Professional ethics and moral code of interpreters

The role of professional ethics in a deregulated 21st century is of great importance for interpreters' job to be sustainable. Ethics, also called Moral Philosophy, is a discipline concerned with what is morally good and bad, right or wrong. The term also applies to any system or theory of moral values or principles. Normative ethics seeks to set norms or standards of conduct. Ethics tells people what they should do and embodies the ideals they should strive to attain. Unethical behavior leads to punishments that are related to how an individual is perceived, both by himself and by his fellow men. Law, on the other hand, provides boundaries of actions, set by society, beyond which a person may go only by risking external sanctions, such as incarceration or loss of a job license.

Below there are basic rules of behavior of interpreters compiled into the “moral code” of interpreters:

1. An interpreter is a “translator”, who rearranges (transforms) the oral text in the source language into the text in the target language.

2. An interpreter has no right to change the source text at his own will, to compress or to expand it, unless such compression or expansion is conditioned by the context, or requested by the client.

3. An interpreter by using professional techniques and tools of interpreting always seeks to render the invariant of the source message as exactly as possible and bears professional, moral and even legal responsibility for the equivalence of interpretation. However, the interpreter bears no responsibility for what is being said by the source speaker.

4. An interpreter must always be impartial and neutral in terms of political, cultural, ethnic, religious or gender views of all parties to the negotiations (talks, conferences, round tables, etc) even if the interpreter does not share or support these views.

5. An interpreter has no right to intervene into the relationships of the parties to negotiations, to express his or her attitude towards the contents of what is being interpreted or “prompt” anything to the speakers.

6. An interpreter shall comply with the confidentiality and professional integrity requirements and has no right to publicly disclose the contents of what is being interpreted. However, if the conference is of an open character, is widely covered by the mass media or if its materials have been declassified, the interpreter may use the materials of the conference for teaching or other non–profit making purposes after two years have passed since the date the conference was held.

7. An interpreter shall by all means provide for high professional competence in the sphere of the source and target languages, techniques and skills of interpreting and competence in the relevant subject fields.

8. An interpreter shall have the right to demand appropriate conditions for his or her work – provision of the background subject field materials (glossaries of terminology, printed texts of speeches, agendas of events, lists of participants, etc), reliability of sound equipment, acceptable speed of speech of participants, breaks to have some rest, water to be delivered to the booth, etc.

9. An interpreter is bound by responsibility for the quality of interpretation. In case of written translation of the mass media or fictional texts, a translator is entitled to the copyright as it is envisaged by the legislation of Ukraine and the name of the translator should be mentioned in the relevant publications.