Having misread the course syllabus, I had assumed I would have an extra week to conduct my interview with a professional interpreter and report my results. Yet as Monday morning’s class concluded, I realized my error and fortunately, I was able to email and set up an interview with an interpreter on campus the following day. I relished the opportunity to ask a professional a collage of questions that were relevant my future career. I gathered a great deal of information that informed my understanding of the profession and the ethical decisions related to it. While we discussed many different topics in the interpreting field, in this essay, I will focus on some of the advice and explanation she provided in regards to making ethical decisions when accepting or declining jobs.
The biggest piece of advice she gave me was “to continually expect the unexpected”. She reaffirmed much of what I knew about every interpreting situation being different and with the clientele being equally so; interpreting jobs will never become “predictable” or “routine”. It is also important that I keep an opened mindset and be willing to accept many of these different jobs. “I am always willing to try new things once,” she says in response to how she determines whether or not to accept a job in an unfamiliar environment, “there are always new opportunities to learn, new challenges to face, and new topics to research. There is so much that we don’t know we don’t know.”
I then asked her a series of questions related to how she decided to decline jobs. She stated that the main reason she would turn down a job would be if there was an ethical conflict. Here, she imparted another piece of valuable advice: “know your boundaries and stick to them because they will be tested”. Such conflicts could be related to the agency’s policies, the client, or the assigned team. One example she provided of an agency’s policy being unethical, was where they would charge a client for a full hour if the...