Honest and Ethical Use of Communication in Translation

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Translation workers who work in media occupations spend a great deal of time talking about “doing the right thing.” Nevertheless, it is not rare that we, as readers or viewers of these disseminators of news, information, and entertainment find that there is something wrong with the “ethics” of their actions. What has led the purveyors of mass communication to believe and act the way they do? Are they morally bound to observe special ethical norms that the rest of us are not, or, in fact, they feel free to cross over the basic moral principles the ordinary citizens have to adhere to so that they are allowed to a “free marketplace of ideas”? These are the questions we must ask ourselves if we are to be moral agents of the mass media.

With this series of articles we make an attempt to provide for bilingual professionals the tools they need to use mass media in an honest and ethic way, both as a recipients of the media “products” and professionals who work in the field of journalism and other media. We think that new Chinese Translation to English workers, Polish Translation and Arabic Translation workers who will be working on such matters as Medical Translation and Legal Translation will benefit from this article most. We have to state from the very beginning that the purpose of this article is not to rule what is “right” to do when handling situations. Here we will try to give you some suggestions of what you can do in a given situation. In doing so, we will focus both on the subject and on the reason we consider the action to be the most appropriate. We have gone to great lengths to answer many questions that the readers on our blog have asked. We also try to give a complete and detailed explanation of each of them.

As one Vietnamese to English Translation worker, who also contributed to this article said, after all it will be your responsibility to make conclusions regarding the responses you choose to accept. We anticipate that you will gain a greater understanding for the difficulties of making a moral decision. At the very least, you will be required to construct a personal benchmark by which to measure your decisions.

Thus, this series of posts will focus on news media, advertising, and public relations. While entertainment media, such as television and the movie industry, are certainly worth investigating for translation workers, these three are the most popular choices for new college graduates with dual majors in Translation studies and Journalism or Communication. What translation and interpretation workers who operate in these three fields have learned can be applied to other forms of communication, information based or otherwise. In addition, one of our Polish Translator workers has provided a lot of information related to the entertainment industry and its effect on world culture. Of course, there have also been written a lot of words against the condition state of modern journalism in different countries. However, advertising and, especially, public relations are often given short shift or—worse—compared with journalism, assuming that the moral dictates of the one will apply across the board to the others. Since that is rarely the case, this book is an attempt to outline the differences that exist among these three types of media in the hope of enhancing the development of sound and specific guidelines by which they may be analyzed and, if necessary, judged according to their specific functions. At last, the principle to tell the truth and to do least harm should be obligatory for all mass media, but to a different extent and for undoubtedly different reasons.

Technorati Tags: Chinese Translation, Ethics, media, Polish Translation, Vietnamese Translation

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!