ETHICS, PROFESSIONAL DEONTOLOGY AND TEAM WORKING

The course Ethics, Professional Deontology and Team Working is one of the core courses of Translation and Interpreting addressing in particular students from the curricula English-Spanish, English-Italian Sign Language (LIS); Spanish-Italian Sign Language (LIS), specialised translation. The course is aimed at providing students with various methodological and practical resources and tools to support them in their preparation to the ethical and collaborative aspects involved in the professions of translation, interpreter and language and cultural mediators. The course sets out to explore different codes of ethics developed and adopted by national and international professional associations that represent translators, mediators and interpreters. However, the course also attempts to move beyond such codes to help students think critically about some of the concrete ethical choices and dilemmas that translators and interpreters often encounter and for which they are rarely prepared. Moreover, the course sets out to promote cooperation best practices and collaborative skills that are indispensable resources for the success of all complex projects.

At the end of the course students will have developed some critical thinking tools that should help them make ethically and deontologically aware choices in their professional career. Students will be able to decide to comply with professional codes of ethics provided by employers or professional categories that represent them and yet they will also be informed about the principle of accountability with improved awareness of their responsibility with regard to their choices. This competence seems particularly important nowadays to enable (would be) translators and interpreters to deal with all those cases that may arise during the professional practice of a lifetime and that cannot be foreseen a priori when drawing up even the most advanced code of ethics. Through group work and simulations of work contexts, at the end of the course, students will have gained some experience in collaborative translation practices and they will have developped a better understanding of the responsibilties involved in project management, as well as developed their tools for conflict management. That will enable them to approach these aspects with greater confidence in their future working environment. More generally, it is the interest of society for individuals to be accountable for their decisions in professional life as elsewhere.

Pre-requisites of this course are a level C1 of the QCER as for the English language and an excellent competence of the Italian language. International students will need at least a level B2 of the QCER as for the Italian language, especially in terms of oral language.

The course deals with a few basic concepts of ethics and morality and particular attention will be paid to the ethical implications of language choices. It explores different meanings of terms such as professionalism, code of ethics, law. Various deontological models will be compared and the difference between deontological and teleological approaches will be examined. Moreover, the concepts of flexibility, integrity, honesty, independence, and pride in one's own work will also be covered during the course while the ideas of decision accountability and individual responsibility will be focused upon. Copyright and translation rights will also be part of the contents covered during the course. As regards teamwork and collaboration skills, they will be presented through practical exercises as skills that foster a healthy work culture and environment where teams of individuals can achieve goals through effective collaboration and motivation. Students will have the opportunity to test all that through the practical experience of the team project work.

Mandatory readings:

Slides of the lectures, academic papers and book extracts which will be provided by the professor and uploaded on the course moodle page

Recommended reading:

Baker, Mona (2018) In Other Words. London and New York: Routledge, Chapter 9 p. 307-331.

The final exam will consist of two parts, a written and an oral one, which will test the students’ competence on the topics explored during the course.
Group project work: Students will be asked to complete a grpup project work within two weeks time. They will be required to upload their project on the course moodle page according to shared guidelines and instructions.
The oral test will assess the students' acquisition of the topics covered during the course. The students' competence of English at C1 level of the QCER is strongly recommended to pass the exam successfully. The oral part of the exam will test students’ ability to employ the metalanguage applied to information mining and terminology management. The two marks of the written project and the oral test will be calculated for the final result of the exam.

Lectures, practical exercises, workshop activities, group work, project work, self-assessment activities.

English

Lectures will be held in English. Most translation examples will deal with the English-Italian language combination.

written and oral