Translation and Ethics

Sometimes our actions have consequences, both negative and positive, that extend far beyond anything we can imagine. Sometimes our actions generate crises and those crises bring new opportunities to learn and grow. TEBP has recently undergone a “crises” which I am hoping will soon turn into an opportunity for growth and expansion. It is no secret that TEBP recently cleared up a misunderstanding with AIPTI regarding an apparent overlap between our groups. Fortunately, this misunderstanding was quickly resolved and I do not wish to go back on that in this post, I do invite any members of either AIPTI or TEBP who wish to voice any opinions, express concerns, or ask any questions about this issue to visit our relevant discussion thread on our group site.

This misunderstanding did, however, bring to light a series of internal issues TEBP now needs to address. It has lead to some members leaving TEBP. Although it is always sad to lose a member, as I have stated in our discussion thread, TEBP’s focus is quality and not quantity and the kind of members we are looking for are people who are willing to do much more than just click join, refrain from participating, and then leave the group the second they don’t agree with something we are doing. We need people who are active and willing to express their opinions. We cannot build a community around silence and passiveness. That’s not what this group is about.

An issue that was raised in our discussion thread is an apparent “division” among people who are members of TEBP alone and people who are members of both TEBP and AIPTI. Some TEBP members feel there’s something behind the silence of people who happen to be members of both groups. At this point, I respectfully disagree. As I shared on our group site, and after some interactions with certain members on NdeT, I think the overall silence in our group is related to one thing only: our group isn’t taken seriously enough because it’s on Facebook – a “social” media site. I would love to hear from group members on this, but I get the feeling that being a FB group makes some members feel we’re really just a social group. If my perception is correct, this is something we need to work on because TEBP was not created to be just a social group (no offense to social groups though).

Another issue that has been raised repeatedly, which is intricately related to what I wrote above, is the detrimental effect of silence. This silence is generating an overall feeling of mistrust among members and can ultimately divide TEBP into two distinct groups. This is unproductive and unnecessary and we need to turn this situation around before it has negative consequences among our members. It’s the sort of thing that can kill our efforts before we even get started and given the time and effort that certain members continuously put into this group, it would be a shame for that to happen.

The idea behind TEBP from day one was to build a community, to exchange best practices, resources, and ideas, to work together to beat isolation and abuse, and to defend our basic rights and liberties. All of these goals require dedication and commitment, something a lot of members benefitted from behind the scenes, but very few members actually seem willing to give in return. Now we have reached a crossroads, and it’s time to change that. The road ahead will require commitment and dedication. The road ahead will require change and introspection. The road ahead will require vision and cooperation.

All of the questions raised in the above mentioned thread lead me to think it is time for a serious change. In that thread I quoted Martin Luther King and I would like to quote him again here, “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.” It is time to make changes to our group. We need to figure out what kind of group we want to be, are we going to be one of those groups you just join and forget about or are we actually going to carry out our mission and work towards Ethical Business Practices?

It is time to design the future of our group. Between free machine translation services like Google Translator, crowdsourcing on Twitter and Facebook, the newly approved US budget for improving machine translation, undercutting, unethical agencies, uneducated clients, etc. our industry is facing a challenge. Some translators feel we are on the brink of extinction, although I don’t think humans can be eliminated from the translation process altogether, I do feel change in our industry is imminent and we need to work together to be prepared to face it. TEBP has always been about finding ethical ways of dealing with these issues. What we need to figure out now is what we’re going to do about it and how.

As someone pointed out to me recently, there are hundreds of translation groups on Facebook and several hundred translator’s association in the world and very few of them are really doing anything other than talk and charge membership fees. This group was never intended to be a member-packed, low-impact Facebook group, nor do we intend to become an association: we’re somewhere in between and we need to define that somewhere. Since the day of its creation our group was intended to be different and make a difference. With that in mind, I would like to invite all members of TEBP to take a few minutes to question why they are members of this group in the first place, what they expect from the group, and what they are willing to contribute to the group, and once that introspection is done, I would like to invite all members to share their conclusions and ideas with us in our new discussion thread: the Road Ahead . For those who do not wish to make their contributions public, please feel free to submit them by email by filling out our blog contact form (asking you to fill out the form is tedious, but we’re trying to avoid spammers).