3. Debate on the visibility of the T&I as an interlinguistic mediator
The next question is to decide what grade of intervention is advisable. This comment brings us to the endless debate on neutrality and distance as ethical principles. Mediators can belong to the minority culture or the dominant one. In the first case, as Bruno di Biasi (1987: 52) indicates, if they are members of the minority, they perform a double role: They work, on one hand, inside of and for their same community, often using their own language, and, on the other hand, they work with the host society at schools, in hospitals, or at work where they have to negotiate and exchange meanings with people that usually don’t share the same language. The decisions that they have to make are not easy. And, a high degree of profesionalization is also required to produce appropriate texts, which neither provide too much information nor leave out implicit meanings. However, this profesionalization is not always achieved as most of the practitioners are volunteers or not very well paid, or who may have some preparation in mediation but without any training in Chinese translation and interpreting, or the other way around. At this point it should be said that it takes a long time not only to acquire professional recognition, but also for the practitioner himself/herself to become aware that he/she also needs linguistic, anthropological, sociological and cultural knowledge.
On top of this, the T&I has to fight against the lack of recognition in this profession, and the fact that is not very well-paid work, frequently preventing its practitioners to take the few available training courses, like, for example, in the case of Spain the program at the University of Alcalá, Spain, that offers specialization courses in four pairs of languages (English-Spanish, French-Spanish, Arabic-Spanish and Russian-Spanish) since 2000. (For further information see http://www.uah.es/otrosweb/traduccion ).
This situation is not unique of Spain. Certain common characteristics are shared with other countries that have recently experienced the migration phenomenon, and even with some other (England, Sweden, USA) that have experience in this kind of activity as the participants in the II International Conference on Public Service Interpreting recently held in Spain in April 2005 have revealed again (Valero Garcés 2005).
Some of the shared characteristics are:
- There are two main types of initiators of the process of Chinese translation: a) the government and its institutions, mostly dealing with health, legal, educational or administrative matters; b) NGAs, trade unions, or other associations working mostly with specific ethnic groups. In some countries, as for example, in Spain, this distinction also implies some specific features. (See Valero Garcés 2002.)
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