Ethics Is a Professional Concern

Ethical questions concern translation on two levels. On the one hand, tired repetitions of traduttore traditore presuppose some kind of ideal loyalty to a source text, author or sender, often pitted against similar loyalty to a receiving language, culture or receiver. On the other, codes of ethics are written for the control of translation as a profession, regulating the translator's relations with other translators, with clients and with questions like official secrets. These are two very different levels. In the first case, the ideal translator remains an invisible linguistic figure, corresponding to no I-here-now. In terms of the profession, however, the ideal translator is a juridical and fiscal entity who, according to most contemporary ethical codes, should have paratextual and extra-textual presence as the partly responsible source of translated texts. The implicit anonymity of the first level would seem to be overridden by a call to explicit professional presence on the second.

Historically, this difference in levels can be projected as a long process going from politically enslaved anonymity to independently professional practice, a process that has been accompanied by the progressive development and justification of translational ethics. That is, to the extent that translators have slowly transformed their anonymity into a professional identity, they have been able partly to develop a professional ethics.

Since the historical development of the profession it concerns a collectivity, i.e. translators are a social group. It is misleading to formulate translation rules as simple precepts for individuals who might be morally right or corrigibly wrong. The essential problem of translational ethics is not how to translate in any given situation, but who may decide how to translate.

Partial answers to this question can be gleaned from the long march from slavery to professionalism. Translators became professional, but they did not do so spontaneously or individually. They passed through several intermediary stages, recountable in terms of political models and arabesque arguments concerning inspiration, individualism, divided loyalty and the apparently neutral use of natural languages.

 

2. The Notion of ‘Ours’ and ‘Theirs’ in the Work of a Translator

The first written references to translation did not mention translators at all: in the sixth-dynasty of Egypt (2423 - 2263 BC) one of the official titles of the Princes of Elephantine was "overseers of dragomans" (translator in the Middle East). There was nothing said of the dragomans or interpreters-guides themselves, who were presumably controlled by nobodies. Similarly, the Biblical references listed by E.Nida mention not the history of translators, but the history of the kings, princes and priests for whom translations were carried out. Performatives belong to kings, princes and priests; translations remain as anonymous as the overwhelming majority of those who, for at least four thousand years, have sacrificed their extra-textual identities in the interests of one kind of equivalence or another.

Although these extra-textual phenomena indicate the nominal existence of a translating individual, they should not contradict translational equivalence, since their very function is to provide support for the acceptance of equivalence. In theory, translators can only be accorded the absolute anonymity of equivalence when they can be trusted absolutely. Unfortunately, in practice, the principle of anonymity is mostly relative, since the extra-textual indicators are themselves not equally trustworthy - foreign diplomas and references are easy to forge - and intellectuals tend to have too many personal opinions anyway. The problem remains.

Now, which extra-textual factors are most likely to be trustworthy? Traditional authority mechanisms tend to subordinate meritocratic indicators to factors like birthright and group identification. Moreover, since politics is largely the discursive elaboration of an inclusive and exclusive "we,” the person who is to be trusted should ideally be included in the same first-person plural as the king, prince or priest distributing authority. In Spain, sworn translators are authorised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and have their certificates issued in the name of the king. The translator should identify with the central authoritative figure. The truly trustworthy translator should ideally be "one of us.”

The only problem with this traditional guideline is that, since translation concerns exchange between different cultures, there is always at least one double "we" involved. In theory, the translator's loyalty could always be to the foreign prince or trader, the potential enemy or thief. In practice, ostensible allegiance almost always goes one way or the other, perhaps according to which prince is paying the most for translational services. Yet objectively mercenary behaviour is never a guarantee of absolute loyalty; clever princes require some form of subjective allegiance as well. Nor are translators able to pretend to the strict disinterest of other kinds of mercenaries: a hired gun can fight in any battle whatsoever, independently of subjective identification, but translators, like spies, can only be employed in situations between cultures of which they have substantial personal experience; they can only be employed in places where their loyalty is open to question. The Princes of Elephantine were not just overseeing linguistic resemblance; they also had to trust dragomans as guides, as former nomads and border-dwellers who knew the foreign lands to be crossed and thus partly belonged to a foreign "we.” Translators are habitually from diglossic border regions, from families of mixed background, from situations where language loyalty contradicts national frontiers. Since they have by definition incorporated elements of multiple subjective identification, since they speak the language and know the lands of the foreigner, since they share the cultural references of real or potential enemies, translators will never be able to convince sceptical princes that their inner subjective identification is entirely one-sided.

A slightly different solution to the problem of the political "we" can be observed in the background of major international summits. When two presidents meet in different languages, there are usually two interpreters on hand for the necessary shadowing. Why two? Since summit-level interpreters are competent in two-way communication, only one should be strictly necessary from the point of view of linguistic skills. Yet neither president wants his words filtered through a foreign mouthpiece. In practice, two interpreters are necessary so that each can function as a check on the equivalence produced by the other: one is presumed to be "ours", the other is "theirs". In this way, the problem of trust is partly solved by making specially selected translators their own mutual overseers.

In the early Middle Ages two translators often worked on the one text, the first producing a literal version, the second then adjusting the literalism to the stylistic requirements of the target language. In principle, this double translation allows for a checking of loyalty in both directions. The "ours" and "theirs" of summit translators becomes an internal fact of the translating process itself, without any recourse to hierarchies or claims of divine inspiration.

Should the ideal translator work alone or in a group? It is no doubt possible to find at least one great individual translator for every great professional group of translators, and no amount of historical or statistical argument will win the day.

Especially in the field of literary texts, preferences for the collectiveness or singularity of translators tend to follow general ideas about ideal authorship and the strength of the corresponding property bond between author and text. If an age believes that all great authors are individuals, its preferred translators will also tend to be individuals.

It seems pragmatically correct that "authorless" genres like information brochures should not name their translators, and that strongly authored texts like poems should always give the translator's name. But there are many genres where authorship bonds are weak and, although ostensible sources are cited, it is very difficult to have a translator's name printed. This difficulty concerns political and economic texts, children's literature, encyclopaedia articles, how-to-paint books and almost anything else that, in commercial passages from publisher to publisher, can undergo any number of uncontrolled rewrites. In these cases, authors are often named quite independently of their knowledge or desire, and translators tend to become as anonymous as the unscrupulous intermediary agents they work for. For this reason alone, it would be difficult to base translational ethics on criteria of authorship. But there are other reasons as well.

If the individual translator's ethical decisions concern cases of loyalty divided between ST and TT cultures, an easy way to solve such dilemmas is presumably to get rid of the figure of the individual translator, thereby getting rid of the subjectivity originally called upon to make such decisions. Indeed, the very existence of authoritative professional groups suggests that there is a certain strategic virtue to be found in the semantic absence of individualism, in tacit retreat from situations of individual choice. By complying with group decisions, the individual's equivalence might be supposed to escape partisan bias and attract substantial social guarantees.

In accordance with this view, an ethics of anonymity would have the translator remain an essentially passive entity with no identity beyond professional unanimity. Translators might perhaps work, but they should not be seen to work.