approaches.” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 16, no. 4: 271–92.
Remael, Aline. 2012. “Media Accessibility.” In Handbook of Translation Studies Online, 95–101. John
Benjamins.
Remael, Aline, Nina Reviers, and Gert Vercauteren. 2015. Pictures Painted in Words: ADLAB Audio Descrip-
tion Guidelines. Trieste: Edizioni Universita di Trieste.
Romero-Fresco, Pablo. 2015. The Reception of Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Europe. Bern:
Peter Lang.
Sanz-Moreno, Raquel. 2017. “La (auto)censura en audiodescripción. El sexo silenciado.” Parallèles 29, no.
2: 46–63.
Schembri, Adam, and Ceil Lucas. 2015. Sociolinguistics and Deaf Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Shaw, Sherry. 2014. “Preparing Interpreting Students to be Allies in the Deaf Community.” The Interpreters’
Newsletter 19: 1–11.
Spolsky, Bernard. 2003. Language Policy, 113–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Suojanen, Tytti, Kaisa Koskinen, and Tiina Tuominen. 2015. User-Centered Translation. London: Routledge.
Szarkowska, Agnieszka, Izabel Krejtz, Zuzanna Kłyszejko, and Anna Wieczorek. 2011. “Verbatim, Stan-
dard, or Edited? Reading Patterns of Different Captioning Styles Among Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and
Hearing Viewers.” American Annals of the Deaf 156, no 4: 363–78.
Tiittula, Liisa, Mikko Kurimo, Andre Mansikkaniemi, and Päivi Rainò. 2018. “The Quality of Subtitling
for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing from the Perspective of Different Target Groups.” MikaEL Kään-
tämisen ja tulkkauksen tutkimuksen verkkojulkaisu 11: 20–34.
United Nations, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). 2006.
United Nations, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). 1948.
Van Parijs, Philippe. 2011. Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wehrens, Bernhard M. 1991. “European Policy for the Integration of Disabled People into Cultural Life.”
In Museums without Barriers: A New Deal for the Disabled People, edited by F. d. F. and ICOM, 3–6.
London: Routledge.
Further reading
23, no. 2: 119–25.
This is the introductory article to the Special Issue “Translation, Ethics and Social Responsibility” of
The Translator and gives new insight to the ethical models that Translation Studies are or should be
dealing with.
Persson, Hans, Henrik Åhman, Alexander Arvei Yngling, and Jan Gulliksen. 2015. “Universal Design,
Inclusive Design, Accessible Design, Design for All: Different Concepts–One Goal? On the Concept
of Accessibility–Historical, Methodological and Philosophical Aspects.” Universal Access to Information
Society 14: 505–26.
An extensive paper on the notion of accessibility, explaining its conceptual, historical, and philosophical
development in the field of ICT.
Greco, Gian Maria. 2016. “On Accessibility as a Human Right, with an Application to Media Acces-
sibility.” In Researching Audio Description, edited by Anna Matamala and Pilar Orero, 20–32. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
This book chapter is a good analysis of the concept of human right in the context of accessibility.
Maaß, Christiane, and Isabel Rink. 2019. Handbuch Barrierefreie Kommunikation. Berlin: Frank Timme.
The most comprehensive work on the accessibility of communication to date.
483
Index
Note: page numbers in italics indicate figures.

abandoning instrumentalism 134 algorithm bias 272
abusive fidelity 16, 92 Althusser, Louis 99
accessibility: characterising translation 471; Altinay, Aysegül 127n11
dimensions of 470–1; historical trajectory Alvarez, Sonia E. 127n11
473–4; human rights as basis 472 Alvstad, Cecilia 7, 180
accessibility and linguistics rights 470–2, Amazon Translate 282
479–80; core issues 474–6; culture and 477; American Translators Association (ATA) 197, 199,
distribution of resources 478; emerging issues 200, 302
477–9; historical trajectory 472–4; human Amnesty International 234, 253
rights as the basis 472; information access Andersen, Hans Christian 461
and 477–8; legislation and policies 478; norms Angelelli, Claudia V. 8, 383
in 475; professionalisation 474–5; quality in anti-humanism 280
475–6; role expectations 476; service ethics Anzaldúa, Gloria 120, 123, 125
478–9 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 104, 105
accountability 343–4 Apple 285
accuracy, ethical principle of 304–5 applied ethics 3; definition 212
action, concept of 61 Aquinas, Thomas 93
activist translation and interpreting 245–6, Arab Spring 255
256–7, 433; core issues 248–52; current Archimedean Oath 19
debates 252–6; ethics doxa (recognition) Aristotle 2, 3, 14, 17, 19, 22, 93
252–4; ethics heterodoxa (political activism) Arrojo, Rosemary 91–2, 353
254–6; ethics of organisation 250–2; ethics of Ars Poetica (Horace) 15
positionality 248–50; expertise vs grassroots artificial intelligence (AI) 262, 281; in Chinese
knowledge 250–2; historical trajectory 246–8; translation 33–4; conference interpreter ethics
impartiality and expertise in volunteer services 205–6; future of translation work 331–2; see also
252–4; impartiality vs engagement 248–50; translation technology and ethics
intervention and prefiguration 254–6 Association of Journalists 49
Adballah, Kristiina 172 Association of Language Mediators 49
ad-hocracies, definition 234 Association of Visual Language Interpreters of
ADLAB project (Audio Description: Lifelong Canada (AVLIC) 197, 199, 200
Access for the Blind) 475 ATA (American Translators Association) 197,
Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain) 461 199, 200
advertising industry, ethics education 347 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 448
advocacy, definition 217 Auschwitz 415
advocates, interpreters as 217–19 AUSIT (Australian Institute of Interpreters and
After Babel (Steiner) 182 Translators) 197, 199, 200
agency 340 Austen, Jane 14, 110
Ahlqvist, August 108, 111n2 Australian Defence Science and Technology
Ahmad, Aijaz 111n1 Organization (DSTO) 286
AIIC (International Association of Conference Australian Institute of Interpreters and
Interpreters) 17, 197, 200, 249, 299, 404, 416 Translators 274
484
Index
autonomy: moral and professional 310–11; Buddhism 30, 36n5, 448, 454
socio-professional 311–12 Buddhist Text Translation Society 443
AVLIC (Association of Visual Language Bulgarian Communist Party 50
Interpreters of Canada) 197, 199, 200 Bulgarian Translators’ Union (BTU) 50
burnout: ethical stress 423–5; process model
Babels 230, 234, 247, 249–52, 254–6 of conditions for 424
Bachleitner, Norbert 465 Butler, Judith 123, 124
Badiou, Alain 134
Baer, Brian James 6, 8, 42, 365 Caesar, Julius 298
Baidu Translate 270 Callon, Michel 104
Baixauli-Olmos, Lluís 8, 297 Canadian School of Feminist Translation 115–18
Baldwin, Richard 281–2, 285, 287 Catford, John 59
Balibar, Etienne 73 Catholicism 26
Basalamah, Salah 7, 227 censorship, in literary translation 460–1
Bassnett, Susan 288 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 289
Bastos, Augusto Roa 72 Chamberlain, Lori 115–16, 132
Batiushkov, Dmitrii 43 Chaosmosis (Guattari) 289
Baudelaire, Charles 187 Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) 168
Baynham, Mike 281 Chen, Jiaying 25
Bediako, Kwame 453 cheng (sincerity) 28; value of 25
Belmont Report 369 Chesterman, Andrew 6, 13, 167, 175, 433–4, 437
Benjamin, Walter 72, 89 Cheung, Martha 30
Bentham, Jeremy 22, 203 child language brokering (CLB) 383, 392–3;
Berman, Antoine 5, 7, 32, 72, 84, 100, 142–3, access to information and accountability
148–9, 153, 168; ethics of Meschonnic and 389; appropriateness 390; as child translator/
74–83; historical trajectory of 72–4 interpreter 383–4; education of gifted bilinguals
Berner, Sam 274 387–8; emerging issues 391–2; ethical dilemmas
Berry, Thomas 290 surrounding 391–2; ethics and 389; as field
Beyond Ambivalence (Koskinen) 131 of study 384; historical background 385–9;
Bhabha, Homi 109–10 individual and societal bi-/multilingualism
Bible 116, 148, 149, 284, 446; “Cotton Patch 386–7; issue of intercultural/linguistic
Version” of 17; Hebrew 148–9, 446; New communicative needs 384–5; role reversal and
International Version Inclusive Language its implications 390, 391; with translation and
Edition 454; New International Version interpreting studies 388–9
Inclusive Language Edition 454; New Revised child language brokers (CLBs) term 383
Standard Version 455n7; New Testament Children’s Society in the UK 390
445–6, 452; Old Testament 2, 73; Slovak Chinese tradition of translation ethics 25–6,
translation of 450; translation of 15 35–6; challenges posed by MT and AI 33–4;
big data 347 Confucian ethics 25–6; convergence of ethics
bilingualism 386–7; with diglossia 387; education and politics 31–2; emerging issues 33–5; ethics
of gifted bilinguals 387–8; see also child of difference 32–3; ethics of reciprocity and
language brokering (CLB) outgoing translation 34–5; ethics of translation
Bindung 356–7 variation 35; faithfulness 28–30; history of
Blinder, Alan 287 26–8; professionalization of translation 33–4;
Boéri, Julie 7, 245 responsibility and morality 30–1
Bogic, Anna 462 Christian, Brian 286
Bologna Process 352 Christianity 2, 9n1, 14, 100, 451, 454; African
Bolshevik Revolution 42 452–3; conversion to 100, 445; dominant
Boulanger, Pascale Piers 74 religion of West 101; missionary translations
Bowker, Lynne 7, 262 of Bible 449–53; World 449, 452
Bradley, A. C. 102 Chu, Chi Yu 28–9
Braidotti, Rosi 280 Chukovsky, Kornei 43
British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) 452 citizen translation 238
Brooke, Stopford 102 Clark, Katerina 47
Brothers Seven, The (Robinson) 108–9 Clifford, James 366
Bruni, Leonardo 156 climate change 289
Buber, Martin 93, 148, 150, 446 climate justice 289
485
Index
code of ethics 300; see ethics codes for contractual ethics 21, 436
interpreters/translators Contra Instrumentalism (Venuti) 135
Code of Hammurabi 2 conventions, translational 64
codes see ethics codes for interpreters/translators cooperation: constructive principle of 67–8;
Codex Sinaiticus 452 professional translator ethics 170–1; translational
cognitive dissonance theory, professional action 63
dissonance 418–20 Cordingley, Anthony 463
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 352 Cortana 282
collaboration: volunteer interpreting/translation Cortés, Hernán 101
235–6; see also literary translator ethics Crenshaw, Kimberlé 118
Collaborative Translation (Cordingley and Frigau) 463 crisis situations 399; see also conflict and crisis
Collins, Patricia Hill 118, 127n4 translating and interpreting
Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) 373 critical pedagogy 92
Common Rule 369 Cronin, Michael 7, 68, 155, 238, 279, 327, 330,
Common Sense Advisory 266 333, 401
communication facilitators, interpreters as 216–17 Cross-border Healthcare in EU 385
Communist Party 48–9 Crots, Elizabeth 171, 172, 175
community ethics, concept of 434 crowdsourcing: translation technology 267;
community interpreting 432–3 volunteer interpreting/translation 235–6
competence, concept of 361 cultural brokers, interpreters as 216–17
competitiveness, 352 cultural mediation, ethics of volunteer 237
computer-aided interpreting (CAI), translation Cultural Revolution 27, 32
technology 274 cultural translation, Bhabha’s notion of 109–10
computer-aided translation (CAT) 262, 263–5 culture, concept of 61–2
Conférence Internationale Permanente d’Instituts curriculum design, ethics of 360–1
Universitaires de Traducteurs et Interprètes cybersecurity, education ethics 347
(CIUTI) 339, 340, 342, 346
conference interpreter ethics 195–6, 207–8; Dahl, Roald 188
codification vs real life 202–3; competence Dalbernet, Jean 59
198; confidentiality 199–200; consecutive Dalit theology 454, 455n8
interpreting (CI) 195, 196; core issues 198–203; Dam, Helle V. 166
emerging issues 204–7; ethics education in Darbelnet, Jean 72
training 204–5, 208; fidelity 200–1; integrity data extractivism 284–5
199; location on site 207; machine/AI Davis, Kathy 127n11
translation/interpreting 205–6; neutrality de Beauvoir, Simone 116, 462
201–2; previous research on 196–8; SI Deckert, Günter 415
(simultaneous interpreting) 195–6; SI Declaration of Helsinki 368
collaboration and partnership 206–7 deconstruction, Derrida’s project of 87–8, 92–3
confidentiality, ethical principle of 306–7 Deep Learning 282, 284
conflict, definition 398–9 Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency
conflict and crisis translating and interpreting (DARPA) 285, 286
398–9, 408–9; in armed conflicts 402–3; core Defence Science and Technology Organization
issues 402–6; developing code of ethics for (DSTO) 286
war translators/interpreters 403–5; gender Deleuze, Gilles 73, 104
issues in 407; historical trajectory 399–402; Delgado Luchner, Carmen 7, 245
in humanitarian crisis zones 408; institutional de Lima Costa, Claudia 127n11
affiliations and training 406; in mass migration de Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne 117
406–7; neutrality of interpreter or translator democratic translation culture, principles of
400–1; new debates in 406–8; training construction of 67–8
professional/non-professional translators/ deontology 3–4
interpreters 403 Derrida, Jacques 4, 7, 72, 87; deconstruction
Confucian ethics, Chinese translation 25–6, 36n3 project 87–8, 92–3; historical trajectory of
Confucianism 26, 36n2 thought 89–91
consecutive interpreting (CI), conference Desai, Anita 110
interpreter ethics 195, 196 Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) 181, 183–5;
continuing professional development (CPD), literary translation 181, 183–5, 190
translation industry 327–8 descriptivism, ethics codes 312–13
486
Index
Devi, Mahasweta 119, 122 issues 307–13; historical trajectory of codes

dialogue: philosophy of 148–50; term 149; 298–300; impartiality as 305–6; moral and
translator ethics 158 professional autonomy 310–11; socio-
Dickens, Charles 110 professional autonomy 311–12; typologies
disability-based rights see accessibility and of 301–4
linguistics rights ethics in Berman and Meschonnic 72, 83–4;
Dizdar, Dilek 8, 351 feeling of foreignness 75–6; fidelity 77, 78;
Doerr, Nicole 127n13 historical trajectory 72–4; language translation
Dolet, Étienne 15 80–2; notions of good 74–5; rhythm in
Dollman, Eugen 156 language 82–3; translating position and
Dorman, Oleg 52 project 77–8
Drugan, Joanna 175–6 ethics in translator/interpreter education:
Dutrait, Noël 29 accountability 343–4; agency 340; case studies
in 341, 345–6; core issues 342–6; cybersecurity
Eastern European countries, translation 347; emerging issues 346–8; equivalence 339;
theories 45–6 ethical reasoning 341; ethical relativity 345;
East European Politics & Societies and Cultures fidelity 339; human rights issues 346; ideology
(journal) 368 343; language and culture 343; loyalty 339;
eBay 279 media and advertising industry 347; neutrality
ecology, constructive principle of 67–8 339, 343–4; overview of 338–42, 348; politics
ECOS 230, 245, 247, 249, 255 and 344–5; professional organizations 342–3;
education: conference interpreter training 204–5, reflexivity 341; responsibility 341, 343–4;
208; teaching ethics in translation technology social responsibility 341–2; socio-political and
273; see also ethics in translator/interpreter economic developments 340–1; washback effect
education; ethics of translator/interpreter on 339
education ethics of difference: in Chinese translation 32–3;
Eker Roditakis, Arzu 462 domestication and foreignization 136–40;
Eliot, T. S. 156 emerging issues 142–4; ethics of location 134,
EMCI (European Masters in Conference 141–4; fluency and invisibility 136–7, 139;
Interpreting) 204 historical trajectory of 132–5; importance of
employability 352 34; issues and topics of 135–42; Venuti and
empowerment 88 131–2
Enlightenment: narrative 89; thinkers 14 ethics of foreignization 133
environmental sustainability: translation industry ethics of location 134, 141–4
330–1 ethics of representation, Chinese translation 28–9
equivalence, phenomenon of 339 ethics of translator/interpreter education 351,
Ergun, Emek 7, 114 361–2; between socialization and self-formation
Ethical Code of Translators, The (project) 51 355–7; core issues in 355–8; curriculum design
ethical concepts and theories 212 360–1; ethics of T& educational institution
ethical reasoning, public service interpreting (PSI) 351–2; emerging issues 358–61; ethics of
220–1 T&I educational practices 352–5; historical
ethical stress 415, 425–6; defining 416–18; trajectory 351–5; professional 358–60;
emerging issues 418–25; factors influencing responsibility and ethics “to come” 357–8
418; historical trajectory 416–18; interpreting Etkind, Efim 44
and translating as stressful professions 416; European Accessibility Act 474
model of conditions leading to trauma and European Commission 166, 321
burnout 424; moral injury 420–3; professional European Journal of Applied Linguistics (journal) 389
dissonance 418–20; vicarious trauma and European Master’s in Conference Interpreting
burnout 423–5 (EMCI) 339, 340, 346
ethics 1; as moral philosophy 3; professional codes European Master’s in Translation (EMT) 339,
of 17; term 2; tripartite division of 3 340, 346
Ethics and Politics of Translating (Meschonnic) 181 European Union 202, 321, 326, 370, 472, 474, 478
ethics codes for interpreters/translators 297–8; Experience of the Foreign, The (Berman) 76, 78
accuracy as 304–5; confidentiality as 306–7;
contents of 304–7; core issues 300–7; fabrication 374
critical assessment 308–10; descriptivism vs Facebook 174, 230, 285, 371, 434
prescriptivism in study of 312–13; emerging fairness, public service interpreting (PSI) 219
487
Index
falsification 374 Gorky, Maxim 43

Fan, Jiayang 78 Gouanvic, Jean-Marc 187
Fan, Shouyi 26 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck) 78, 187
Federov, Andrei 43, 44, 153 Green Bible, The by Harper Bible 455n7
feeling of foreignness 75–6 Gross, Marina 156, 199–200, 203
feminist translation ethics 114–15, 125–6; Groys, Boris 109
Canadian school 115–18; core issues 118–20; Gu, Zhengkun 31
emerging issues 120–5; historical trajectory of Guattari, Félix 107–8, 289
115–18; Third World feminism 118–20 Gujarati texts, translation 110–11
fidelity 339, 354; conference interpreter 200–1; Gumilev, Lev 43
virtue ethics 15–18 Gürçağlar, Sehnaz Tahir 448
Finnish Pentecostal church 219
first aid see linguistic first aid Habermas, Jürgen 238
FIT (International Federation of Translators) 16, Handbook of Translation Studies Online 473
50, 51, 299, 325, 327, 404 Harari, Yuval Noah 290–1
Floros, Georgios 8, 338 Haraway, Donna 126
Flotow, Luise von 115, 116 Hardy, Thomas 13
fluency 136 Hart, Roger 101
Foucault, Michel 73, 104, 150 Harvey, Keith 118
Franklin, Benjamin 14 healthcare interpreting, advocating social justice 218
freedom, concept of 61 Hebenstreit, Gernot 6, 58
Freely, Maureen 463 Hebrew Bible 148, 149, 446
Friedrich Wilhelm University 352 Heidi (Spyri) 461
Frigau, Céline 463 Herbert, Jean 196
Fu, Lei 29 Hermans, Theo 104
functional translation 58; emerging issues 66–8; hermeneutic theory of interpretation, Ricoeur’s
ethical issues in Holz-Mänttäri’s work 62–3; 87–8
ethical issues in Vermeer’s work 60–2; historical Hersant, Patrick 463
trajectory 58–60; Skopos theory and loyalty Heyvaert, S. 73
63–6; towards a democratic culture 67–8; Hieronymic Oath 6, 18–20, 168, 170, 433, 437,
translation cultures 66–7 438, 471; proposal for 19, 68
Hieronymus 19
Gambier, Yves 473 Hinduism 444, 445
Gao, Xingjian 189 Hippocratic Oath 19, 298, 437
Garneau, Michel 77 Hirvonen, Maija 8, 470
Garrett, Don 84n3 HIV prevention 375
Geertz, Clifford 104, 105 Holocaust: denying the 343; survivors 190–1
Geier, Svetlana 52 Holz-Mänttäri, Justa 6, 58
gender essentialism 127n3 Homer 14
gender issues, in translating and interpreting 407 Horace 15
General Data Protection Regulation 370 hostility 94
genre 344–5 House, Juliane 59
German Democratic Republic (GDR) 42, 45; see Huang, Zhonglian 35
also socialist translation ethics Hubscher-Davidson, Séverine 8, 415
German Romanticism 134 humanitarian crisis zones, translating and
German Romantics 72–3 interpreting 408
Gibbons, John 291 humanness, definition of 286–8
global civic consciousness, volunteer interpreting/ Human Rights Watch 290
translation 237–8 Hume, David 27
global justice movement 247 Huxley, Thomas H. 29
Global Voices 283
globotics 281–3 identity theft 214, 331
Godard, Barbara 73, 74, 75, 115, 116 ideological conflict, research and 366
Goldblatt, Howard 34 Igarashi, Hitoshi 20
Goldblatt, Michael 285 Imaginary Maps (Devi) 119, 122
Google 266, 279, 282, 285 impartiality: ethical principle of 305–6; principle
Google Translate 262, 270, 273, 283, 284 of 402
488
Index
Imperial Royal Academy for Oriental Languages 352 Kantian ethics 76, 202
Inbox Translation 173 Kashkin, Ivan 44
Indignados 253 Keating, AnaLouise 124, 125, 127n11
Infante, Guillermo Cabrera 117, 463 King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy
Inghilleri, Moira 36, 93 Qur’an 443
Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) Kinnunen, Tuija 8, 470
167–8 Kivi, Aleksis 108–9, 111n2
institutions: translator and interpreter education Kolbert, Elisabeth 290
351–2; see also ethics of translator/interpreter Koller, Werner 59
education Koran 15
intention, concept of author’s 65 Koskinen, Kaisa 1, 7, 87, 131, 166
International Association of Conference Kothari, Rita 110, 111
Interpreters (AIIC) 17, 197, 200, 249, 299, Krueger, Alan 287
404, 416 Kruger, Haidee 171, 172, 175
International Federation of Translators (FIT) 16, Kurzweil, Ray 279
50, 51, 299, 325, 327, 404
International Labour Organisation 327 Laaksonen, Jenni 7, 131
International Medical Interpreters Association labour extractivism 283–4
Code of Ethics 168 Lacan, Jacques 73
international professional associations 302 Lagerlóf, Selma 462
International Tribunals for Rwanda (ICTR) 421 Lambert, Joseph 7, 165
International Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia Lan, Hongjun 29
(ICTY) 421 language contact 386–7; see also child language
interpreter agency: degrees of 215–19; brokering (CLB)
interpreters as advocates 217–19; interpreters as language service providers (LSPs) 321, 323, 328;
communication facilitators and cultural brokers internal and external stakeholders in 324
216–17; non-involvement 215–16 Latour, Bruno 104, 290
Interpreter and Translator Trainer, The (journal) 340, 403 Läubli, Samuel 174
Interpreter’s Handbook, The (Herbert) 196 Lawrence, D. H. 187
interpreting see public service interpreting (PSI) Laxness, Halldór Kiljan 462
Interpreting Studies (IS) 213 Laygues, Arnaud 93, 148–9, 463
intertextual coherence 59 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 137
invisibility, critiques of 150–1 Lee, Tong King 281
InZone 408 Lefevere, André 459–60
Irigaray, Luce 73 Leninism see Marxism/Leninism
Islam 2, 9n1 Leuchter, Frederic 415
Israel, Hephzibah 9, 441 Levin, Iurii 44
iTranslate Voice 282 Levinas, Emmanuel 32, 148–9, 358
Levine, Suzanne Jill 117, 132, 463
Jacobsen, Annie 285 Levý, Jíří 45
Jacquemond, Richard 100, 132 Lewis, Philip 92, 133
Jäger, Gert 45 LGBTQI 126n1
Jakobson, Roman 89 LGBTQ spectrum 150
Jameson, Fredric 111n1 LGBT rights movement 367
Jansen, Hanne 461 Liang, Qichao 26, 32
Jendreyko, Vadim 52 Liang, Shuming 25
Jenner, Judy 199 liberation theology 455n8
Jervolino, Domenico 93 Lilova, Anna 50
Jones, Francis 92, 418–19 Lin, Shu 32
Jordan, Clarence 17 Lin, Yutang 28
Judaism 2, 9n1 Lindgren, Astrid 188
junzi, concept of 25 linguistic first aid 431–2, 437–8; activist translation
Juva, Kersti 18 433; communitarian approach 434–5; concept
of 431; core issues 433–6; emerging issues
Kade, Otto 45, 59, 153 436–7; historical trajectory 432–3; individualist
Kang, Han 78 approach 434, 435; social responsibility 436–7;
Kang, Ji-Hae 458 see also accessibility and linguistics rights
489
Index
linguistic hospitality 124; ethics of 90; notion of Marxism/Leninism 42, 44–5, 47, 52
93–4, 95; translation facilitating 91 Massardier-Kenney, Françoise 6–7, 72, 73
linguistic rights: as accessibility concept 471; mass migration, translating and interpreting 406–7
historical trajectory 472–3; see also accessibility master of translation (MT) in China 33–4
and linguistics rights Matson, Alex 462
LinkedIn 174 media industry, ethics education 347
Linna, Väinö 462 Mellinger, Christopher D. 8, 365
literary translator ethics 180–1, 191–2; censorship Memmi, Albert 99
460–1; collaboration and control 458–9, Meschonnic, Henri 5, 7, 72, 84, 84n1, 149,
465–6; collaboration between translators 441; ethics of Berman and 74–83; historical
463–4; complex translation situations trajectory of 72–4; poetic approach to literary
187–90; core issues 181–90, 460–4; critique translation 181–2
of translation sociology 187; Descriptive metaethics 3, 4; definition 212
Translation Studies (DTS) 181, 183–5, 190; Michael Henry Heim Translation Prize 368
emerging issues 190–1, 465; ethics of difference Michon, Pascal 82
(Venuti) 185–6; hermeneutic approach Microsoft 285
(Steiner) 182–3; hierarchies of power 186–7; Middlebury Institute of International Studies at
historical trajectory 181, 459–60; indirect Monterey (MIIS) 204
translation 189–90; influence of source- minoritizing 138, 143
text authors 462–3; machine translation and Moorkens, Joss 8, 320
273–4; multiple translatorship 461–2; poetic Morales, Rosario 125
approach (Meschonnic) 181–2; retranslation moral injury, ethical stress 420–3
188; translators and/as revisers 464; unstable morality in Chinese translation 30–1
originals 187–8 Mosse, George 105
Liu, Miqing 31 motivation, volunteer interpreting/translation 232
Liu, Yameng 32 Mounin, Georges 72
Ljudskanov, Aleksandăr 45 multilingualism 386–7; see also child language
Lomas, Laura 110 brokering (CLB)
Lorde, Audre 126 Munday, Jeremy 464
loyalty: concept of 58; constructive principle of
67–8; Skopos theory 63–6, 69; virtue of 17 NAATI (National Accreditation Authority for
Lu, Xun 26, 27 Translators and Interpreters) 204
Lugones, María 120–2 Nagar, Richa 121–2, 124, 127n11
Lungina, Lilianna 52 Nairobi Declaration 299
Luo, Xinzhang 29 National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and
Luther, Martin 445 Translators 169
Lyotard, Jean-François 73, 89 National Socialism 105
natural translator: term 384; see also child language
Ma, Jianzhong 31 brokering (CLB)
McDonough-Dolmaya, Julie 170, 174 Naumann, Peter 249
machine bias 272 Navalar, Arumuka 445, 447
machine translation (MT) 262, 264–5, 322; negative mediation 402
conference interpreter ethics 205–6; see also neo-tribalism 147, 153
translation technology and ethics Neubert, Albrecht 45, 59
MacIntyre, Alasdair 332 neural machine translation (NMT) 264–5,
McKinsey Global Institute 287 268–70, 272–3
McKinsey Report 287 neutrality 339, 341; in conflict and crisis situations
Maier, Carol 117 400–1; definition 405; notion of 343–4;
Maitland Sarah 93, 95 principle of 400, 402; professional translator
Majević, Marko 84n1 ethics 171–3
manipulation, descriptive translation 183–4 Newmark, Peter 59
Manipulation of Literature, The (Hermans) 459 New Revised Standard Version Bible 455n7
Marcel, Gabriel 93, 148 Newsweek (magazine) 458
Marr, Nikolai 44 New Zealand Society of Translators and
Marshak, Samuil 44 Interpreters 274
Martzloff, Jean-Claude 101 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 3, 14
Marxism 155 Nida, Eugene 59, 450–1, 453, 455n5
490
Index
non-professional: defining 228; interpreting/ Pound, Ezra 156

translation (NPIT) 227, 231 power, research and 366–8
Nord, Christiane 6, 58, 69, 153, 169, 460 power disparities, translation industry 324–5
normative ethics 3 practice, definition of 332
Nuremberg Code 368, 376n1 prefigurative translation and interpreting 255–6
prescriptivism, ethics codes 312–13
occupation, professional translator 166–7 principle of party spirit, translation view 44, 47–8
Occupy Wall Street 253, 255 Probirskaja, Svetlana 8, 431
O’Connell, Mark 279, 286 professional acculturation 355
October Revolution 42 professional codes of ethics 17
On Translator Ethics (Pym) 131 professional dissonance, ethical stress 418–20
organization, activist translation and interpreting professionalisation: accessibility and linguistics
250–2 rights 474–5; in Chinese translation 33–4;
Orrego-Carmona, David 174 translator/interpreter education 358–60
Ost, François 93 professionalism 197; phronesis 359–60
Otsuji, Emi 281 professionality 63
ownership of resources, translation industry 325–6 professional responsibility 300
professional translation/interpreting (PIT) 227
Pacheco Aguilar, Raquel 8, 351 professional translator: defining 166–7;
Paloposki, Outi 9, 458 development 177n1
Pamuk, Orhan 462–3 professional translator ethics 165, 176–7; agency
Parshley, Howard 462 and expanded responsibility 175–6; basis
partisanship, translation view 44, 47–8 of 167–9; consolidating concerns, 173–4;
patronage 285–6 cooperation and responsibility 170–1; core
Peng, Ping 27 issues 170–4; emerging issues 175–6; historical
Pennycook, Alastair 281 trajectory of 167–70; moving beyond the text
People’s Commissariat for Education 46 169–70; neutrality and personal ethics 171–3
People’s Republic of China 27, 32 Professional Union of Interpreters and Translators 51
personal ethics, professional translator ethics 171–3 Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language
phronesis, professional 359–60 Translation (Kay) 332
Pickford, Susan 465 Prunč, Erich 5, 6, 66–7, 69
Pike, Kenneth 443 public service interpreting (PSI) 211–12, 221–2;
plagiarism 374 codes clashing with reality 213–15; degrees of
Plato 2, 6, 14, 15 interpreter agency 215–19; emerging issues
Pöllabauer, Sonja 211 221–2; ethical reasoning 220–1; interpreter
Pokorn, Nike K. 1, 7, 9, 87, 458 involvement 216–19; interpreter non-
Polanyi, Karl 281 involvement 215–16; interpreters as advocates
political activism see activist translation and 217–19; interpreters as communication
interpreting facilitators and cultural brokers 216–17; models
politics and ethics: in Chinese translation 31–2; of ethical decision-making 220; research on
volunteer interpreting/translation 233–5 interpreters’ decision-making 221; social
Pöllabauer, Sonja 7 justice and fairness 219; theoretical approaches
Popkin, Richard H. 84n2 212–13; trajectory of 212
Popovič, Anton 45 Putin, Vladimir 156, 199, 307
Porter, Andrew 449, 455n3 Pym, Anthony 5, 15, 21, 73, 109, 131, 147, 168,
positionality: activist translation and interpreting 169, 170–1
248–50; concept of 249
Posner, Eric 284 Qi, Lintao 464
postcolonial translation ethics 99–100; emerging Qian, Zhongshu 29
issues 109–11; ethics and respectability Quebec sovereignty movement 116
105–9; ethics of difference 102–5; historical Queer Translation Collective 119
trajectory of 100–2; transmajoritization and Quran 116, 442, 443, 446, 448, 451
transminoritization 105–9
posthumanism and translation 279–81, 290–1; data radical activism 248
extractivism 284–5; definition of humanness Radical Markets (Posner and Weyl) 284
286–8; globotics 281–3; labour extractivism Radó, György 50
283–4; patronage 285–6; transversality 289–90 Rafael, Vicente 100, 286
491
Index
Ramayana, Hindu text 444 Schäffner, Christina 6, 42, 167

reciprocity, ethics of in Chinese translation 34–5 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 75–6, 90, 102,
reflexivity 341 105–7, 134
Reiß, Katharina 59 secondary trauma syndrome 423–5
religion see sacred texts translating Second Sex, The (de Beauvoir) 116
Remael, Aline 473 Selim, Samah 250
remote intelligence (RI) 281 Sengupta, Mahasweta 102–4
remote interpreting (RI) 416 Sermon, Ilya 44
ren (benevolence) value of 25 Serre, Michel 289
Ren, Wen 7, 34, 195 Seven Brothers (Impola) 108
representation 339 Shen, Lianyuan 32
research ethics in translation/interpreting 365–6; Shi, Dao’an 29
analyzing 372; conducting 370–1; core issues Shi, Yancong 30
369–75; disseminating, reviewing and citing shuzhong (reciprocity and faithfulness), value of 25
373–5; emerging topics 375–6; planning 369–70; Simon, Sherry 115, 132
reporting 372–3; theoretical considerations simultaneous interpreting (SI): collaboration and
366–9; translation, language and power 366–9 partnership in 206–7; conference interpreter
responsibility 88, 341, 343–4, 354; in Chinese ethics 195–6
translation 30–1; concept of 61; professional Singh, Nikky 447
translator ethics 170–1, 175–6; translator/ Skopos: rule 65; term 21, 59; theory 58, 68, 148
interpreter education 357–8 Skype 285
Rethinking Translation (Venuti) 132 Skype Translator 282
retranslation: literary 188; term 464 Smith, Deborah 78
Return to Ethics (Pym) 195 Socialist Realism 43, 46–7
Ricci, Matteo 101 socialist translation ethics: censorship and
Ricœur, Paul 5, 7, 73, 87, 124, 125, 237; self-censorship 44–5, 52, 53; emerging
hermeneutic theory of interpretation 87–8; issues 50–2; Marxism/Leninism 42, 44–5,
historical trajectory of thought 89–91; as 47, 52; party spirit or partisanship 44,
post-structuralist 90 47–8; political-ideological position 48–9;
Right and the Good, The (Ross) 76 professional associations 49–50; researching
Ringmar, Martin 462 42–6; responsibility 46–7; translators as
Robinson, Douglas 7, 99 interventionists 42, 44, 53
Robinson, Mary 289 Socialist Unity Party of Germany 49
robotic process automation (RPA) 287 socialization, self-formation and 355–7
Rocchi, Marta 8, 320 social justice 218; public service interpreting
Rosetta Foundation 230, 232 (PSI) 219
Ross, David 79 social responsibility: ethics education 341–2;
Ross, W. D. 76 linguistic first aid and 436–7; translation
Rothenstein, William 102 technology 272–3
rule-based machine translation (RBMT) 264 Socrates 2, 14
Rushdie, Salman 20, 110 Solum, Kristina 463
Soviet Union 27, 42–52; see also socialist
sacred texts translating 441–2; Christianity 449–53; translation ethics
institutions and 447–8; missionary translations Soviet Union of Writers 43
of Bible 449–53; perception of translator’s Spinoza, Benedict de 80
audience 445–6; Ramayana 444; retranslating Spinoza’s Ethics 79, 80
446–7; scholarly debates on 442; Textus Receptus Spivak, Gayatri 103, 105, 119, 122
(TR) 452; translation agents 443–9; translators Spurlin, William J. 121
in religious community 444 Spyri, Johanna 461
Said, Edward 366, 367 statistical machine translation (SMT) 264, 265, 268
Salka Valka (Laxness) 462 statistical packages 373
Sangtin Writers 122 Steinbeck, John 78, 187
Sanneh, Lamin 452–3 Steiner, George 101; hermeneutic approach to
Santaemilia, José 118 literary translation 182–3
Satanic Verses (Rushdie) 20, 110 stress: ethics-related 417; see also ethical stress
SayHi 282 Strindberg’s Giftas 185, 188
Scandals of Translation, The (Venuti) 73, 134, 138 Sun, Zhili 31
492
Index
sustaining employment, translation industry translation memories (TM) 326

326–7 translation quality, concept of 20
Swanston Howard, Velma 462 translation sociology 187
Swiss Association d’Interprètes et de translation Taylorism 236
Traducteurs 299 translation technology and ethics 262–3, 274–5;
Swiss Pentecostal community 219 computer-aided interpreting 274; computer-
aided translation 263–4; computer-aided
Tack, Lieven 172 translation (CAT) 262, 263–5; cultural
Tagore, Rabindranath 102–4, 107 hegemony vs linguistic diversity paradox
Tamil Saivism 445, 447 270–1; emerging issues 272–4; fidelity and
Tampere Pentecostal Church 445 collaboration 267; funding MT research 274;
TAUS (language data network) 284 historical trajectory 263–5; lack of guidance in
technology see translation technology and ethics professional associations’ codes of ethics 269;
TED Talks 230, 231, 232, 283 machine translation (MT) 262, 264–5; MT
telos: concept of 21, 175; term 21 and literary translation 273–4; neural machine
Ten Commandments 2 translation (NMT) 264–5, 268–70, 272–3;
terrorism 248 privacy and confidentiality of data 266–7;
Textus Receptus (TR) 452 productivity, time and money 270; professional
theory of translational action: Holz-Mänttäri 58, identity, autonomy and job satisfaction 267–9;
62–3, 68 sharing and commoditization of translation
Theses on Translation (Venuti) 135 resources 265–6; social responsibility 272–3;
Third World feminism 118–20 statistical machine translation (SMT) 264, 265,
Tlaxcala 245, 249 268; teaching in courses 273
Topolovec, Iris 7, 211 translation variation in China 35
Toury, Gideo 95, 169, 213 translator(s): fidelity and 15–18; see also ethics
Toward a Criticism of Translation (Berman) 76 codes for interpreters/translators
Toward a Translation Criticism: John Donne Translator, The (journal) 340, 341, 402, 407
(Berman) 78 translator ethics 147–8, 157–8; Buber, Levinas
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Spinoza) 80 and philosophy of dialogue 148–50; critiques
tradosphere, notion of 238 of invisibility 150–1; disruption 155; emerging
Tragic Psychology (Zhu) 25 issues 156–7; historical background 148–53;
training: conflict and crisis translating/interpreting neo-classical cooperation and trust theory
406; as continuing professional development 151–3; term 147; things still missing 157–8;
327–8; ethics education in training 204–5, trust as professional promise 153–5; when
208; professional/non-professional translators/ everyone can translate 157; see also literary
interpreters 403; volunteer interpreting/ translator ethics; professional translator ethics
translation 233 Translators Association of China (TAC) 31, 34
transcreation 347 Translator’s Charter 16, 17, 50, 299, 303,
transcultural text design 59 325, 327
transculturation, term 127n7 Translator’s Invisibility, The (Venuti) 131, 133, 134,
transhumanism 279 138, 465
translational action 59 Translators Without Borders/Traducteurs Sans
Translation Changes Everything (Venuti) 134 Frontières 230, 234, 253
translation culture: concept of 66–7; transparency, constructive principle of 67–8
definition 66 transversality 289–90
Translation Environment Tools (TEnTs) 263 Trump, Donald 156, 199–200, 203, 307
translation history 348 trust, translation industry 328–30
translation industry ethics 320–1, 333; artificial Truth, Sojourner 118
intelligence (AI) and future of 331–2; Tryuk, Małgorzata 8, 398
considerations in 322–30; disparities of power Tubiana, Laurence 290
324–5; environmental sustainability in 330–1; Twain, Mark 188, 461
internal and external stakeholders in network Twitter 174
324; new frontiers in 330–2; ownership of Tymoczko, Maria 36n3
resources 325–6; resources for 327–8; short Tyndale, William 15
history of 321–2; sustaining employment
326–7; training as continuing professional undecidability 88
development 327–8; trust in 328–30 Underhill, James 82
493
Index
UN International Criminal Tribunal for volunteer translation, definition 229

Rwanda 424 von Ahn, Luis 283
Union of Russian Translators 51 von Humboldt, Wilhelm 73, 75, 79, 81
United Bible Societies 443, 450
United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Wang, Dazhi 27, 28
Persons with Disabilities 473 Wang, Haiming 27
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Wang, Hongyin 30
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 301, 327 Wang, Kefei 26
Universal Access to Information Society (journal) 474 Wark, McKenzie 284
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 437, 472 Warsaw Pact 44–5
University of Geneva 408 war translators/interpreters: developing code of
Unknown Soldier, The (Linna) 462 ethics for 403–5; see also conflict and crisis
untranslatability 91, 94–5 translating and interpreting
Upanishads 2, 9n1 WayGo 282
US Bureau of Labor Statistics 322 Wegener, Anna 461
US Court Interpreters Act 299 WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialised Rich
US Department of Health and Human Services: and Democratic) 221
Office of Research Integrity 374 Wenig, Devin 279
US Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf Code Weyl, Glen 284
of Ethics 299 What Is Cultural Translation? (Maitland) 93
utilitarian ethics 21–2, 76, 436, 437 White Book, The (Kang) 78
Woodlanders, The (Hardy) 13
Van Wyke, Ben 167 World Christianity 449, 452
Vedas 2, 9n1 World Health Organization 368
Vegetarian, The (Kang) 78 World Literature 43
Venuti, Lawrence 7, 32, 73, 131, 132, 181, World Social Forum (WSF) 249, 251, 254–5
185–6, 465 World Trade Organization (WTO) 231
Vermeer, Hans J. 6, 58, 355; tracing ethical issues Writers’ Union 46
60–2 wulun (five relationships), concept of 26
vicarious trauma (VC): ethical stress 423–5;
process model of conditions for 424 Xie, Tianzhen 29
Vidal Claramonte, Africa 94 xin (faithfulness): in Chinese translation 28–30;
Vinay, Jean-Paul 59, 72 value of 25, 35
Vinge, Vernon 279, 291 Xin, Guangqin 6, 25, 33
virtue ethics 13; emerging issues in 20–1; fidelity Xu, Guangqi 26, 31, 101
15–18; Hieronymic Oath 18–20; historical
background of 13–14; justice 17, 21; loyalty 17; Yan, Fu 26–9, 31–2
paratextual visibility 18; proper ambition 17, Yandex 270
18; self-respect 17, 18 Yang, Rongguang 35
visibility 354 Yeats, W.B. 102, 104–5
volunteer, definition 228 Yin, Mingyue 7, 195
volunteering 227 Yue, Diana 30
volunteer interpreting/translation (IT) 227–9, 238–9, Yugoslav Society of Translators’ Associations 50
432–3; core issues 231–5; definition 229; ethical
economics 231–2; ethical pitfalls 235; ethics Zhang, Boran 25
of crowdsourcing/collaboration 235–6; ethics Zhang, Jinghau 27
of global civic consciousness 237–8; ethics of/ Zhi, Qian 28, 29
in training 233; ethics of motivation 232; ethics zhong (loyalty), value of 25, 28
of volunteer cultural mediation 237; historical zhongshi (equivalence) 28
background 230; new debates in 235–8; politics Zhu, Chaowei 31
and ethics 233–5; volunteer non-professional Zhu, Guangqian 25
(VNP) codes of ethics 233 Zhun, Chunshen 36n4
volunteer non-professional (VNP) 232; codes of Zimbardo, Philip 371
ethics 233 Zuckerman, Ethan 283
494

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Ethics 2020031492 9780815358237 9781003127970 - Compress

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Ethics 2020031492 9780815358237 9781003127970 - Compress

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Ethics 2020031492 9780815358237 9781003127970 - Compress

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Routledge Handbook of

Translation and Ethics

Nike K. Pokorn is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies provide comprehensive over-

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbooks-in-

Edited by Kaisa Koskinen

List of contributors viii

1 Ethics and translation: an introduction 1

2 Virtue ethics in translation 13

3 Translation ethics in the Chinese tradition 25

4 Ethics in socialist translation theories 42

5 Functional translation theories and ethics 58

6 Ethics in Berman and Meschonnic 72

7 The ethics of linguistic hospitality and untranslatability in

8 The ethics of postcolonial translation 99

9 Feminist translation ethics 114

10 Venuti and the ethics of diference 131

11 Translator ethics 147

12 Professional translator ethics 165

13 Literary translator ethics 180

14 Conference interpreter ethics 195

15 Ethics in public service interpreting 211

16 Ethics of volunteering in translation and interpreting 227

17 Ethics of activist translation and interpreting 245

18 Translation technology and ethics 262

19 Translation and posthumanism 279

20 Ethics codes for interpreters and translators 297

21 Ethics in the translation industry 320

22 Ethics in translator and interpreter education 338

23 Ethics of translator and interpreter education 351

24 Research ethics in translation and interpreting studies 365

25 Ethics in child language brokering 383

26 Translating and interpreting in confict and crisis 398

27 Ethical stress in translation and interpreting 415

28 Linguistic frst aid 431

29 Ethics of translating sacred texts 441

30 Ethics of collaboration and control in literary translation 458

31 Accessibility and linguistic rights 470

Claudia V. Angelelli is Chair in Multilingualism and Communication at Heriot-Watt University

Lluís Baixauli-Olmos is Associate Professor at University of Louisville. He has co-edited a vol-

Georgios Floros is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Cyprus. He

Tuija Kinnunen is University Lecturer in German Translation at the University of Helsinki.

Jenni Laaksonen is Doctoral Researcher of Accounting at Tampere University, Finland. Her

Françoise Massardier-Kenney is Professor of French and Translation Studies, Director of the

Christopher D. Mellinger is Assistant Professor of Spanish Interpreting and Translation Stud-

Raquel Pacheco Aguilar is a postdoctoral researcher in translation studies at the Faculty of

Outi Paloposki is Professor of English at the University of Turku (Finland), Department of

Svetlana Probirskaja is University Lecturer of Finnish-Russian Translation at Helsinki Uni-

Anthony Pym is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Melbourne, Distinguished

Kaisa Koskinen and Nike K. Pokorn

Translators or interpreters, translation students and teachers, researchers, promoters of translation

2 Handbook: the making of

3 Outline of the contents

3.1 Fidelity and other translator virtues

3.2 A Hieronymic Oath

Proposal for a Hieronymic Oath (Chesterman 2001, 153)

Related topics in this volume

of volunteering in translation and interpreting; ethics of activist translation and interpreting;