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Introduction
The Return to Ethics in Translation Studies

Anthony Pym

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The Translator. Volume 7, Number 2 (2001), 129-138 ISBN 1-900650-50-9

Introduction
The Return to Ethics in Translation Studies

ANTHONY PYM
Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain

Translation Studies has returned to questions of ethics. The observation is

simple enough. At the beginning of the 1990s, say, the talk was still of
describing translations, of moving away from the prescriptive or normative
age when one of the aims of Applied Linguistics was to tell translators how
to translate. Ethics was an unhappy word in those days of over-reaction. In
1994, after I had given a lecture on the subject to four lost cats at the Collège
International de Philosophie, Jean-René Ladmiral confided, as we waited for
a straggling metro, that he thought there should be no ethics of translation. A
metaphysics or meta-science perhaps, but not an ethics. The ethical Antoine
Berman, the object of that lecture, seemed unlikely to become the posthumous
hero he is today. And where should one find, in today’s world, enough
certitude to tell anyone how to translate? As if it were a question of catching
the right train. Yet the questions no longer stand there.
This return to ethics is part of a very general social trend. Major cross-
cultural problems have been presented by technological advances in biology
and medicine, with issues ranging from cloning to euthanasia questioning the
very identity of the human subject. Globalizing economies go hand-in- hand
with calls for global economic, environmental and human-rights regulators.
Outbreaks of minor nationalisms have seen many bombs dropped in the name
of an international justice that satisfies few. The internet is in need of gov-
ernance. Literary scholars have developed a sophisticated discussion of ethics,
in search of their own worth in an age that seems not to need literature.
Visibility has become an ethics-laden catch-cry for women, sexualities,
minorities of all kinds, and hybridity, breaking up the sameness once needed
for universal principles. At the same time, many of the politicians of the
recent past – and not just the bad guys – turned out to have less than clean
hands, undermining any remaining belief that ‘we’ are always on the side of
justice. The certitude of the great nineteenth-century ideologies is no longer
there.
Few of these problems concern translation directly. Yet they all increas-
ingly entail decision-making on a level above that of the individual culture or
nation. In all these cases there is deep doubt as to how to decide, and keen

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130 Introduction: The Return to Ethics in Translation Studies

awareness that the norms of tradition, established practice, cultural specificity,

or the past no longer suffice. In all these cases, ethics has become a cross-
cultural concern. As it has in translation studies.

Defining the field

Although many translation scholars now agree to discuss ethics, most would
disagree about how to define the field. In his contribution to this volume,
Andrew Chesterman distinguishes between what he sees as four current
models: the ethics of representation (of the source text, or of the author), an
expanding ethics of service (based on fulfilling a brief negotiated with a cli-
ent), a more philosophical ethics of communication (focused on exchanges
with the foreigner as Other), and a norm-based ethics (where ethical behav-
iour depends on the expectations specific to each cultural location). To these
four, Chesterman would add an ethics of ‘commitment’, an attempt to define
the ‘good’ ideally attained by translation, embodied in an oath that might
work as a code of professional ethics for translators. That makes five possi-
ble ways of talking about ethics. As Chesterman readily admits, these five
frequently overlap. Yet the various approaches converge as attempts to ex-
plain how and why translators should ‘do the right thing’ (or ‘avoid the wrong
thing’). The rough grid thus formed might help us locate the various ap-
proaches sampled in this volume.

To represent what?

A strong tradition in ethical questions is to consider the translator responsi-

ble for representing a source text or author. If something is in the source but
not in the translation, the translator is at fault and is thus somehow unethical.
This general approach was questioned many years ago by Georges Mounin
(1957), who pointed out that there were situations in which the translator
could not simply represent the words, nor the grammar, nor the style, prosodics
or semantics. A long line of theorists have similarly discussed translation as
an art of sacrifice, of knowing what to omit and what to retain, in a situation
of inevitable loss and axiomatic inferiority. Ethics would then reside in hav-
ing some kind of principle able to justify making the sacrifice one way or
another. Mounin claimed that such a principle should privilege something as
vague and as mystical as the “poetry of the (poetic) text”, the “global mean-
ing” (1957:148, 150). Umberto Eco, writing in 2001, does not really take us
much further, claiming that the translator’s representational fidelity should
be to the source text’s “guiding spirit (whatever that means)” (2001:117; see
John Style’s review in this volume). Henri Meschonnic, in 1973, gave a rather
more theorized description of what is to be translated, emphasizing the
textuality of the source text, its status as a specific practice, and the possibil-
Anthony Pym 131

ity of then, within historical limits, rendering “the marked for the marked,
the non-marked for the non-marked, figure for figure, and non-figure for
non-figure” (1973:315-16). This would more generally be described as “sig-
nificance” (1985) or “what a source text does”: the thing to be translated
becomes “what a way of thinking [une pensée] does to language” (1999:23).
Such vocabulary is only partly carried through in Jean-Marc Gouanvic’s
contribution to this volume, where ‘significance’ is seen as “the literary
intertext that crystallizes the interests specific to a field”. Gouanvic adds the
wider concepts of field and genre to the previous focus on textuality, demon-
strating that since the construction of meaning is quite different in science
fiction and the realist novel, the modes of translation may be quite different
yet equally representative of the source’s significance.
The ship of representation might thus seem to be riding out various storms
of dynamic textuality. For as much as a deconstructionist critique points out
that there is no stable source entity to be translated, there are certainly the
traces of activity that can be continued. As Gouanvic puts it “the ethics of the
target text is submitted to the future that the source text offers” (a notion that
recalls Benjamin, Steiner, and indeed Derrida). Representation need not be
restricted to an archeology of the dead.

A service to whom?

Representation might also be understood in the sense in which a lawyer

‘represents’ a client, involving ‘to speak on behalf of’, ‘to say what should
be said in the circumstances’, but also ‘to fulfil a brief’, usually ‘to win the
case’. Such might be representation as seen from the perspective of
Skopostheorie: the translator renders whatever translational service is required
by the client, and to do so well is ethically correct. In order to judge the
ethical virtues of a translation, one should thus locate the explicit brief
(commission, Auftrag) formulated by the client or in some way appropriate
to the target situation. This ethics of service is increasingly common in pro-
fessional circles, especially in the localization industry, where it goes
hand-in-hand with criteria of efficiency and acceptability to a specific target
locale. But such things are rarely argued about in terms of ethics, perhaps
because they are too close to common sense. Only Peter Newmark has taken
real issue with the trend, arguing that “the days of ‘my employer right or
wrong’ should be as dead as those of ‘my country or my cause right or wrong’”
(1994:70). For Newmark, the translator should remain representationally
committed to “the truth”, “logic”, “morality as it evolves”, “style” and
“universal pure/clean (rein) language”, not those of the text but of an ap-
parently universal “reserved area”. Newmark’s position was actually put to
the vote at a conference of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting in
1994, and lost by a large majority amid what Newmark describes as “dark
132 Introduction: The Return to Ethics in Translation Studies

mutterings about ‘thought police’ and ‘political correctness’” (1994:71). But

as Newmark correctly observes “in spite of democracy, minorities later ap-
pear to be right” (ibid.). That position, at least, is partly vindicated in this
volume.
One might expect the ethics of service to be most vigorously argued by
Christiane Nord, since her past work has been close to Skopostheorie ten-
ets. Yet we find in her contribution to this volume that the client’s brief is not
enough for an ethical translation, since there are other communication part-
ners involved: “If the client asks for a translation that would mean being
disloyal to either the author or the target readership or both, the translator
should argue this point with the client or perhaps even refuse to produce the
translation on ethical grounds”. Loyalty here thus requires a general compat-
ibility on the interpersonal level, including to the representational responsibility
not to contradict “the source-text author’s communicative intentions”. Much
depends here on the way the translator and/or client “has to decide what kind
of function the target text can possibly achieve in the target culture”. Once
that decision is made, the translation cannot be ethical or unethical in itself; it
merely fulfils the intended function well or badly. Here it is instructive to see
Nord the theorist defending Nord the co-translator of a German New Testa-
ment, speaking from within a very real situation in which various reviewers
did not understand or appreciate the ‘intended function’. Nord would claim
compatibility with all communication partners except perhaps those review-
ers. But then, as Monacelli and Punzo argue in their article, communication
is an experiential reality; we can only speak about it from within its practice;
an ethics seeking defence in a crystal-clear brief is condemned to its own
positionality.
Notions of service are certainly also at stake in Arnaud Laygues’ study
of how a novice translator was exploited by her publisher/co-translator, at
least to the extent that the briefs were not clear and the roles of the various
agents were poorly delimited. One might conclude, within an ethics of serv-
ice, that more ethical work conditions would be attained by defining more
explicitly what is required of the translator. However, Laygues recognizes
this as a partial solution only: in this case there was a more important lack of
interpersonal ethics underlying the professional veneer. Similarly, in Alev
Bulut and Turgay Kurultay’s work on the role of interpreters at disaster
sites, an ethics of service far outweighs any constraint to represent any par-
ticular source text, yet clarity in the definition of professional roles is not
enough. When the aim is to save as many lives as possible, the translator’s
reward is not a question of being paid as a correctly denominated profes-
sional. What is at stake is a very humanist giving of the Self to the Other, in
the name of what are unashamedly called, perhaps in the space but not the
thought of Newmark, “universal cultural values”.
Anthony Pym 133

Alterity vs deontology

Chesterman distinguishes between an ethics of service and an ethics of ‘com-

munication’, where the latter would more emphatically entail a relation with
people rather than with texts. This is indeed the general trend we have seen
operating in Nord, Laygues, Bulut and Kurultay, who are ultimately con-
cerned with the purposes of entire communication situations. Yet there is a
lot happening behind the scenes here.
One basic division not made clear in Chesterman’s grid is that between
‘ethics’ as the general field of relations between Self and Other (let us call it
‘alterity’), and ‘deontology’ as the stuff of rules and regulations, the ‘codes
of ethics’ (codes de déontologie) specific to a professional group. This dis-
tinction seems to hold more sway in French (where the words for the two
sides are more separate) than in the other languages in play in this volume.
Gouanvic and Tack raise the distinction explicitly; Basamalah underscores
the ways deontological codes such as the Nairobi Recommendation are inad-
equate to “properly ethical relations” with developing countries; Alexis Nouss
uses the same distinction in defending Berman: “when ethics is the welcom-
ing of alterity, if it is to be itself it has to be infinite and cannot be expressed
in terms of accuracy”. Laygues’ notes on Buber, Marcel and Levinas (pre-
sented as a review article in this volume) usefully sketch out the philosophical
tradition behind this commitment to alterity, which could also be referred
back to the creaky Kantian dictum that humanity should be treated as an end,
not just as a means. In the ethics of alterity, the translator would welcome the
foreign text as a person, giving of themselves and respecting otherness, in a
way that goes well beyond generalized deontological rules and calculations
(one recalls Nord’s notion of loyalty as an inter-personal category, to replace
fidelity as an inter-textual notion). For Nouss (1998), this philosophical eth-
ics excludes discussion of, for example, rates of pay. For Koskinen, reviewed
here by Lieven Tack, a properly postmodern ethics of translation cannot be
based completely on economic relations, on the concerns of a profession,
which can only restrict the translator’s ethical subjectivity (2000:120). On
this point both Nouss and Koskinen take issue with Pym. A brief response
might be in order.
One answer here is that an ethical relation to the Other should inform all
deontological positions in this field. It is not hard to take the official codes of
ethics, reveal their limitations and contradictions (as in Pym 1992:160-62,
Chesterman 1997:187-89), deplore their inadequacy (cf. Basamalah in this
volume), and then move to higher ideological realms. Yet the reverse move-
ment should also be possible, from alterity to deontology. That is, once we
have established the kind of general relation to be obtained, we should be
able to generate terms and principles for a multiplicity of professional rela-
tions, as Chesterman would be attempting to do in this volume. If not, we
134 Introduction: The Return to Ethics in Translation Studies

allow the ideals to ring out with hollow tones, perhaps like the French politician
Bernard Kouchner who had the children of Paris sing for Sarajevo in its darkest
hour, making the French feel engaged but hiding the fact that they only
accepted a small number of refugees. Such was the old trap of humanist ideals,
allowing pretty words to cover over the inconvenient numbers. Further, with-
out a movement back to the deontological, to actual guidelines and modes of
calculation, we leave the symbols without the power of the professional groups
most prepared to enact ethics as a practice. The role of professional associa-
tions appears essential for tasks such as eradicating exploitation within the
profession (Laygues) or professionalizing fields of practice hitherto left to
chance (Bulut and Kurultay). Without them, the noble ideals flounder, as the
same Bernard Kouchner discovered as head of the UN Civilian Mission in
Kosovo. Altruistic alterity is a very fine thing for the well-fed, but we must
also work with professionals and cultures driven, legitimately, by self-interest.
The ethics of alterity, of whole communicative situations with the Other,
is undoubtably the area into which most other approaches are currently feed-
ing. Not by chance, many of the papers closest to this position actually address
interpreting, especially various forms of dialogue interpreting, where the peo-
ple involved are mutually present and intuitively carry more ethical weight
than do their texts (cf. Mason 1999). As we learn more about the dynamics
of interpreting, we are revising the schemata traditionally used to assess the
longer-distance communication involved in translating literature (Gouanvic)
or the Bible (Nord).

Under what name?

Chesterman’s list of current ethics includes ‘norm-based’ approaches. Dif-

ferent cultural locales have different criteria for what constitutes a ‘good’
translation. This relativism stood at the base of the reaction against the many
linguistic approaches to translation that prescribed representation and noth-
ing more. Instead of theorizing what should happen then descending to earth
only to deplore the state of translations, descriptivists set out to assert the
actual diversity of the translational field. In this, their approach remains prag-
matically valid if and when the description can be incorporated into some
movement in the reverse direction. Consider, for example, Salah Basamalah’s
position in this volume: “if ethics is seen as a system of values giving a glo-
bal understanding of human beings, then a culture is nothing less than the
ethics of a way of life”. On this view, there would be as many ethics as there
are cultures and sub-cultures; the various copyright regimes that restrict the
translation of works in developing countries would belong to a rich-world
norm (the owners of knowledge are interested in protecting knowledge); the
struggle against copyright restrictions is both in the name of cultural diver-
sity and a part of ethical diversity. And yet, riding above the description of
Anthony Pym 135

these differences, Basamalah is clearly calling for change, in the name of a

further ethics of ‘rights’ and ‘solidarity’. Description need not remain at the
level of isolated descriptions; it may strengthen claims about what should be
done, without any necessary passage through an ontology of universal laws
(cf. Toury 1991).
Although there are serious epistemological problems with such double
movements, studies of norms remain tremendously useful in the field of eth-
ics. When David Katan and Francesco Straniero-Sergio analyze the
translation shifts in their corpus of talk-show interpreting on Italian televi-
sion, they reveal cases of misrepresentation and interpersonal manipulation
that would certainly not be justified by any ethics of representation or alterity.
Yet that kind of interpreting is an evolving social practice, with practitioners
who are better or worse at it, so it is quite possible to go from the corpus and
the evaluations to a series of underlying principles, in this case the interpret-
er’s capacity to perform, to provide ‘comfort’ in terms of the show, and to
domesticate the foreign. This is then described as an ‘ethics of entertain-
ment’, since it conforms to the evolving norms of the genre. With similar
empiricism, Maria Sidiropoulou studies the translation of an urgent politi-
cal message, identifying pragmatic shifts that are not found in background
norms of translation for other text genres, concluding that the anomolies de-
tected were produced in the name of a specific ethical parameter, in this case
‘urgency’. Or again, consider the example, used by Bulut and Kurultay in
this volume, where a Turkish interpreter presented German Red Cross per-
sonnel as members of the German ‘Red Crescent’, since the domestication
saved time and might thus help save lives in the aftermath of an earthquake.
This would be justified by no ethics of representation, alterity, or perhaps
even service (would a client or user prescribe such a shift?) yet is ethically
correct in view of the norms and criteria of that specific situation.
In all these cases something vaguely ethical can be construed from the
empirical, as we move from what happens to questions of why it might hap-
pen (the implication of causality is necessary but not our main concern here).
Or, in Chesterman’s terms, a kind of ‘ought’ can be derived from ‘is’. What
should we say, though, of Gouanvic’s example of the manipulative transla-
tion of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath into French, which was made to
serve the interests of the Nazi Occupation in Belgium? Would that too be a
valid ethics? Or are we really prepared to condone all those talk-show inter-
preters who truncate and twist the subjectivity of their foreign guests so as to
slot them into the dictates of genre and Berlusconi commerce? One suspects
that the derivation of ‘ought’ from ‘is’ works, more or less, only for as long
as the ‘is’ falls within some kind of just or intellectually laudable cause, and
even then it is at the cost of tremendous conservatism. When the cause is not
so clear, when right and wrong are mixed and all around us, we are made
very aware that communication, once again, is an experiential rather than
136 Introduction: The Return to Ethics in Translation Studies

ontological reality: we have no neutral position from which to make our de-
scriptions in the first place, so the movements are never really just one way
or the other.
A further problem with deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’, especially if some es-
sential virtue is to be attached to the result, resides in issues of demarcation.
Things work well enough for as long as we are in the probabilistic centre of a
norm or the qualitative density of a prototype. But as soon as we drift toward
the edges of virtue we are increasingly likely to run into claims that ‘This is
not a translation’, ‘You are not a translator’, and the like. We see this in the
study by Laygues, where the roles of the co-translator, revisor and publisher
were poorly defined and overlapped in nefarious ways; we might also sense
it in various reactions to the above examples of comforting talk shows and
German Red Crescents.
This kind of problem, in fact the constant play of translation’s identity
and offers of equivalence, is theorized in Claudia Monacelli and Roberto
Punzo’s application of fuzzy logic to situations of military interpreting. Eth-
ics is seen here not as a matter of applying rules but as ‘immediate coping’
with constant disequilibrium. The ideals are accepted as fictions, and yet we
proceed: “the fictionality of communication, the emptiness of interpreting,
does not lead to ‘acting out’ ethics but to embodying it”. On this basis, the
use of fuzzy logic (as opposed to norms or probability) might handle many
problems of the border, addressing situations that both are and are not trans-
lation, or equivalence, or fidelity. Instead of lamenting the lack of clarity in
our social definitions, fuzzy logic shows us how common sense effectively
handles such problems. Monacelli and Punzo approach the translator from
radical constructivism, in terms of Francisco Varela’s ‘know-how’, which
“takes the middle way between spontaneity and rational calculation”. Una-
bashedly difficult for non-initiates, their article might partly be contextualized
in this volume by Derek Boothman’s review of Varela’s lectures on ‘ethical
know-how’, all the more justified here in view of Varela’s passing away on
28 May 2001.
The return to ethics, if it is to have any substance, must be a return to
thought of a very applied nature (this too was in Meschonnic back in 1973).
Ethics must take root in the historical individuality of what translators do,
and only then in appeals to abstract or timeless principles. As Lukács argued
in a slightly different context, “ethical beauty requires both aspects” (1967:
21). Not by chance is there a lot of practice in this volume: anti-globaliza-
tion, the denouncing of exploitation within the profession, the theorist
defending her own translation, the specific concerns of popular genres, the
culture bubbles of talk shows and the horrors of earthquakes, military inter-
preters who are actually working in the Balkans, and urgent political pleas
from prison. Things are happening, good and bad, and translators are in-
volved in numerous different ways. They are acting in the world, applying
Anthony Pym 137

strategies, taking risks, manipulating illusions. Further, they are doing so in

ways that rarely concord with ethics as mere vigilance, effectively impeding
action, condoning no more than intellectual distance and dissent. That seems
no longer to be where we stand.

The return to ethics

It might be possible to start a trend by naming a trend and finding a dozen or

so friends to echo it for you, in return for publication space. That is not the
case here. There is no particular agreement in this volume on specific ethical
principles, nor even on correct approaches. Yet there is a common and wide-
spread accord to discuss ethical issues in a variety of new lights. No longer
can we simply shun the deontic as if it were merely prescriptive; few would
now argue that there should simply be no ethics of translation; that train was
missed long ago.
If we were to search for some general principles behind the articles in this
volume, the following might serve as an orientation:

• No one here is going back to something that was done thirty years ago.
We are no longer concerned with the ethics of linguistic equivalence,
or of fidelity, or even of their simple negation, since it is no longer easy
to identify the object of such relations. Those concerns are maintained,
but in quite different forms and at higher levels.
• As a consequence of the above, the categories brought to bear on these
issues are increasingly wider, going well beyond what were once called
‘units of translation’ and their texts. Ethics is now a broadly contextual
question, dependent on practice in specific cultural locations and
situational determinants.
• There would seem to be increasing agreement to focus on people rather
than texts, and to do so in terms that cannot be reduced to textually
inscribed subjectivities. This may be attributed to the growing interest
in interpreting, especially dialogue or community interpreting.
• There is a correspondingly greater acceptance of the researcher’s
positionality, involving a certain engagement in social practice rather
than aspiring to detached neutrality (although in making this observa-
tion I am clearly not neutral).
• Perhaps paradoxically, there are also brave aspirations to universal val-
ues, of a kind that would have been sacrilege in the heyday of critical
deconstruction. This may be because the struggle against globalization
produces globalizing categories. It might also be understood as a reac-
tion against the antihumanism of detached analysis and play on signifiers.
Whatever the case, it seems now granted that one can take position and
act in terms of general values or causes, albeit within a certain range of
political acceptability.
138 Introduction: The Return to Ethics in Translation Studies

We are certainly not all going to agree on neat answers to any of the
questions formulated above, let alone on the ‘reserved area’ that Newmark
tried to map out. But disagreement is a very good reason for dialogue. In the
growing respect for the beliefs of the Other, including even Newmark’s be-
liefs, those who failed to get votes in the past might yet participate in the
more vigorous and vital debates of our future.

ANTHONY PYM
Departament de Filologia Anglogermànica, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Plaça
Imperial Tàrraco, 1, 43005 Tarragona, Spain. [email protected]

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