Professional Detachment Is Attachment to a Profession

A properly translational ethics must precede questions of individually divided loyalty. It must be developed beforehand, in the space of the collective professionalization which produced the ideal of the individual translator in the first place. Translators' prime loyalty must be to their profession as an intercultural space, an intersubjective place in which criteria of translational quality can and should be determined.

On what basis should these decisions be made? It is important to realise that certain factors lie beyond professional control.

First, there is rarely any question of improving the source-text, which by definition lies beyond the space of translation. The ST is generally to be regarded as a fait accompli, outside the control of the translator and only entering translation through irreversible transfer. No one can change de Gaulle's speech of 1940. What can be improved is the transferred text, the original as it arrives in a new context: a translator could and did attempt to improve de Gaulle's speech as it existed in Britain in 1966.

Second, the question of improvement does not directly concern the content of the translated text. When we discuss the moral responsibility of the translator in terms of issues like "the manufacture or sale of armaments, the use of animals in laboratory experiments, and pornography", the questions involved might concern the translator's opinions and beliefs as an individual, but do not concern the translator's profession as such. The individual translator can refuse to work in these areas, but does so as an individual, like any other worker reluctant to be involved. There are no strictly professional grounds for saying that such texts should not be translated.

Source-texts and non-translational ideologies must thus lie beyond the space in which a professional ethics can be developed.

Content is one thing; axiological presentation is quite another. The translator or interpreter, when he or she is translating and interpreting, is in the same position as an advocate. An advocate, during the course of his career, may occasionally appear on behalf of an unfortunate victim, but it is more than likely that his client will be a double-dyed villain who would make him shudder with disgust if he had not learnt to take an attitude of professional detachment. The clients rely on the translator to put their case, in the foreign language, as they would like to see it put, not as the translator would like to see it put.

The analogy might be more instructive than it appears. If a client knows how a case should be put, why should he or she need an advocate? Obviously, so that a spontaneous presentation of the case can be improved; so that certain embarrassing details can be left out or hidden, other advantageous elements extended or added, a more formal or logical order instituted. The advocate, like the translator, is employed to improve a given text. But should the translator therefore mimic the advocate's professional detachment with respect to the client's purpose as such?

When a barrister argues a client's case, it is in a symmetrical situation where a further professional will argue the opposing case, producing a partitioned dialogue leading to a formal conclusion or judgement. That is, professional advocates are employed to facilitate exchange within a highly formalised regime. If they are detached with respect to the moral value of their client's actions and opinions, it is because they are firmly attached to the ethical values of the discursive regime within which they work: they will not abuse the judge; they will respect court rules; they will speak the formalised language of the profession; they will tailor the client's case to suite the rules and conventions of the applicable legal code.

Now, if the translator is really a kind of advocate, there is no reason why the analogy should be limited to professional detachment. One should also ask what professional criteria - what regime of formalised exchange - might justify this detachment as ethical commitment. If there is detachment, it is only because there is attachment to something else. Barristers are attached to the rules and procedures of the court, which has as its purpose the dispensing of justice. Translators should presumably be attached to the rules and procedures of their profession, justifying their actions and decisions in terms of translation's own ultimate aim. But where advocates have the symmetry of accusation and defence, translators have only the asymmetry of imposed directionality; where advocates leave the final decision to a judge, translators themselves are surely the only people fully qualified to assess the shortcomings of their intercultural work. For these reasons, the fact that the advocate's aim is to serve a client does not necessarily mean that the same purpose is valid for translators.

The apparent conflict between translational improvement and professional detachment thus in fact concerns the translator's attachment to a profession whose ultimate aims have yet to be formulated.