Incorporating Ethics-Awareness Competence in China Translator-Training Programme

Abstract

This paper addresses the imperative of embedding ethics-awareness competence in translator-training programmes in China, and illustrates the components and methodology that such training involves. Although ethical issues have been approached from a variety of perspectives in the wider discipline of Translation Studies in China, discussion about the role of ethicsawareness in professional translation practice has tended to centre on the perceived qualities of loyalty or fidelity to the source text rather than exploring ethics as a value-based professional system. Moreover, there has been little discussion as to how ethics-awareness might be presented in the translator-training curriculum. This paper adopts a more reflective and critical stance towards ethical issues, and in particular as to how ethics might be taught through the application of “identity-state-explain” model under social constructivism. There are different interpretations between ethics and experience, while this paper will evaluate the perspectives of deontologists and consequentialists, discussing ethics in order both to present a practicebased discussion that draws upon ethics as an abstract system that is concerned to shape and control behaviours. Everything discussed here has a real-world value, calling as it does for a different approach to translatortraining than has hitherto been adopted. The paper will also seek to make a series of pedagogic recommendations that bring together real-world concerns with the enhanced professionalization of the role of the translator in today’s technological landscape. This competence is undeniably about text and how text is used, but professional translators also have to think for themselves what ethics might mean in different situations, to assess whether an activist stance may or may not be appropriate, and how the subject of translation itself is being publicly represented.