| Translator training has expanded exponentially since the 1990 s 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, 2001). Some foreign translation scholars such as Joanna Drugan, Chris Megone and Mona Baker all have written articles to stress the importance of ethics in translator training. At home, some scholars also indicated that translation ethics should be brought into the curriculum for translation majors. Zhou Zhaoxiang, a scholar from Hongkong, also wrote that to deal with challenges and cultivate qualified translators, enhancing translation ethics teaching was more urgent than ever.In translation teaching, teachers use translation coursebooks to implement syllabus and organize teaching activities. It is coursebooks’ mission to inherit the concept of curriculum and express the content of curriculum, which provides them a pivotal position. As the core of translation teaching, the modern translation coursebooks with high quality should embed ethics into them and pay attention to cultivating translators’ responsibility and professional ethics. In the past 30 years, the study of translation coursebooks has made great progress, mainly focusing on three aspects: the introduction of coursebooks, the teaching experience of coursebooks and the system and the principles of compiling coursebooks. Only a few scholars have mentioned ethics, such as Liu Jichun, Tao Youlan and Han Ziman and the like. In comparison, foreign researches on translation ethics teaching are more in-depth. From the point of language philosophy, Arrojo analyzed three translation coursebooks respectively edited by Mona Baker, P. Kussaul, Hatim and Mason, proposing that translation teaching should make students recognize their ethical responsibility. Many scholars believe that in order to make students aware of the moral influence of their decisions, the translation teaching must implement ethical education.In this context, based on previous researches on ethics, the present study learns from business ethics model and proposes an integrated framework for translator ethics. In business ethics, the corporation should not only fulfill its social responsibility and handle the external relations, namely the relationship between businesses and their customers, investors, creditors, environmental stakeholders and potential customers, but also properly handle the internal relations, which is the relationship between enterprises and employees. Companies should win the trust of all parties and bring the expected benefits and social impact by selling their products in good faith, treating employees well, properly managing businesses, protecting environment, and fulfilling commitments and other measures. In fact, translation ethics shares many similarities with business ethics. With the advent of some new concepts and phenomena such as translation technology, translation services, translation professionalism, translators are faced with more and more ethical issues and need to address the relationship with different parties. On the basis of business ethics model and the theory of translational action, this thesis summarizes six players in translation toward whom the translator has to ensure his responsibility: the initiator, the ST producer, the reader, the commissioner, the translation critics and the community/culture. The author believes that translator ethics should be divided into two aspects: personal morality and inter-personal ethics. In the framework of translator ethics, this thesis focuses on the following questions: 1) How much contents related to ethics are contained in translation coursebooks? 2) What are the features of ethical contents? 3) How to embed ethics into translation coursebooks in a better way?To deal with these questions, the author has collected translation coursebooks published from 2010 to 2014 as research objects. After typing the keywords “translation coursebook” in the main Chinese book-selling websites respectively(Jingdong, Dangdang, and Amozan), and further analysis and selection, the author has collected 62 translation coursebooks for English majors. For the sake of convenience, all books have been coded as B1, B2, B3 etc. According to the integrated framework of translator ethics, if some sentences of a coursebook involve personal moralities of the translator like justice, honesty and responsibility, it will be considered as a coursebook with translator ethics. Similarly, if a book contains any statements involving inter-personal ethics such as being responsible to the author, reader or clients, respecting other cultures, having a right attitude toward payments and rights etc., the coursebook will also be considered as a coursebook with translator ethics. In the statistics, the first thing is to judge whether the book contains ethics or not and then those books involving ethics are classified into three groups. The first type is those books containing less than 3 sentences on ethics. Then those books that devote one or two paragraphs to ethics go to the second type. Lastly, the third type is those books which devote about one section to dealing with translator ethics.After a careful investigation, it is found that only 23 translation coursebooks involving some statements on translator ethics, which takes up about 37% of all the 62 books. While among the above 23 translation coursebooks, 11 books belong to the first type, accounting for 47.8%; 8 translation coursebooks present the translator ethics in forms of paragraph, which take up 34.8%. There are only 4 books talking about ethics in forms of sections, accounting for 17.4%. It can be clearly seen that the amount of ethical contents is quite small. Besides, the location of them is rather remote. The form of it is simple and its contents are rather narrow, which has little help to the translation teaching. Focusing on the above problems, this thesis has made the following suggestions: 1) when compiling translation coursebooks, the ethicist and translation scholars should work together. 2) Integration of ethics into the coursebooks will be the first and foremost principle to govern the compilation, rather than merely writing a separate chapter or unit on the issue of ethics in translation. 3) Case study can be a useful method to embed ethics into translation coursebooks. |
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