Beyond the Translator’s Rights
Before any code of professional ethics, the translator is required to abide by the law-the copyright law. In fact, the condition of the translator-which is governed by the Recommendation of Nairobi (1976) and the Translator’s Charter (1963-1994)-is closely tied to the international copyright law, as these two documents don’t have any autonomous legal power. Whereas at the legal and philosophical levels, the translator’s rights are determined by the aforementioned laws and the literary meta-discourse about authorship, this article purports to develop a translator’s ethics-within the context of the culture and knowledge production unbalance between industrialized and developing countries-in order to construct a new identity, a new ethos for the translating subject. In suit with Derrida’s philosophy and post-colonial translation studies, our task will concentrate on defining the principles which would contribute to put forth a translational ethics of “citizenship and alterglobalism.”