Abstract
Although ethics has been a heated topic in translation and interpreting (T&I) studies (Drugan, 2017; Koskinen & Pokorn, 2020; Monzó-Nebot & Wallace, 2020), few publications touch upon the application of ethics-related issues in the context of T&I education, especially under the impact of technological advances. Filling this void, the volume The Routledge Guide to Teaching Ethics in Translation and Interpreting Education authored by Rebecca Tipton, concentrates on the systematic exploration of integrating ethics into T&I teaching and learning. This book, as the second publication in the Routledge Guides to Teaching Translation and Interpreting, has multiple aims: first, to provide guidance for reconsidering existing practice in T&I ethics education; second, to critically evaluate the current T&I pedagogy and its role in enhancing ethics education; third, to design practical ethics-related learning activities; and fourth, to stimulate in-depth discussions about tertiary-level ethics education. The book is divided into six parts, which contain five chapters in addition to an introduction. Combining theoretical and practical perspectives, the book sheds light on the inclusion of ethical aspects in T&I education to a larger extent than what currently occurs.
In the Introduction, the author elaborates on the aims and core principles of the volume, points out the research gap on ethics education in T&I despite the ever-growing interest in this field, and introduces each chapter’s themes as well as types of tasks both for educators and students. Moving beyond teaching, Tipton advocates for an integrated method that requires joint efforts in teaching to emphasise how students learn ethical decision-making and foster ethical development as the goal of ethics education.
Chapter 1 consists of two parts: ethics teaching and teaching ethics. The first part, ethics teaching, depicts a critical overview of T&I theories and moral philosophy and their relationships with ethics in T&I, highlighting the potential application of ethical relativism and moral imagination. The second part sets out the context for teaching-related ethics and highlights social responsibility to promote greater equality, diversity, and inclusion in classrooms. Nevertheless, the connections between the ethical framework of social responsibility and T&I education are not mentioned clearly, leaving what differentiates T&I teaching ethics from other programmes’ teaching ethics unelucidated.
As for curriculum design, the author discusses the influences of curriculum alignment, hidden curriculum, assessment, and feedback on student learning. The part would benefit from the inclusion of examples that demonstrate the hidden curriculum in T&I education. For instance, Cheung (2019) focuses on the hidden curriculum in Chinese/English interpreter training, in which he analyses reflective essays written by students from a 1-year MA programme in interpreting in China. These essays discussed students’ reflections on their study trip to international organisations. He acknowledges that the explicit interpreting curriculum, which delineates elements of interpreting expertise, teaching content, and learning outcomes, stresses the importance of incorporating non-native Chinese in the training programmes to enhance racial diversity. However, based on the analysis of students’ reflective essays, the hidden curriculum assumes that all the trainees are native Chinese speakers, leading to ethnic homogeneity in the Chinese booth at international conferences.
In addition, the topics of feedback and assessment the author mentions in this chapter may benefit interpreting education in more specific ways than discussed. Feedback and assessment are an essential part of learning and teaching interpreting because they may be more complicated in interpreting than in translation because of the multidimensional nature of interpreting outputs and transient character of spoken language. Due to the relatively scarce literature on feedback in interpreting pedagogy and interpreter training (Domínguez Araújo, 2019), it is worthwhile to identify commonalities and differences between students’ and teachers’ feedback, thus serving a useful foundation for deciding which approach to take to the integration of ethics into interpreting teaching and learning. In the early stages of ethics education in interpreter training, the interpreting class is often teacher-centred, as students rely heavily on teachers’ feedback and assessment. However, as time goes by and students acquire more knowledge and develop essential skills for self-learning and self-assessment, the class will gradually shift to a more student-centred approach.
Chapter 2 examines the integration of ethics into the translation curriculum. It acknowledges the traditional goals for translation graduates to achieve high standards of integrity and thoroughness and highlights their limitations in developing a structured approach to ethics education. The chapter proposes a focus on the evolvement of students’ self-concept as a translator, which differs from benchmark professional translator identity because a professional outlook does not necessarily lead to a positive outcome in ethical conflicts. In this chapter, pre-translation tasks, including peer translation, reading, monolingual revision, and text profiling, are suggested to cultivate students’ ethical sensitisation. Although pre-translation tasks are interesting and potentially useful, the introduction of monolingual revision could benefit from a more in-depth description of the task assessment because students may encounter specialised texts. As students are not experts in these specialised fields, the question of how to be sure and who can decide whether corrections are necessary and right remains to be further investigated.
The chapter also uses literary and commercial domains of translation as examples to illustrate various ethical issues across text types. By drawing insights from both the humanities and the business world, the chapter illustrates how core ethical principles are applied in different contexts. This genre-based approach to developing awareness about ethical problems has the potential to be applied into interpreting courses due to diverse requirements and functions generated by different genres and contexts, such as medical and court interpreting. Furthermore, transcreation, regarded as a productive ground for ethical issues in this chapter, resonates with the concept of translanguaging (Li, 2018), which can be adapted for ethics-related pedagogy in interpreting education, as a translanguaging space is likely to provide opportunities for students from diverse social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds to develop intercultural competence and professional identities without limits (Runcieman, 2021).
Chapter 3 focuses on the application of technology and the ethical issues it has brought about in the translation curriculum. Through detailed examples and guidelines for activity design, the chapter provides inspiration on how to weave digital reflexivity into the fabric of the teaching and learning of machine translation, post-editing, and collaborative translation. Although the translation technology introduced in the chapter is broad in scope, Chat-GPT, a pre-trained large language model based on artificial intelligence (AI), is left out despite its huge popularity in translation practice (Larroyed, 2023; Siu, 2023), evaluation (Jiao et al., 2024), and classrooms (Zhou, 2023). This kind of emerging technology also generates a broad range of ethical issues (Stahl & Eke, 2024). Specifically, it requires a meticulous arrangement of prompts that are understandable and relevant, and that resonate with AI’s interpretive systems in order for humans to achieve the desired outcomes. Hence, the ethical questions raised by prompt engineering, such as algorithm bias, also merit attention amid the rhetoric over AI’s superiority to the human translator.
This chapter also has the possibility to lend support for ethical explorations in technology-assisted interpreting practice and education. For instance, ethical risks, such as data security, data bias, service quality, and transparency lurk in technology use for interpreting as well (Bakdash et al., 2024; Horváth, 2022). Therefore, it is necessary to knit ethical thinking into interpreting and the technology curriculum to develop students’ ethical decision-making in AI-assisted interpreting. However, the differences in technology-assisted interpreting education need closer examination. For example, feedback assisted by technology in interpreting classrooms needs to move beyond reference texts (Chan, 2023) and consider comprehensive assessment by different stakeholders.
Chapter 4, directly related to interpreting education, discusses ethical matters by dividing spoken language interpreting into dialogue and conference interpreting curricula. As for dialogue interpreting, Demand Control Schema proposed by Dean and Pollard (2013), in combination with drama-based pedagogies, is recommended for ethical decision-making cultivation. In the context of conference interpreting, the author advises using academic articles, such as corpus-based studies, to offer supporting materials for ethical decision-making in interpreting practice. Case-based learning and interpreter agency conceptualisation through social justice and activism are also critically reviewed.
However, interpreting technology and online interpreting training, especially among the surging adoption of remote interpreting since COVID-19, are not incorporated in this chapter. Differences between machine and human interpreting (Pöchhacker, 2024), and interpreting technology use before, during, and after an interpreting task (Zwischenberger et al., 2023) carry educational importance as well. As remote interpreting has become indispensable in this industry, ethical problems brought by this mode, such as the impact on the interpreter’s role, deserve consideration in ethical debates on interpreting tasks. In addition, although online learning offers new opportunities in the ever-evolving educational setting, ethical risks like low potential equality in learning outcomes (Liu & Lei, 2023), student motivation, and technical challenges (Bayraktar-Özer & Söylemez, 2023) continue to be a concern for interpreting educators.
Chapter 5 is dedicated to the exploration of ethical considerations in the conduct of T&I research. It underscores the profound influence of biomedical sciences on research methodologies and provides a systematic review of fundamental ethical principles. These include the imperative to avoid harm; the necessity of obtaining informed consent; the maintenance of confidentiality; and the rigorous management, storage, and retention of data. Moreover, a significant portion of this chapter addresses the ethical dimensions associated with data collection in qualitative studies, emphasising the importance of ethical rigour throughout the research process. This analysis not only enriches the discourse on research ethics but also serves as a critical guide for ensuring ethical integrity in scholarly investigations.
Nonetheless, it is imperative to establish comprehensive ethical guidelines for quantitative research and subsequently integrate these principles into the pedagogy of research ethics, which is not covered in this chapter. For instance, the practice of replication in quantitative research, which has gained prominence in the T&I field during recent years (Freese & Peterson, 2020; Olalla-Soler, 2020), presents a range of ethical challenges. These include maintaining open contact with original authors, ensuring methodological alignment with the original study, selecting appropriate statistical analyses, and upholding the transparency of the replication process.
This volume significantly enriches the T&I field through its distinctive contributions. First, it introduces comprehensive frameworks that address a wide range of current and pressing issues encompassing T&I ethics teaching, the ethical dimensions of T&I education, technology-related ethics, and research ethics. In doing so, it effectively addresses the existing void in ethics education because this relevance ensures that the content is applicable to the modern ethical challenges that students and educators face in the rapidly evolving landscape of T&I. Second, the book provides practical guidelines, including detailed prompts, activities, and recommended readings, facilitating the incorporation of ethical considerations into T&I curricula. It incorporates a suite of methodological tools designed to foster ethical reflexivity, bolster confidence in ethical decision-making, and cultivate a robust commitment to ethical standards in professional practices. These resources are designed to foster educators’ reflective thinking and allow educators to customise the materials in alignment with diverse pedagogical settings and student demands. Third, the present volume advocates a pedagogically rigorous approach to the teaching of ethics, deliberately structured to elevate the calibre of student engagement and learning within this discipline. It combines theories of T&I and other disciplines, philosophies, and practice to ensure that the guide is both practical and applicable across varying educational contexts, thereby enhancing its utility as a scholarly resource in T&I programmes.
The contribution of this book would be greater if some limitations are addressed. First, “ethics” could perhaps be defined more clearly. Second, interpreting technology needed to be mentioned to present a more panoramic view of technology ethics in T&I practice and education. Third, a deeper exploration of certain ethical issues could enhance its effectiveness. For instance, although some real-life examples of ethical problems related to translation technologies are included, the incorporation of case studies for further analysis would enhance the approach.
Overall, despite minor criticisms, this volume is a useful and comprehensive guide and highly recommended for T&I students, educators, and researchers.
