Ethical awareness and professional responsibility: educating translators to tackle diversifying industry dilemmas

Ethical awareness is arguably becoming ever more relevant with the increasing digitalisation of professional practice. Ethical dilemmas are changing in nature, becoming more diverse and more difficult to tackle, also as technologically infused realities give rise to more blurry boundaries. Language professionals, in training for the roles of the future, require a strong sense of professional responsibility. This correlates with the ability to define their own ethical profiles and to apply them agilely to navigate evolving industry expectations. Ethical profiling is paramount if graduates of translation education are to confidently engage with the variety of emerging language-based roles, including those that involve significant automation. This article focusses on professional ethical requirements for the language industry as exhibited in the Romanian national context and describes educational tools that may support the development of ethical awareness for newly trained translators. The article reports on a pedagogical model applied with second year master’s students in translation, which can ensure increased explicit exposure to ethically-charged professional scenarios as part of curriculum design. The suggestive model aims to mould professional ethical behaviours of trainee translators and to equip them with methodological options to support the continuous enhancement of their professional profiles while realistically assessing market developments and identifying shifts in ethical expectations.