– Joss Moorkens –
This workshop focuses on ethical concerns experienced by different stakeholders in the translation industry at various levels in translation production. These stakeholders’ responsibilities and priorities may differ depending on many factors and are strongly influenced by globalisation, a process enabled by translation and one that has transformed the increasingly distributed production networks that carry out translation work. Relationships within these production networks are highly transactional and subject to the competing imperatives of time, cost, and quality. The nature of these networks and interrelationships are also highly dynamic in response to changing technologies employed at different stages of the translation process. We will look at disparities of power, ownership of resources, training, the importance of trust, and consider environmental and employment sustainability. We will also look at emerging ethical issues, such as neural MT and automation, workplace monitoring, and the challenge of crowdsourcing.
Joss Moorkens is an Associate Professor and Chair of postgraduate translation programmes at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University, affiliated with the ADAPT Centre and the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies. He has authored over 50 journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers on translation technology, machine translation post-editing, user evaluation of machine translation, translator precarity, and translation ethics. He is General Coeditor of the journal Translation Spaces with Prof. Dorothy Kenny, and coedited the book ‘Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice’, published in 2018 by Springer, and special issues of Machine Translation (2019) and Translation Spaces (2020). He leads the Technology working group (with Prof. Tomas Svoboda) as a board member of the European Masters in Translation network and sits on the advisory board of the Journal of Specialised Translation.