Cross-cultural approach to professional codes of ethics for Translators and Interpreters

This workshop aims to introduce and trial a lens through which we can critically engage with professional code(s) of ethics, apply them to some ethically challenging situations, and self-reflect our own value-governed practice, which is a crucial part of never-ending professional development.

A professional code of ethics is documentation which inscribes ethical norms expected to be shared by people involved in the profession. A code of ethics can provide a powerful set of rules which prescribe “right” behaviours and prohibit “wrong” behaviours as agreed by the community and can be cultural-specific. This culture-specific nature of ethical norms, and of the code(s) of ethics, is relevant to those shared in professional communities, including a community of translators and interpreters (T&I).

Looking from a cultural perspective, in the first part we shall introduce and compare how T&I code(s) of ethics are structured as a system in a range of countries which have experienced, and are experiencing, diverse paths toward multiculturalism and multilingualism: Australia, South Africa, the UK, the US, China and Japan. Then, the second part will start by illustrating how distinctive cultural values are reflected in some of the T&I ethical principles by comparing the cases of Australia and Japan. Each part will include individual and group activities through which we will reflect on and share our own views toward the T&I code(s) of ethics and identify differences and similarities between codes of ethics from Australia and from a cultural context of your choice.

To prepare for the workshop, it would be helpful if you could
1) look up any code(s) of ethics for translators and interpreters available in a region of your choice (e.g. which organisation(s) maintain those? Are they domain-specific?); and
2) note any ethical principles that highlight differences between them and the AUSIT code of ethics.

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO SHARE THIS INFORMATION WITH YOUR T&I COLLEAGUES

Speaker:

Maho Fukuno is an English-Japanese translator certified by NAATI. She is also a PhD candidate in Linguistics and Translation Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. After receiving her BA from Osaka University in Japan, she completed a Master of Translating and Interpreting at RMIT University in Melbourne in 2016. Her PhD project explores, from a social-cultural perspective, the relationship between translators’ ideology, emotions and practice in community translation settings, focusing on how translators negotiate between their subjectivity and ethical norms.

The above information is quoted from https://ausit.org/EventDetail?EventKey=SA200213