Ethics in Public Service Interpreting

Mary Phelan, Mette Rudvin, Hanne Skaaden, Patrick Kermit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317502845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

This is the first book to focus solely on ethics in public service interpreting. Four leading researchers from across Europe share their expertise on ethics, the theory behind ethics, types of ethics, codes of ethics, and what it means to be a public service interpreter.

This volume is highly innovative in that it provides the reader with not only a theoretical basis to explain why underlying ethical dilemmas are so common in the field, but it also offers guidelines that are explained and discussed at length and illustrated with examples. Divided into three Parts, this ground-breaking text offers a comprehensive discussion of issues surrounding Public Service Interpreting. Part 1 centres on ethical theories, Part 2 compares and contrasts codes of ethics and includes real-life examples related to ethics, and Part 3 discusses the link between ethics, professional development, and trust.

Ethics in Public Service Interpreting serves as both an explanatory and informative core text for students and as a guide or reference book for interpreter trainees as well as for professional interpreters - and for professionals who need an interpreter's assistance in their own work.

1
SITUATING INTERPRETING ETHICS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Mette Rudvin

1.1 Introduction

1.1.1 Sector-specific interpreting: interpreter agency and ethical challenges¹

Interpreting has grown and developed significantly as a profession and as an academic discipline in the past few decades. Concomitantly, the discipline of Interpreting Studies (hereafter IS), departing from the exclusive elitist realm of conference interpreting, has branched out into a set of sectorial sub-disciplines — medical interpreting, legal interpreting, interpreting in the education sector, business interpreting, interpreting for the media or for tourism, diplomatic interpreting, etc. This increased segmentation is reflected both in the literature and in the plethora of training programmes specific to each sector. The terminology used to denote the macro-sector of dialogic, face-to-face interpreting in public and private institutions is also somewhat fragmented, although largely referred to as Public Service Interpreting (hereafter PSI) and Community Interpreting (hereafter CI), whereas Liaison Interpreting has lost currency. The issue of professional ethics has received increasing attention in Interpreting and Translation Studies generally, but nowhere more so than in the field of PSI.²

This rather fragmented landscape begs the question of whether or not we can speak of a general ‘ethics of interpreting’, and if so, can we speak of a collective set of shared ethics that derives its authority from the consensus of the professional community (i.e. an ‘external’ Code of Ethics), or does each sector require a specific code? By the same token, are interpreters governed by the rules that apply to the various domains, practices and stakeholders involved? These would be: (1) the public and private institutions that require their language services (hospitals, public offices, legal institutions for interpreters, or the client for translators); (2) the professional associaliou, companies or cooperatives they belong to; (3) the institution (if they have received dedicated training). Alternatively, is ethics driven by (4) an intrinsic, unwritten rule governiv iransfer, or by (5) a privately-driven ‘internal’ ethics by which a single interpreter examines his or her own conscience internally and acts accordingly? Operating with at least these different levels of ethics, the picture is clearly very complex and may lead to situations in which the interpreter is unsure of which ethical level or source he or she should follow, especially if the guidelines or injunctions at the various levels overlap or clash.

The development of IS into increasingly specialised areas of research and practice has had significant implications for the perception of the interpreter’s role in the international literature on interpreting. It has brought to the surface and into public debate important issues related to interpreter agency and the degree to which the interpreter is ‘visible’ and ‘proactive’ in the interpreting assignment. The debate has led to a bifurcation of schools of thought in the PSI literature represented very broadly by what Sandra Hale (2007) calls the ‘mediated approach’ vs the ‘direct approach’. Where the first approach tends to accept more active engagement by the interpreter, the latter is more cautious regarding the degree to which an interpreter should enter proactively in the interpreting process by providing additional information or otherwise enacting overt alterations. This bifurcation also represents a broader paradigm shift in the humanities (see Rudvin 2006) towards a wider acknowledgement of the reader’s (or interpreter’s) agency in the communicative event. It has also led to a new set of metaphors reflecting that higher degree of agency and engagement, exemplifying this shift: from a ‘pane of glass/conduit’ to ‘bridge’, from ‘translator’ to ‘conversation coordinator’, from ‘invisible’ to ‘visible’. Consequently, the code of conduct³ and ethics that the interpreters abide by also reflect the changing epistemological and methodological framework that guides and governs them.

There is arguably a natural correlation between ethics and PSI practice, motivating the prominence of ethics in PSI literature. The most important reasons for this correlation can be captured in the following features:

• The nature of PSI is highly dialogic, interpersonal and collective, often played out in public and institutional domains of power asymmetry. This power asymmetry may lead to deliberate (or unintentional) abuses of power at the level of language or the para-verbal level.

• The PSI interpreting mode is immediate and requires split-second decision-making; this is obviously also true of conference interpreting, but in PSI settings non-verbal behaviour is an inherent part of the communicative act. Subsequently, communication strategies need to be reflected upon and learned through training beforehand so that they become internalised and to some degree ‘automatic’.

• PSI is deeply engaging in human terms because of the face-to-face format that requires immediate and constant interaction with other participants. PSI interpreters must therefore often engage not only with their interlocutors’ propositional and pragmatic intentions but also their affect-driven utterances and behaviour.

• PSI is deeply context-dependent and the settings shift from one institutional and life domain to another, requiring flexibility and adaptation as well as familiarity with the behaviours, norms and terminology of each sector, each with their own particular socio-cultural and institutional constraints.

• PSI is by definition an intercultural activity.⁴ This may lead to a highly complex communicative process involving cultural, social and pragmatic features relating to socio-cultural interpersonal relations.

The responsibility for negotiating such complex factors can be a heavy burden on the interpreter and necessitates ethical guidelines to guide and advise, and to help interpreters minimise any potential damage to other interlocutors. The twin aspects of power-asymmetry and vulnerability require special attention and delicacy in order not to cause harm to the foreign-language speakers or to the communities and institutions served by the interpreters.

1.2 Contextualising PSI ethics: history, philosophy, and professional practice

Historically, ethics has been investigated principally in the macro-disciplines of theology and philosophy. In both these domains, ethics has had multiple functions, the most important of which is a ‘damage-preventing’ function (e.g. ‘do not kill’, ‘do not bear false witness’), but at the same time ethics also functions as an ideal and idealised standard for desirable behaviour Clove thy neighbour’, ‘give alms’). Both these are normative processes. The broader discipline of philosophy engages with various questions pertaining to life, death, knowledge, language and human behaviour from a more descriptive angle. It is specifically the sub-branch of moral philosophy that has had the task of investigating and probing the reasoning and logic behind ethical injunctions, their robustness and validity, and their applicability to any given society. Moral philosophy puts under the microscope both the big questions of life (life, death, afterlife, the environment) as well as the more mundane ones that affect our lives every day and that we often take for granted. Indeed, ethics operates in most areas of institutional life (hospital, courtroom, banks, schools and universities); in science and the organisation of society (genetics, medical technology and cloning, artificial intelligence, farming, rubbish disposal), to social justice, and interpersonal relations. People live their lives guided, often unaware, by many ethical standards and sometimes find themselves trapped in situations without being aware of the circumstances that led them there or how to tackle them. Philosophy helps us untangle and clarify those circumstances and the reasoning behind them so that we can be more aware of how and why human beings behave the way they do. In that way it also helps us to optimise those behaviours in the best interests of individuals and society. Questioning what we take for granted, preconceived notions and ‘platitudes’, is indeed the stuff of philosophy, as Lewis observes: ‘It is the profession of philosophers to question platitudes that others accept without thinking twice’ (1969: 1, quoted in Glock, 2003).

As an object of theoretical inquiry (meta-ethics) as well as a guide for human conduct (normative ethics), ethics has been a prime focus of Western moral philosophy at least since the time of the Ancient Greeks.⁵ By articulating ideas of ‘right’, ‘good’ and ‘just’, philosophers have had a powerful norm-developing role, strengthening the role and position of philosophy as an arena to suggest prob-lem-solving methods for both individuals and groups of people. The organisation of society into professions (professional groups), and how they affect individuals and the community, also falls squarely within the ambit of ethical reflection. What better channel, then, through which to probe PSI ethics than through the framework of moral philosophy? With very broad brushstrokes Part 1 aims to identify — historically and conceptually — some of the connections between PSI and moral philosophy by tracing a simplified chronological trajectory of the central tenets of moral philosophy and selecting those areas of concern that are most obviously applicable to PSI. By creating a philosophical backdrop against which we can correlate the main ethical tenets of PSI, I hope to provide a fuller picture of the ethics of our profession, an example of how professional practices emerge in a specific historical, cultural and social context. This can be helpful to PSI researchers as they examine ethical tenets and try to formulate guidelines to help interpreters work to the best of their abilities in the service of the community. It can also be helpful to practitioners in order to be more fully conscious and mindful of the ethical decisions they enact, reassured by the knowledge that all professions are governed by ethical injunctions that limit arbitrary choice, and that those same ethical guidelines have developed through millennia in our societies to provide robust answers to difficult questions. In the Introduction to this volume, Kermit has provided some background to the Utilitarian school of philosophy as well as to Immanuel Kant’s focus on reason. This Part will provide a panoramic overview of those and other branches of moral philosophy as they pertain to PSI ethics.

1.3 Ethics in philosophy

The broad question of what is right/wrong is encapsulated in Socrates’ question of ‘how should one live?’ and Kant’s more specific question ‘what is my duty?’ (Graham 2011: 50). As such, ethics is a broad, generalised term that defines what is ‘good’ (’meta-ethics'), embedded in the search for a definition of ‘right conduct’ (broadly speaking, the conduct that causes the greatest good) and ‘the good life’ (as in a life worth living, that is satisfying). At the same time, however, it is also the study of how people ought to act, and thus seeks a set of rules to help people decide on a course of action (’normative ethics’). Insofar as ethics attempts to formulate a system that determines what is ‘good and bad’, it is a public system on which there is general agreement in a given society and one which enjoys collective consensus, rather than being ‘simply’ a private, inner belief It is precisely this consensus that underpins its robustness and normative efficacy.

The aim of such regulatory practices is to help individuals co-exist efficiently in a group, causing the least possible damage and doing the greatest possible ‘good’. As Gordon Graham (2011) discusses, ethics dictates how an individual should behave in their different dimensions of life: in the private dimension (family, friends) and in the public dimension, as a citizen in a community and as a professional. Thus, ethics reflects both an individual and a collective dimension, private vs public/pro-fessional. A system operating in a public collective dimension may do harm, potentially to a large number of people, and therefore it needs to be protected from itself, as it were, precisely to limit that potential damage. Whereas in a private situation an individual has the exclusive ownership of his or her own decision-making, in the public and professional arena that ‘ownership’ is limited, and the individual also has a responsibility towards the group of which he or she is part. An ethical dilemma may arise precisely when the collective and the private spheres clash, when a potential action or decision based on a private or a cultural norm contravenes the rule of the profession, institution or nation/state. This area is often far from clear-cut and the very distinction public/private, collective/individual is not always easy or possible to establish.⁶

Professions were and are created to serve but also to reflect societies’ ways of structuring themselves into organised entities: institutions, economies, kinship formations, religion...