The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Ethics

Kaisa Koskinen, Nike K. Pokorn, Kaisa Koskinen, Nike K. Pokorn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780815358251
• eBook ISBN: 9781000289084
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

1
Ethics and translation

An introduction

Kaisa Koskinen and Nike K. Pokorn

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 question: 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 working 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 researchers. 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 stepping 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 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 philosophy 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 philosopher 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, Apology 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 virtuous 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 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 philosophical 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 foundations 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 differentiates 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 contrastively, 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 systematic codification of conduct – this tie between codification and deontology is particularly 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 perspective 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, prohibitions or sanctions. This being said, we should keep in mind, however, that all ethical decisions 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 intersection, 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.

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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Ethics and translation: an introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Index