The Linguist

26 The Linguist Vol/61 No/2 2022 thelinguist.uberflip.com OPINION & COMMENT Where next for professional translation ethics? PHILLIPPA MAY BENNETT JOSEPH LAMBERT Questions of ethics permeate so much of our daily lives. It's not just lofty debates of good versus evil or controversial topics such as euthanasia, but a much more complex field. From considering whether we should continue to buy food, clothes or devices from brands we know exploit their workers, to weighing up the moral component of, say, tuition fees, ethics inevitably creeps into all of our personal lives. But what about the professional side? How do language professionals fit into the equation and what does ethics mean to translators? For decades now, agencies, associations, scholars and translators have all weighed in on the matter, drawing up service agreements, non-disclosure agreements and the like, drafting codes of conduct for their members, and explicitly tackling the area in academic studies, blogs and social media posts. Yet in today's globalised world, with climate, health and economic crises presenting a more pressing danger than ever before, our thinking on translation ethics is evolving and expanding beyond more traditional concepts. A potted history: from fidelity to agency Within academic and professional explorations of translation ethics, the issue of fidelity has long been central. This notion has often been reduced to questions of source versus target orientation and revolves around the encounter with Otherness – other languages, and other cultures – that is central to translation. Christiane Nord expands these notions of textual fidelity to home in on the idea of loyalty, 1 another recurrent concern in the pursuit of translation or, maybe more appropriately, translator ethics. Who or what should we, as translators, be loyal to, for instance? While scholars such as Antoine Berman argue that our primary loyalty (and thus our "properly ethical aim" is to represent the foreignness within texts in translation, 2 Nord attempts to commit "the translator bilaterally to both the source and the target side". She asks that we consider balancing the needs of the source text author, the commissioner of the work (our client) and the target audience; if this is impossible, we should negotiate or even refuse to translate. Anthony Pym, meanwhile, advocates that mutually beneficial cooperation should be our goal when translating and has explored trust as a central concept in our ethical decision-making. 3 More recently, thought has shifted to questions of political engagement, activism and social responsibility. Chesterman sums up this range of issues rather neatly by suggesting a division between macro-ethical and micro-ethical matters. 4 Macro-ethical issues encompass broad social questions "such as the role and rights of translators in society, conditions of work, financial rewards and the client's profit motive, the general aims of translation as intercultural action, power relations between translators and clients, the relation between translation and state politics". Micro-ethical matters pertain to the "relation between the translator and the words on the page". These two levels feed one another, of course, and at the root of it all, the way we engage with the Otherness within a text is crucial. But we cannot lose sight of our own inevitable, personal, human input. As such, it is this broader picture that we focus on here, bringing the agent involved in this process more clearly to the forefront. Current and emerging considerations Through this lens of translators as the key agent, there are several areas that seem to call for urgent ethical attention. In a recent European Language Industry Survey, 72% of freelance translators reported that rates were a stress factor in their working practice, while 59% of those who participated in the Inbox Translation Freelance Translator Survey cited "low rates of pay" as the main obstacle to being a freelance translator. However, the topic of rates has, in many instances, been avoided in literature on ethics, perhaps due to the (mis)conception that each translator is in charge of their own destiny – thus charging the rates they believe to be ethically fair – or even that rates are not an ethical issue at all. Clearly, there is much progress to be made and this complex area cannot be dealt with in isolation. Rather, it is inextricably linked to issues of status, professionalisation and understandings of translation more widely. Elsewhere, the area through which we can most clearly view the need for renewed consideration of ethical issues is the domain of technology. While the use of translation technology is nothing new, accounting for the ethical ramifications of increased technological engagement has been a slow Up to code?

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