1. LECTURE 1. ETHICS AND TRANSLATION Plan 1. Ethics as a Science 2. Ethics in Translation 2.1. Who are Translators? 2.2. Reliability and Speed in Translation 2.3. Moral Issues in Translation Business

2. KEY WORDS Consciousness, ultimate, normative ethics, metaethics, and applied ethics, crucial, naturalism, intuitionism, emotivism, and prescriptivism, bioethics, business ethics, legal ethics, and medical ethics, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and the work generally known as Magna Moralia, the Stoics, Renaissance, translator, interpreter, synchronous (simultaneous) interpretation, consecutive (posledovatelnii) interpretation, Source language, Target languageintuitionismemotivism prescriptivism

3. 1. Ethics as a Science Ethics is the philosophical science that studies morality as a form of social consciousness—as a major aspect of human activity and a specific sociohistorical phenomenon. Ethics illuminates the role of morality in the context of other types of social relations; it analyzes the nature and internal structure of morality, studies its origin and historical development, and provides theoretical justification for one or another moral system.

4. Normative ethics seeks to establish norms or standards of conduct; a crucial question in this field is whether actions are to be judged right or wrong based on their consequences or based on their conformity to some moral rule, such as “Do not tell a lie.” Metaethics is concerned with the nature of ethical judgments and theories. Some major metaethical theories are naturalism, intuitionism, emotivism, and prescriptivism.intuitionism emotivismprescriptivism Applied ethics, as the name implies, consists of the application of normative ethical theories to practical moral problems. Among the major fields of applied ethics are bioethics, business ethics, legal ethics, and medical ethics.

5. - Ethics in Eastern and classical thought - Aristotle and ethics (Nicomachean ethics, Eudemian ethics, Magna Moralia) - the traditional division of philosophy into three branches- logic, physics and ethics is derived from the Stoics. - The principle problem in ethics ( two categories) The question of the nature of morality The category of moral activity The connections between such categories as moral requirement, obligation, duty, responsibility, dignity and conscience

6. 2. Ethics in Translation 2.1. Who are translators? The work of a translator or interpreter is a very hard one. Translators and (especially) interpreters do all have something of the actor in them, the mimic, the impersonator, and they do develop remarkable recall skills that will enable them to remember a word (often in a foreign language) that they have heard only once. Translators and interpreters are voracious and omnivorous readers, people who are typically in the middle of four books at once, in several languages, fiction and nonfiction, technical and humanistic subjects, anything and everything.

7. - The primary characteristics of a good translator are similar to the expectations translation users have for the ideal translation: a good translator is reliable and fast, and will work for the going rate. From an internal point of view, however, the expectations for translation are rather different than they look from the outside. For the translator, reliability is important mainly as a source of professional pride. From the user's point of view, it is essential to be able to rely on translation — not only on the text, but on the translator as well and generally on the entire translation process.

8. A translator converts written material such as newspaper material, books, articles from one language into another. An interpreter converts spoken material such as speeches, presentations and the like from one language into another. Although there is some vague connection between abilities involved in translation and interpretation, it is not necessary for the translator to interpret and for interpreters to translate.

9. The profession of a translator/interpreter has a long history. According to the Bible at the dawn of human civilization all people spoke one language but when the God got angry with people he mixed their languages in such a way that they couldn’t understand each other.

10. In synchronous interpretation the interpreter is supposed to be able to give his translation while the speaker is uttering the original message. This can be achieved with a special radio or telephone equipment. The interpreter receives the original message through his ear-phones and simultaneously speaks into the microphone (mike) which transmits his speech to the listeners. This type of translation involves a number of psychological and psycholinguistic problems both of theoretical and practical nature.

11. In consecutive (posledovatelnii) translation the translating starts after the original speech or some part of it has been completed. Here the interpreter’s strategy and the final result depend to a great extent on the length of the segment to be translated. If the segment is just a sentence or two the interpreter closely follows the original speech. As often as not, however, the interpreter is expected to translate a long speech which has lasted for scores of minutes or even longer. In this case he has to remember a great number of messages and keep them in mind until he begins his translation. To make this possible the interpreter has to take notes of the original message.

12. Sometimes the interpreter is limited in time to give his rendering. It means that he has to reduce his translation considerably, selecting and reproducing the most important parts of the original and dispensing with the rest. This implies the ability to make judgments on the relative value of various messages and to generalize or compress the received information. The interpreter must be good and quick-witted person.

13. Different Levels of Difficulties in Translation Sometimes people think that if a person knows two languages perfectly well it is not difficult for him to translate from the Target language into the Source language. But it’s not so. Let’s take for example the simple sentence in English “ The cat is on the mat”.

14. Very often there happen sentences which are unclear and it is difficult to see where the translation begins from. Let’s take the sentence ‘The buyer of the collar buys a cap and writes the floor; the writer of the collar writes a cap and buys a floor’. To translate this sentence in a proper way the translator should analyze not only the grammar of the sentence but paradigms of all words as well.

15. 2.2. Reliability and Speed in Translation Reliability in translation is largely a matter of meeting the user's needs: translating the texts the user needs translated, in the way the user wants them to be translated, by the user's deadline. The demands placed on the translator by the attempt to be reliable from the user's point of view are sometimes impossible; sometimes disruptive to the translator's private life; sometimes morally repugnant; often physically and mentally exhausting.

16. The first thing to remember is that not everyone translates for clients. There is no financial motivation for rapid translation when one translates for fun. The second is that not all clients need a translation next week. The acquisitions editor at a university press who has commissioned a literary or scholarly translation may want it done quickly, for example, but "quickly" may mean in six months rather than a year, or one year rather than two. And the third thing to remember is that not everyone is willing or able to force personal preferences into conformity with market demands.

17. There can be no doubt, however, that in most areas of professional translation, speed is a major virtue. The translator should work to increase his/her speed. The simplest step is to improve the typing skills. The other factors governing translating speed are harder to change. The speed with which you process difficult vocabulary and syntactic structures depends partly on practice and experience. The more you translate, the more well-trodden synaptic pathways are laid in your brain from the source to the target language.

18. Many freelance translators and agencies increase translation speed through the purchase and use of translation memory (TM) software. These programs — notably TRAD OS Translation Workbench, Atril's DejaVu, IBM Translation Manager, Star Transit, and SDLX — are all fairly expensive, and mainly useful with very repetitive translation tasks, such as a series of user's manuals from the same client, so their most spectacular application has been in the translation divisions of corporations ("in-house" translating). TM software makes it possible for a new hire to translate like an old hand after just a few hours of training in the software.

19. TM software also only works with texts that you receive in digital form, so if most of your work arrives over the fax line, you can safely put off buying one of the programs (scanning a faxed job with OCR (optical character recognition) will introduce so many glitch characters that you will spend more time fixing up the text for the software than the software would save you). Freelancers who use it are also quick to point out that TM software doesn't "create creativity" — it is purely for organizing existing term match- ups — and so is useless with literary translation, and even for translating advertising copy. However, despite these limitations, TM software has brought about a revolution in the translation profession that is comparable to the spread of digital computers in the 1980s and the Internet in the 1990s.

20. 2.3.Moral Issues in Translation Business Just as professionals such as doctors and lawyers occasionally grapple with ethics, translators and interpreters will likely face a range of ethical dilemmas in the practice of their profession. Certain countries have established codes of conduct that set out guidelines for issues such as quality standards, impartiality, and confidentiality; however, the truly difficult decisions arise when linguists are asked to translate a text that clashes with their personal ethical standards.translators

21. The professional ethics of translation have traditionally been defined very narrowly: it is unethical for the translator to distort the meaning of the source text. As we have seen, this conception of translator ethics is far too narrow even from the user's point of view: there are many cases when the translator is explicitly asked to "distort" the meaning of the source text in specific ways, as when adapting a text for television, a children's book, or an advertising campaign. Professional ethics is an integral part of any interpreter/translator. He is not an ordinary clerk, his profession is connected with the translation of information and he must do it with full responsibility.

22. From the translator's internal point of view, the ethics of translation is more complicated still. What is the translator to do, for example, when asked to translate a text that s/he finds offensive? Or, to put that differently, how does the translator proceed when professional ethics (loyalty to the person paying for the translation) clash with personal ethics (one's own political and moral beliefs)? What does the feminist translator do when asked to translate a blatantly sexist text? What does the liberal translator do when asked to translate a neo-Nazi text? What does the environmentalist translator do when asked to translate an advertising campaign for an environmentally irresponsible chemical company?

23. As long as thinking about translation has been entirely dominated by an external (nontranslator) point of view, these have been nonquestions — questions that have not been asked, indeed that have been unaskable. The translator translates whatever texts s/he is asked to translate, and does so in a way that satisfies the translation user's needs. The translator has no personal point of view that has any relevance at all to the act of translation. From an internal point of view, however, these questions must be asked. Trans­lators are human beings, with opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings.

24. Translators, like the members of any other professional group, are likely to encounter a variety of ethical issues in the practice of their profession. In some countries, codes of conduct exist that set out guidelines on issues such as quality guarantees, impartiality, independence and secrecy. Clients rely on the translator to provide a translation that does full justice to the source text. This means that the translation should cover every aspect and connotation in the source, and should not add any material or connotations extraneous to that source, nor hints of the translator’s personal opinion with respect to the subject-matter.

25. Another interesting issue is that of errors in the source text. The requirement of faithfulness dictates that any errors found should simply be copied into the translation, but this obviously clashes with every serious translator’s common sense and desire to produce a text that is free from error and, if at all possible, even better than the original. Sometimes a translator might even feel the urge to protect the author’s reputation if he suspects that the content or tone of voice of the source text would open its author to ridicule.

26. The obvious strategy in these cases is to highlight errors or problems and ask the client to reconsider his text, and while many clients will indeed appreciate such perspicacity, others will condemn the translator for being pedantic. Clearly there is no ideal remedy.

27. Unethical behaviour in translation business When most people think of ethics and professionals, they tend to focus on people like accountants, doctors, lawyers, or other high profile jobs. However, everyone that deals with other people in their business has the duty and responsibility to be ethical. Translators are no exception. It is easy for people to point out unethical behaviour in certain professions, but what about translators? It might not be as apparent. However, unethical activities do occur and it's important to know what some of these are and ways to keep them from being a temptation to you.

28. Unethical behaviour in the translation profession can take many forms. For example, translators are usually on deadlines with clients and it's important to be truthful to your clients in terms of what you can accomplish in a given timeframe. If you come to terms with a client and agree to finish a job by a certain deadline, it is unethical to decide not to do that job or not finish it on time without informing the client. They usually have deadlines as well, and not respecting those is not only bad for business, but is also unethical.

29. Another major way that translators can be unethical is by not keeping their clients' information confidential. Translators are privy to all sorts of information, and some of this information is private and confidential to the client that requested the translation. It is definitely unethical for a translator to disclose this information to anybody. Another way that translators can be unethical is by purposely overcharging a client when a price has already been quoted.

30. There is also a category of texts which, at first sight, appear to be positively illegal. If a translator agreed to translate bomb-making instructions, would he be responsible for attacks committed with the bombs produced with the help of such instructions? He certainly would, in our view, if he did not take the trouble of finding out who needed the translation, and for what purpose it was required. If the nature of the client were sufficiently obscure to raise even the slightest concern, no translator in his right mind would accept such an order. However, if the translation was commissioned by a government authority as part of efforts to study terrorists’ practices, the translator might actually contribute to a good cause by translating even the most reprehensible texts.

31. To sum up, it is clear that translators in addition to grappling with the technical content of source texts may be up to some morally challenging tasks as well. While guidelines and codes of conduct exist to help translators formulate their stance in general ethical issues, in many cases the approach to practical moral dilemmas in translation will be a matter of personal consideration and assessment, aided by the translator’s knowledge of the client.