Engaging citizen translators in disasters

Abstract

Crisis situations, including disasters, require urgent decisions, often without sufficient resources, including decisions about translating and interpreting. We argue that using citizen translators (i.e., translators without professional translator training) in such contexts can be ethically justified when their preparation incorporates virtue ethics. Translation potentially improves access to crucial safety information, and delivering such information is critical. We acknowledge several ethical challenges with citizen translation based on our experience in humanitarian contexts, relevant literature, and discussions with stakeholders engaged with our research consortium. Recourse to citizen translators has limitations, but we advance mitigation measures through training to address the ethical challenges of providing translation services to linguistically diverse groups in crisis. We propose virtue ethics as a framework for citizen translators to develop ethical decision-making skills and virtues. We suggest virtue ethics training to prepare citizen translators for ethical challenges in the field.

Ethics and crisis translation: insights from the work of Paul Ricoeur

“…How exact does the match need to be between what the communicator means and what the receiver understands her to mean? In a humanitarian setting, this quality (or correspondence) often must be balanced against the urgency of the situation (Hunt et al , in press) or the lack of availability of highly trained professional translators (O’Mathúna et al , in press). When viewed through Ricoeur’s lens that perfect translation is not possible, it may become easier to accept adequate correspondence.…”

“…For example, well-trained professional translators ideally should be deployed to ensure the highest degree of accuracy and best communication. Such professionals can be unavailable in crises, so that others with less training may need to be used, knowing that this risks introducing mistakes and miscommunication (O’Mathúna et al , in press). Arguably, poor communication is better than none.…”

Translation Technology and Ethical Competence: An Analysis and Proposal for Translators’ Training

“…For a number of years, these concerns were accepted as the price to be paid for the advantages of technology; yet attention has also been drawn to broader ethical issues that arise. Examples of such issues are the sharing and commoditization of translation resources and the privacy and confidentiality of data (Bowker 2020), copyright issues (Moorkens and Lewis 2019), data extractivism (Paullada 2020), the risk of using technologies in safety-critical domains (Canfora and Ottmann 2020;O'Mathúna et al 2019;Hunt et al 2019), environmental sustainability (Cronin 2017), the ethics of algorithms (Tsamados et al 2021), and gender bias in translation data (Savoldi et al 2021;Prates et al 2020).…”