Believable Use of Mass Media Tools in Chinese Translation
Translation workers who work in media occupations spend a great deal of time talking about “doing the right thing.” Why is then that their audience quite often feels that there is something wrong with the “ethics” of the people engaged in the dissemination of news, information, and entertainment? What drives the mass communication purveyors to think or act the way they do? Are they obliged to adhere to special ethical norms that ordinary citizens are not, or, vice versa, they rely on a special waiver of the basic moral tenets that the rest of us must observe so that we may have access to a “free marketplace of ideas”? We have to ask ourselves these questions if we are to be moral agents of the mass media.
With this series of articles we make an attempt to provide for bilingual professionals the tools they need to use mass media in an honest and ethic way, both as a recipients of the media “products” and professionals who work in the field of journalism and other media. We are sure that new Chinese Translator workers, Polish Translation and Arabic Translation workers who will be working on Medical Translation and Legal Translation issues will find a lot of useful information in this article. However, what you should know from the very beginning is that this text is not instructional and it does not suggest the “proper” thing to do in a given situation. Instead, we will try to provide some suggestions of what seems to be “most appropriate” for a given situation. In doing so, we will focus both on the subject and on the reason we consider the action to be the most appropriate. We have put a great effort in answering the numerous questions of our blog readers. In addition we try to give a full and detailed explanation of each of them.
As one Vietnamese Translation worker who was a contributor in this article suggested, it will eventually be your responsibility to draw your own conclusions with regards to the answers that you choose to accept. We suppose that you will realize to a greater extent how difficult it is to make a moral decision. At the very least, you will be required to construct a personal benchmark by which to measure your decisions.
So, this series of articles will deal with news media, advertising, and public relations. While entertainment media, such as television and the movie industry, are certainly worth investigating for translation workers, these three are the most popular choices for new college graduates with dual majors in Translation studies and Journalism or Communication. The experience gained by translation and interpretation workers who work in these three spheres can be applied to any other form of communication, information based or otherwise. Moreover, a Polish Translator member of our team has collected reams of information related to entertainment industry and its effect on culture all over the world. And, certainly, volumes have been written in opposition to the condition state of modern journalism in various societies. However, advertising, and especially, public relations, are often given cursory attention or – which is worse – compared with journalism, taking for granted that the moral postulates of the one will be valid for the other. Since that is rarely so, the purpose of this book is to explain the specific features of each of these three practices and thus enhance the development of reasonable and concrete guidelines that can be used for their analysis according to their specific functions within our society. Finally, the principle of truth and minimizing harm should apply to all mass media, but to a different extent and for definitely different reasons.