Joanna Drugan

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Heriot-Watt University

Translation involves ethical decision-making in challenging contexts. Codes of practice help professional translators identify ethical issues and formulate appropriate, justifiable responses. However, new and growing forms of community translation operate outside the professional realm, and substantial differences exist between the two approaches....

Interpreting and translation are increasingly provided in the public sector via large-scale outsourced framework contracts ( Moorkens 2017 ). In the UK, one of the largest recent framework agreements for interpreting and translation was introduced between 2016 and 2017 in critical contexts for justice, including the Home Office, the Ministry of Jus...

Translation quality and translation quality management are key concerns for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), and the European Union institutions more broadly. Translated texts are often legally binding, politically sensitive, confidential or important for the image of the institutions. For legislative texts, an i...

‘Employability’ is now a key term in university strategies in the UK and increasingly across Europe. Pressure to implement such strategies can lead to bolted-on rather than embedded activities within curricula. This paper argues that employability should be an embedded ethos, particularly for translation and interpreting courses. Employability can...

Interpreting and translation are unregulated activities in most countries, yet interpreters and translators perform challenging work in sensitive domains, such as the law, medicine and social work. Other professionals working in these sectors must complete formal ethics training to qualify, then subscribe to Codes of Practice or Ethics. When they f...

The diverse approaches to translation quality in the industry can be grouped in two broad camps: top-down and bottom-up. The author has recently published a decade-long study of the language services (Quality in Professional Translation, Bloomsbury, 2013). Research for the study covered translation providers from individual freelance translators wo...

Translator training programmes have expanded exponentially since the 1990s against a backdrop of increasing economic and cultural globalization. A growing body of literature contends that, if the effects of globalization are to be dealt with effectively, translation studies should return to questions of ethics (Venuti 1998, Pym 2001a). Thus trainin...

Historical Introduction As is now widely recognised, translation has played a major role at key historical periods in the development of national cultures and vernacular languages across Europe, with France being no exception. The terms traduction and traducteur were introduced into French in the sixteenth century by Etienne Dolet (1509–46), a huma...

Translator training programmes have expanded exponentially since the 1990s against a backdrop of increasing economic and cultural globalization. A growing body of literature contends that, if the effects of globalization are to be dealt with effectively, translation studies should return to questions of ethics (Venuti 1998, Pym 2001a). Thus trainin...