Tomás Cano Binder, CT Spain Local time: 22:06 Member (2005) English to Spanish + ...
Your business, your decision
Oct 14, 2011
You are totally free to reject a job for ethical/moral reasons. You can simply tell the agency that you cannot take care of the job for ethical reasons and that is the end of it.
There is no standard in defining what is ethical and what is not. A text you consider unethical could be perfectly OK with me, and the opposite. Personally, my limit is that I would not translate anything that would promote actions or thoughts that could conflict with human rights or that would promote, justify or excuse hate.
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Katalin Horvath McClure United States Local time: 16:06 Member (2002) English to Hungarian + ...
Your decision, but explain the situation to the agency
Oct 17, 2011
I am not sure what kind of illegality you suspect, but let me tell you something that happened to me recently.
An agency asked me to translate a few documents that were issued for a certain person. They were certificates from sports competitions, showing this person winning 1st and 2nd and 4th places. The translation was commissioned by a lawyer, who was assisting this person with her visa application, and these documents were to support her claim of having extraordinary talent.
When I looked at the documents, I immediately spotted a few things that made me highly suspicious of their authenticity. At least one of them was a clear forgery - it was a certificate of participation that was altered to say the person won 2nd place. It would have been clear to anybody knowing the language of the document, as podium places (1, 2, 3) receive a certificate with a different template. In fact, this person had a podium place certificate from another year of the same competition, so it was even more obvious that the other one was fake.
As soon as I noticed this, I talked to the agency, and told them I am not going to work on this, and explained my discoveries.
The PM at the agency said that she sees the translator's role (including her agency's role) to translate whatever they are given, without considering the authenticity of the documents, etc. She also said that their client is the immigration lawyer, and therefore must be trained to detect such issues, so she did not feel it was a problem to carry out the translation. I could understand this sort of "hands-off" approach, too, I am just not comfortable doing it myself.
In this particular case, if somebody looked at the translated documents only, she/he may not realize the problem, the inconsistency between the documents, as the translation would be typed, and therefore differences in handwriting and the different paper templates used on the originals will not be visible.
Anyway, the PM at the agency said she understood if I did not want to work on it, and we left it at that. I guess she found somebody else to translate it anyway.
Even though the job would have been well paid, I felt much better turning it down.
Katalin
[Edited at 2011-10-17 00:33 GMT]
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IanDhu France Local time: 22:06 Member (2005) French to English
Elegantly put
Nov 3, 2011
Charlie Bavington wrote:
I assume the translation is required because some excrement has come into contact with a mechanical ventilation device) and they can take steps to get out of it.
The centrifugal propensities of fans in contact with farmyard substances are most elegantly evoked.
With kind regards, and strength to your defences in this regard!
Adam Warren (IanDhu - 41189)
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B D Finch France Local time: 22:06 Member (2006) French to English + ...
Depends upon the issue and different for a job already accepted
Jan 28
I don't think there is a single valid answer that covers everything. The fact that you had already accepted the job does make a difference and you cannot simply walk away from your contractual obligation. If you feel that the issue is such that you could be an accessory to something illegal and immoral were you to continue the translation, there may be local law relating to the matter. You should certainly communicate your concerns to the agency straight away and ask for clarification, which they may or may not give depending upon their own ethical standards. I believe that the position that it is none of the translator's business is ethically very much like a certain farmyard substance that has been mentioned above. The school of thought that holds that the translator's own ethical standards should be left behind once a job order is signed, though pretending to be apolitical, is in itself political as it favours a particular balance of power.
If the agency or client refuses to, or cannot, give an explanation that clarifies the legality of what the client is involved in and if the matter is one where you have a legal duty to report your suspicions about the matter to the appropriate authorities, then you should do so. If there is no legal duty to report, but no reassuring explanation is forthcoming, then it really depends upon whether the matter is sufficiently serious for you to be prepared to risk being in breach of contract and ending your working relationship with that particular agency.
I had a similar, but relatively minor, situation a while back with a direct client. He had explained the documents for translation in general terms. It was only after I had agreed to translate them and he had travelled some distance to meet me with the handwritten documents, that I realised that his business, though perfectly legal, involved cruelty to animals and I was unhappy about assisting him expand that business by providing translations. In that case, I felt that the documents I was translating were in themselves neutral and within my field of competence and so I translated them and did not accept any further work from that client. I did not explain why, because the business concerned is one that most French people would have difficulty considering as unethical.
In the situation described by Katalin, I think she should probably have continued the translation and delivered it with a translator's note spelling out the reasons why the source document appeared to her, as a professional translator, to be a forgery. The agency would then be colluding if they failed to pass that note on to the client. There remains the question of whether she should alert the authorities for whom the translation was intended. However, suppose that the athlete concerned was fleeing persecution in their home country and that immigration restrictions, which might be considered as draconian, racist ... , meant that the only way of obtaining asylum involved forgery. Would it be right to report the forgery to the authorities? Could one compare the situation to that of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany using false papers?
[Edited at 2012-01-28 12:10 GMT]
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