ABSTRACT
Ethical practice has always been an important issue for translators and interpreters, though historically the focus of concern has been the question of fidelity to the spoken or written text. One of the earliest translation scholars to elaborate an ethics of translation was Antoine Berman, who developed a critique of the kind of literary translations that operated on the source text through ethnocentric, annexationist or hypertextual methods, deforming the text and sacrificing its poetics. Paul Ricouer conceptualizes encounters as both ethical and communicative, using the term “linguistic hospitality”, while embracing the idea of the translatability of all languages to demonstrate how it is through translation that humans become reflexively aware of their contingency. The view that codes of ethics are needed in order to establish guidelines and enhance professionalism continues to be widely adopted, with or without the additional caveat that they must not and cannot always be adhered to.
