Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to show the benefits of teaching a course in Risk Management in Translation by introducing case studies where translators and interpreters are faced with various problematic situations. The problematic situations can appear in settings such as a court setting, medical setting, and engineering site setting, an interview setting, as well as presentations of a project plan, or workshop on the topic of leadership. The interpreter finds him or herself faced with issues such as pressure from attorneys in a court setting to summarize what the witness says, yet this comes against the ethical principles especially in such a setting where each and every detail matters. In addition, mistakes from the interpreters who do not pay careful attention to the use of modal verbs can completely change the situation and lead to the clear guilt of the suspect, e.g. if the witness says that they think they saw the suspect in a certain place, and if the interpreter translates this as the witness claiming that they did see the suspect in a certain place. In a medical setting, the interpreter should not intervene and not react emotionally, by encouraging and convincing a nervous patient that the operation is safe, when the doctor claims that there are some chances of risk. In an engineering setting, safety instructions need to be translated without ommitting and detail. Scenarios where these do not happen will be examined in order to present to students the various risks or to make them think about the possible consequences. In the case of a project plan presentation, the engineer managing the construction plan of a new mall may pressure the interpreter to soften the possible additional fees or risk possibilities in case of using cheaper materials. In the case of a workshop on the topic of leadership, the interpreter may be facing a situation where one participant asks him to translate less convincingly the argument of another participant, or the coach may be using drect communication when offering feedback, while the participants come from an indirect communication culture. Starting from these case studies and their analyses together with the students, we can claim that we can strat building up experience and then we can devise risk management mitigation strategies. The theoretical part will be gone through easier after presenting students with concrete examples. Critical thinking abilities are developed through the analysis of these scenarios. In addition, students rely on their previous knowledge of ethical principles and deontological codes for translators as a basis to start judging the situation, and to think ahead of the consequences of acting one way or another. They are asked to think ahead and to make hypotheses about what can happen in the future if one action or another are taken by the translators and interpreters in the case studies. The use of technology for translation and its risks are also present in the case studies. The students taking these course are MA degree students, first year, in Specialized Translation and Interpretation, second year, at the Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest, Romania. The course is taught by the author of the present paper during the second semester of the academic year 2025-2026, online on Microsoft Teams platform. Risk management, translation studies, ethics, and psychology are part of the methodological framework.

Keywords:

Critical thinking, ethics, mitigation.