Translation and Ethics

A new translator’s association was launched on September 30, 2009. This association’s aim, as stated in their motto, is to foster ethical “professional” practices in the translation industry. As a group that has already been aiming at fostering ethical “business” practices (as expressed in our motto) in the translation industry since July 21, 2009 we welcome this new initiative and wish them the best. However, we can’t help feeling there might be a bit of overlap with our group in terms of aims and after analyzing the following timeline, we would like to respectfully request clarification from AIPTI and Nota del Traductor on this series of events.

July 21, 2009: Translators for Ethical Business Practices was created on Facebook. Our mission statement (which has not been changed since) included bringing translators and interpreters together to brainstorm ways of raising industry standards, to discuss issues pertaining to payment and outsourcing, among others (which are currently having a serious impact on our industry), and to figure out a way to fight these problems and raise the bar so that clients can get better service and translators and interpreters can get better payment.

On the first week of August, we got a new member who wrote to me saying they had become interested in our group because our idea was being discussed on another site (Nota del Traductor), a site that belongs to one of the founding members of AIPTI. I looked into this and found 2 references to Translators for Ethical Business Practices on Nota del Traductor: 1) one on July 21, 2009 (same day TEBP was created) in a forum discussing turn-key translations and 2) on July 23, 2009 in another forum in which the president of AIPTI posted links and descriptions of translation-related groups on Facebook, except TEBP was the only group that was not limited to a mere link and description, the president of AIPTI actually copied our mission statement in full on the forum thread.

August 5: One of the very first members of TEBP, founding member of AIPTI, and someone who has a very close relationship to the president of AIPTI, left our group and felt compelled to post that they were leaving on our wall, although no explanation was provided as to the reasons for leaving the group. I contacted this person about it, asking if anything had happened in our group that they were not comfortable with, and they said they were leaving simply because there were differences of opinions. However this person had never actually voiced their opinions in any of our discussions, replied to any of my messages, nor participated on our blog or fan page.

On August 8, 2009: (only 3 days later) The president of AIPTI purchased the domain for AIPTI (you can verify this information on www.whois.net). The site was not launched to the general public until September 30, so this information was not known to me at the time.

In mid August, I tried to create a LinkedIn group to reflect our Facebook group. I was unable to use the name Translators for Ethical Business Practices because it had already been taken by a private group, i.e. someone else had gone and created Translators for Ethical Business Practices on LinkedIn. I asked members of TEBP about this and no one knew anything about it.

September 30, 2009: AIPTI was launched with a very similar mission to that of TEBP, 20 members of TEBP are active (and some even founding or honorary members of AIPTI) only one member of both groups thought to email me about AIPTI. Not a single one of these 20 members shared information about AIPTI on TEBP inviting fellow members to join. How is it that members of an association dedicated to promoting ethics and “stimulating the creation of institutional bonds with other associations and public entities, both foreign and domestic in the defense of the Translating and Interpreting profession” didn’t think to include a group dedicated to fostering ethics in its opening ceremony or dinner celebration considering one of the missions of the association is to promote cooperation between professionals? I even ran into two of its founding members in person that same week and neither one of them mentioned this to me.

In their press release, AIPTI states it has been in the making for two years, which would indicate that the overlap is just a coincidence. Yet on September 30, 2009 in her own forum, the president of AIPTI wrote that they have been working on this initiative for “months” (not years), and she later clarifies that they’ve had the idea of doing something like this for years. There are several other comments on several other forums (including Translator’s Cafe) indicating the hard work they have been putting into this association for months (not years). I don’t doubt, from the seriousness and size of the association, that it took a while to put together. The only thing I am questioning is the overlap in aims and time.

This association also claims to currently be processing their legal status as an NGO. There is no public record of this on the IGJ registry (Inspección General de Justicia, the organ in charge of supervising the constitution of commercial and not-for-profit organizations in Argentina), which is consistent with the statement on their site claiming they’re awaiting approval. However, given that IGJ registration only takes a few months, and the president of this association has insisted on claiming it has been in the making for years, why isn’t the issue of their legal status settled yet?

The overlap between the creation of Translators for Ethical Business Practices and that of AIPTI is something I think needs clarification. Another point that needs clarification is why, despite the fact that the creators of AIPTI were aware of the existence of TEBP, they still chose to make their slogan in English so similar to that of TEBP: if you add the word “working” to ours and change “business” to “professional” you get the AIPTI slogan.

On another note, I have also noticed that some members of TEBP who are also members of AIPTI have copied materials I’ve sent to TEBP members by email (or published on our site for discussion on our forum) and published it on Nota del Traductor for discussion there. Although the information I send members of TEBP is not copyright material, my goal when addressing members of TEBP is for that material to be used on our forum. There is no law against using it anywhere else, but I do find this practice to be a bit disrespectful: when I take the time to look for information for TEBP, I intend for it to be used on TEBP. If I wanted to look for information for members of Nota del Traductor or any other forum, I would post it there. What makes this worse, is that the members who took materials from TEBP to other forums didn’t even bother to participate in our discussion forums (or even confirm receipt of these materials).

With that in mind, I would also like to ask members of TEBP who happen to be members of AIPTI or Nota del Traductor, to please let me know if you are planning to use materials for TEBP on other sites so that I can let the other members of TEBP know in case they too are interested in joining the discussion. TEBP was never intended to be a private club or closed group. We have been open to the general public from day one because we believe that raising the bar in our industry includes effective and inclusive communication. Closing ourselves to private forums fosters secrecy and the kind of clique-like behavior that can ultimately lead to further division in our industry.

Because we don’t believe in “every man for himself” (or every group for itself, for that matter) we would like to clarify these apparent indiscrepancies with AIPTI and Nota del Traductor and hope our groups, forums, and associations can cooperate with each other in the future.