Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2020

This article reviews the practical, ethical, and policymaking dimensions of public service interpreting and translation in New Zealand. It shows that the country has had a limited tradition in translation and interpreting and that historically bilingual community members have been asked to perform T&I without specific training. Our review also reveals that several factors may explain the ongoing use of non-professionals across public settings: the availability of bilingual staff and community volunteers, the misrecognition of the T&I role, difficulties around procurement of highly skilled practitioners, and cost concerns. Policymakers and other members of the community have identified that these factors can negatively impact quality standards and professional ethics, as seen in the government’s recent initiative to regulate and professionalize the sector. We report on this initiative and our advisory role concerning the endorsement of a teleological approach to professional ethics.

This article presents a pilot research project which examined the effectiveness of remote, formal support, provided by Colleagues Across Borders, for volunteer interpreters in an immigration detention support NGO. We consider the occupational stress and susceptibility to vicarious traumatization and burnout for interpreters working in sensitive (e.g., refugee) contexts. It is argued that it is an ethical responsibility to keep oneself fit and well-prepared to perform interpreting assignments to the highest standards. The project offered an intervention of remote support for non-professional interpreters in a detention center who needed professional advice and emotional relief. Analysis of pre- and post-intervention focus groups and questionnaires indicates an improvement in self-care, resilience, confidence, and effectiveness after three support sessions, suggesting that a remote yet personal support program can mitigate the effects of vicarious trauma and burnout for non-professional and professional interpreters working in ethically challenging refugee contexts.

Crisis situations, including disasters, require urgent decisions, often without sufficient resources, including decisions about translating and interpreting. We argue that using citizen translators (i.e., translators without professional translator training) in such contexts can be ethically justified when their preparation incorporates virtue ethics. Translation potentially improves access to crucial safety information, and delivering such information is critical. We acknowledge several ethical challenges with citizen translation based on our experience in humanitarian contexts, relevant literature, and discussions with stakeholders engaged with our research consortium. Recourse to citizen translators has limitations, but we advance mitigation measures through training to address the ethical challenges of providing translation services to linguistically diverse groups in crisis. We propose virtue ethics as a framework for citizen translators to develop ethical decision-making skills and virtues. We suggest virtue ethics training to prepare citizen translators for ethical challenges in the field.

This article compares the professional profile of community interpreters to that of a particular group of intercultural mediators who work as non-professional, untrained interpreters, mainly in healthcare settings. Through a textual comparison of 13 deontological documents for community interpreters and intercultural mediators, this article investigates differences in the ethical positioning of these two profiles. The results show that while the codes of ethics of community interpreters tend to emphasize impartiality, the documents defining the emerging profile of intercultural mediators position advocacy more prominently. Beyond the differences in ethical positioning, the article also considers other reasons for the formation of this new profile and outlines several challenges related to the partial overlap between the two profiles, which include distorted definitions of the interpreter’s competences and performance, conceptual confusion in the research literature, and mismatched expectations of language services consumers.

This article analyzes the communicative behaviors of non-professional interpreters and primary participants in the context of therapy/counseling sessions in a prison setting. It describes the negotiation and collaboration patterns established among all members of the communicative triad in order to co-construct the interpreter’s role dialogically, in a corpus of 26 mental health interviews in a prison setting between therapists/counselors and allophone prisoners, with other inmates as interpreters. Using Goffman’s (1981) concept of footing as the main analytical tool, it sheds light on the conversational strategies that all members of the triad use to initiate, accept, or resist the interpreter’s shifts to different footings, especially those that depart most dramatically from widely accepted “translator” ones.

Accuracy tops most of the codes of ethics for public service interpreting. This dominant position is not accidental, since the lack of truth in the transmission of the message may entail a violation of the users’ and providers’ fundamental right to truth. In Catalonia, where intercultural mediators have taken on the role of interpreters for many years, the issue of accuracy becomes even more complex due to their dual roles as professional mediators and non-professional interpreters. Drawing on more than four hours of video recordings and post-task interviews with study participants, this paper analyzes the accuracy of five intercultural mediators working with Arabic, Spanish, and Catalan when in the role of interpreter.