Translation For Communication
Media translation workers spend a lot of time talking about “doing the right thing.” Nevertheless, it is not rare that we, as readers or viewers of these disseminators of news, information, and entertainment find that there is something wrong with the “ethics” of their actions. What drives the mass communication purveyors to think or act the way they do? Do they have a special obligation for ethical behavior that ordinary citizens do not; or do they, in fact, have a special waiver of the basic moral tenets that the rest of us must accept in order that we may have access to a “free marketplace of ideas”? These are the questions we must ask ourselves if we are to be moral agents of the mass media.
This series of articles has the task to equip bilingual professionals with the tools they need to make objective and moral decisions how to use mass media, both as consumers of the “output” of the media and as creators of media products in the field of journalism and other media. In our opinion new Chinese Translator workers, Polish Translation and Arabic Translation workers who will be dealing with such matters as Medical Translation and Legal Translation will find this article most useful. This text, however, is not instructional – you will not find any rules regarding what is “right” to do when handling situations. Instead, we seek to provide some good suggestions that seem “most appropriate” for a given situation. In doing so, we will concentrate mainly on the subject and on the reason we consider the action to be the most appropriate. We have seen to answering the numerous questions our blog readers have asked. In addition we try to give a full and detailed explanation of each of them.
As one English to Vietnamese Translation worker who also contributed to this article suggested, after all you will be the one who has to draw conclusions as far as the answers you find most acceptable are concerned. We anticipate that you will gain a greater understanding for the difficulties of making a moral decision. At the very least, you will have to construct your own benchmark by which you can judge your decisions.
So, this series of articles will deal with news media, advertising, and public relations. While the investigation of entertainment media, for example television and the movie industry, are more attractive for translation workers, the above three are the most popular choices for college graduates who have majors both in Translation studies and Journalism or Communication. The experience gained by translation and interpretation workers in these three fields can be used in other forms of communication, information based or otherwise. In addition, one of our Polish to English Translation workers has contributed with a heap of information about the entertainment industry and its cultural impact worldwide. Of course, there have also been written a lot of words against the condition state of modern journalism in different countries. However, advertising and, especially, public relations are often given short shift or—worse—compared with journalism, assuming that the moral dictates of the one will apply across the board to the others. That is rarely the case, and this book is designed to point out the differences that exist among these three practices in hopes that reasonable and specific guidelines can be developed by which they may be analyzed and, if need be, judged according to their specialized functions within our society. At last, the principle to tell the truth and to do least harm should be obligatory for all mass media, but to a different extent and for undoubtedly different reasons.
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