Ethics and the Curriculum

Critical perspectives

Mona Baker, Carol Maier

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781905763269
• eBook ISBN: 9781317620792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

First Published in 2011. This special issue of The Interpreter and Translator Trainer provides a forum for reflection on questions of ethics in the context of translator and interpreter education. Covering a wide range of training contexts and types of translation and interpreting, contributors call for a radically altered view of the relationship between ethics and the translating and interpreting profession, a relationship in which ethical decisions can rarely, if ever, be made a priori but must be understood and taught as an integral and challenging element of one's work

The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5(1), 2011, 65–92

ISBN 978-1-905763-26-9

‘Ethics-less’ Theories and ‘Ethical’ Practices

On Ethical Relativity in Translation

Georgios Floros

University of Cyprus

Abstract. This paper discusses the issue of ethical responsibility on the part of the translator, specifically the need to act ethically and make responsible translation-related decisions about politically sensitive texts, focusing on practices that emerge in the context of translator training. The underlying premise of the discussion is that a contradiction between theoretical ideals and actual contexts of practice hampers students’ ability to negotiate an ethical decision. In an attempt to enable students to arrive at well-thought out, responsible decisions, this paper outlines a potential framework for exploring the ethical implications of textual choices in translation. The notion of ethical relativity is introduced as a by-product of the dynamism and partiality of norms, narratives and values, and used to highlight the factors that have a bearing on decision making. The ultimate aim is to demonstrate that an ethical framework must be sought that allows students to question and negotiate norms and narratives in order to arrive at sound ethical decisions. This framework must also offer students the possibility to act responsibly as agents of political change. Two translation exercises of politically sensitive texts from the Greek context are discussed as case studies.

Keywords. Ethical decision, Ethical relativity, Ethical injunction, Norms, Narratives, Values, Conflict, Translator training.

The vast majority of the students I have taught come to translation theory and translation practice classes with the general presumption that translation is the – easy – task of re-expressing in another language ‘what the text says’. This problem is widely acknowledged in the literature on translator training (Nord 2005, Arrojo 2005). Students’ understanding of what translators do and how they function coincides mainly with the image of communicators uninfluenced by any factors that might either prevent the ‘correct’ understanding of an original message or impede the production of a ‘comprehensible’ target text.

Specifically for the Greek-speaking area, this attitude can largely be explained in relation to two factors. On the one hand, students have been exposed to Greek translations of foreign literature that read fluently, with the foreign usually domesticated, thus creating the illusion¹ that a different culture is not so different after all. This situation is reminiscent of a similar problem, albeit with different repercussions, widely discussed by Venuti (1995, 1998) in the framework of his critique of fluent strategies used in literary translation into English. On the other hand, students are constantly exposed to hilarious examples of bad quality subtitles on TV which contain obvious translation errors and hence create the illusion that translation is primarily about linguistic skills. In an attempt to challenge this attitude among my students, I use poems as well as morally charged political texts, even in introductory courses. Introducing students at the very beginning of their training to the complexities and ambivalences inherent in translation is intended to prompt a more ‘questioning’, and thus more critical, attitude to key theoretical concepts they will be introduced to later in their studies, such as equivalence and functionalism, and to strategies such as foreignization and domestication.

It is at this point, when they are introduced to the complexities of translation, that students begin to realize that effecting a smooth transfer of an original content is an illusion, and that the image of the translator as a ‘mere’ communicator is a rather naïve one. Disillusioning students about theoretical concepts and foregrounding ethical thinking are prerequisites to reinforcing their sense of responsibility, both during training and later in their professional life, and encouraging them to reflect on the complexities of their task. Alerting students to complexities might encourage them to resort back to the trainer for an easy solution, however. Thus the question ‘how should I translate this’ is one that is often posed by students, who assign trainers the role of arbitrators and automatically attribute to them the ‘authority’ of truth, as if there were an absolute truth which they themselves cannot see. This assumption derives not only from the students’ own attitudes to translation (and critical analysis in general) but to some extent is also a function of the training environment to which they have become accustomed, within both higher and secondary education institutions. Such training environment tends to favour a teacher-centred pedagogical approach which aims at duplicating knowledge in students’ minds (Kiraly 2005:1098f.), and is sometimes referred to as performance magistrale (Ladmiral 1977). There has recently been a vibrant debate about replacing the teacher-centred approach with more student-centred approaches which also take into account the social conditions of learning as cognitive and situated practice.² A student-centred approach is also adopted in this study, as will become clear in the discussion and examples that follow.³

Trainers are thus confronted with the need to engage in a double deconstruction. They not only need to reinforce the students’ critical stance by deconstructing the ethical validity of theoretical concepts such as equivalence and functionalism, they also need to deconstruct the image students have of the trainer as an authority. For example, once they are introduced to the concept of voicing the Other, students tend to immediately accept it as a general ethical injunction for translation. They also tend to accept functional theories (e.g. Skopos theory) as suitable mainly for pragmatic texts, although these theories in fact allow for a change in the function of the foreign text (e.g. summarizing translations, translations of scientific texts to appear as semi-scientific articles, etc.). Students are then surprised when they realize that there is a clash between theories they have found helpful in some contexts and the broad ethical injunction to ‘voice the Other’. From the perspective of ethics, a change in function suddenly appears rather ‘unethical’.

A similar problem arises when students are introduced to theories of translation such as those propagated by feminist or postcolonial scholars (for example, Simon 1996, Simon and St-Pierre 2000). Translating ‘what the text says’, i.e. voicing the Other, cannot be reconciled with the seemingly interventionist approach to translation maintained by postmodern literary theory. At the same time, however, students are fascinated by the democratic and anti-hegemonic stance inherent in these theories. Similarly, students start expressing doubts about domesticating translations which they previously admired. When juxtaposed to an injunction such as voicing the Other, domestication suddenly seems less ‘ethical’ a practice than it previously appeared. At the same time, students remain dismissive of the idea of translating ‘what the text says’ when it comes to political texts in which the ‘enemy’ speaks, as will be shown in the case studies below. Thus, when students are confronted with multiple discourses and morally charged texts where their own responsibility is at stake, they begin to see faithfulness and equivalence in a totally different light.

The above problems probably arise from the eagerness of students to understand translation strategies as tantamount to ethical stances – an understanding which represents a tacit rather than conscious level of ethical articulation. Some clarification is thus needed as to what these strategies may offer in terms of ethical practice. I would argue that they offer a pool of possibilities for practical action, which means that what may appear as ad hoc choices can in fact reflect an ethical stance. It is social conventions, rather than strategies per se, which are the sources of ethical stances. Schleiermacher’s foreignizing method is a case in point. While Schleiermacher (1813/2000) advocated foreignization in order to enrich the German language, later translation scholars such as Berman (1984) and Venuti (1991, 1995, 1998) advocated the same method as a means of combatting ethnocentrism (see also Koskinen 2000:49). Thus, the same strategy is used to serve different ethical stances, and once one recognizes this, it becomes obvious that the strategy itself is not an ethical stance, but the result thereof. In a pedagogical context, this means that the discussion of the ‘ethical’ cannot revolve only around its results but needs to include its causal factors, i.e. social conventions, as well.

1. Ethics and conventions

In contemplating the ‘ethical’ in translation, one has to recognize that ethics calls for value-based rather than fact-based thinking. Although there has been some debate on whether value-based thinking is desirable for translation as a discipline, the fact is that, at best, values and contingencies might be dispensable in the exact sciences, where natural phenomena might be studied in a value-free manner, but not in a humanities-based discipline. I would thus disagree with Vermeer’s call for keeping translation theory value-free (1996:83).

At the same time, since any contemplation of the ethical in the context of translation has to engage with concrete language, we have to engage in fact-based discussions of language constraints and linguistic peculiarities of transfer. The resulting tension may be resolved by viewing values as facts, which would entail studying the contexts in which facts are created and, ultimately, their very viability. These ends may best be served by sociological approaches to translation, including approaches that engage in the critical examination of norms (as discussed in Descriptive Translation Studies, e.g. Toury 1980, Schäffner 1999, Chesterman 1997/2009), and of narratives (e.g. Baker 2006). Toury (1980:51) defines norms as follows:

[Norms are] the translation of general values or ideas shared by a certain community – as to what is right and wrong, adequate and inadequate – into specific performance-instructions appropriate for and applicable to specific situations.

Schäffner (1999:1) follows the same line of thought, although she stresses the status of norms as collective knowledge, in addition to being performance instructions:

… in each community, there is a knowledge of what counts as correct or appropriate behaviour, including communicative behaviour. In a society, this knowledge exists in the form of norms. Norms are developed in the process of socialisation. They are conventional, they are shared by members of a community, i.e. they function intersubjectively as models for behaviour, and they also regulate expectations concerning both the behaviour itself and the products of this behaviour.

The dependence of ethics on norms seems clear, as is the dependence of norms on values. The latter is explicitly reaffirmed by Chesterman in his description of an ethics of responsibility (1997/2009:35):

Deontic actions (those the agent feels “ought” to be done) are governed by norms, and norms themselves are governed by values. A norm, after all, is accepted as a norm because it embodies or manifests or tends towards some value. Values are thus examples of regulative ideas.

Chesterman (ibid.:36ff.) goes on to distinguish among four fundamental values underlying four different norms, respectively: The value of clarity (governing expectancy norms), the value of truth (governing the relation norm), the value of trust (governing the communication norm) and the value of understanding (governing the accountability norm).

Norms do not only depend on values, but also on narratives. Drawing on narrative theory, Baker argues that members of communities entertain narratives about themselves and the institutional formations around them. She defines narratives as “public and personal ‘stories’ that we subscribe to and that guide our behaviour. They are the stories we tell ourselves, not just those we explicitly tell other people, about the world(s) in which we live” (2006:19). Adopting the typology of narratives proposed by Somers and Gibson (1994), Baker then differentiates between ontological, public, conceptual and meta-narratives (ibid.:28–48), emphasizing “the power and function of narratives rather than their structural make-up” (ibid.:19). Narratives have a strong ethical dimension since “[o]ne of the effects of narrativity is that it normalizes the accounts it projects over a period of time, so that they come to be perceived as self-evident, benign, uncontestable and non-controversial” (ibid.:11).

The normative potential of narratives, then, lies in their ability to become the basis for seemingly benign and incontestable conventions, just as values are often adopted unreflectively and unquestioningly.⁴ If, in addition, narratives become collective (i.e. acquire the status of public or meta-narratives), they can exercise considerable persuasive power about what is thought to be good or bad, correct or incorrect, appropriate or inappropriate, etc. Thus narratives may potentially solidify into norms. Values, narratives and norms should not be conflated, however: values and narratives may both fall under the general heading of social conventions that have an ethically regulating character, whereas norms could be regarded as the ‘culmination’ of such conventions, manifested through actual translation practice and possibly informing future translations.⁵

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of narratives (and values) is their dynamic nature. Narratives may “change in subtle or radical ways” (Baker 2006:3) as people are exposed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Ethics in Interpreter & Translator Training: Critical Perspectives
• Relationships of Learning between Military Personnel and Interpreters in Situations of Violent Conflict: Dual Pedagogies and Communities of Practice
• From Training Skilled Conference Interpreters to Educating Reflective Citizens: A Case Study of the Marius Action Research Project
• ‘Ethics-less’ Theories and ‘Ethical’ Practices: On Ethical Relativity in Translation
• Teaching Translation for Social Awareness in Toronto
• Ethics in the Teaching of Conference Interpreting
• Towards Empowerment: Students’ Ethical Reflections on Translating in Production Networks
• Context-based Ethical Reasoning in Interpreting: A Demand Control Schema Perspective
• Features Section
• Book Reviews
• Thesis Abstract