The Effect of Work Experience and Educational Level on Official Translators’ Familiarity with Ethics in Translation and their Commitment to the Principles; an Iranian survey

Abstract

Although ethics in translation is not a new realm of study, it is almost intact for official translators in Iran. This study aims to evaluate translators’ familiarity and commitment to universally accepted ethical issues. Moreover the present study attempts to shed light on the relationship between translators’ educational levels and work experience and their familiarity and commitment to universally accepted translation ethical issues. The Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators (AUSIT) has published a code of ethics for the members and obliges them to observe the principles. The first five principles are related to “Professional Conduct”, “Confidentiality”, “Competence”, “Impartiality” and “Accuracy”, which were obtained to conduct the present research. The instrument utilized in this study was a questionnaire containing 35 items presented to official translators in three populated cities in Iran, Tehran, Mashhad and Kerman. The multiple-choice researcher-made questionnaire was constructed in Persian to reduce any possible ambiguity. The present study conducted in 2016 on certified official translators and interpreters, either male or female, aged between 25 to about 52. However, it does not take age and gender into account. The study findings reveal that work experience and level of education have significant relationship with commitment and familiarity. SPSS and One-Way ANOVA were utilized to analyze the data.
1.INTRODUCTION
Ethics in translation is such a new subject in Iran that most of the official translators cannot avoid expressing their shock as they hear the term ethics in translation. Although ethics has been already introduced in many translation centers in many countries such as Australia and the USA, It is still new in Iran and degree of official translators’ familiarity with the principles and their commitment to them is unknown. Not observing the principles equals maximizing ethical challenges faced by translators and interpreters since they have a crucial role in many different situations related to human interactions (Baker, 2016). A study seemed necessary to evaluate their performance that can lead to an improvement per se since observing ethics is so important that philosophy believes it is a main source of making decisions arbitrarily unless the actions would be “aimless”, (Rupani, 2015). Such a study can introduce the necessity of ethics to translators, if it is then determined unknown and required. Afterwards, a comprehensive and culturally appropriate code of ethics will be proposed to Iranian Association of Certified Translators and Interpreters.
AUSIT (Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators) published one of the most accredited codes of ethPublished
by Australian