ABSTRACT
Translator ethics starts from the people involved in the production of translations rather than from translations as texts. Generalist versions of translator ethics address the translator’s moral responsibilities as a whole person, while restricted versions focus more on the translator’s specific position as a translator, often as a member of a selected group or a profession. The restricted approaches variously draw on antecedents in the philosophy of dialogue, the initially feminist discourse on visibility, the interpersonal aspects of Skopos theory, and neo-classical negotiation theory, which includes elements of risk management and trust theory. A core interest is in the translator’s “commissive promise” to represent an anterior text. This promise acts in the interpersonal relations around the translator and can give rise to institutionalized or personalized trust in the translator, and by extension trust in the translation as a representation. The Western forms by which such trust is created are nevertheless challenged by the revisability of electronic communication, by the rise of machine translation, by the growing facilitation of collective translation acts, and by a concomitant forward-looking orientation towards an ethics of virtuous effects rather than the traditional backward-looking trust in representation.
