Some of you may know I belong to two professional areas: performing arts and languages. We dancers are supposed to be the dumbest among the dumb. We are not. On the contrary, we are quite smart and we have really helpful life skills other professions lack. It is true that we are tough, both on ourselves and on each other but our ethics are solid.
If anything, the last two years have made me take a stronger stand on ethics, and believe me, they were pretty strong already.
We always talk about how there are a lot of untrained and unqualified people who work as translators and interpreters, and we all go “corporative” and proud, and rant about our training and all the money and time we have invested.
OK. Let’s see. This is something I see in my other profession, dance. When I was young, any good-looking girl would be hired by a TV station as a dancer just because they were pretty, in the very same way that people who speak two or more languages are hired as translators and interpreters. I am a qualified and certified dance teacher and I it pains me to see how many untrained dancers are giving lessons: they lack basic teaching and pedagogy knowledge and they can also injure their students just because they don’t know about child development or advanced anatomy. It’s the same in T&I: I am a translator/ interpreter and therefore I can teach (T&I or languages). Really?
Teaching T&I is much more than knowing how to do what you do. You need to know why you do it. You need to be didactic and you need to know how to teach. You need to know Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Cognition, Pedagogy and Psychology among other things. Additionally, you need to like it; if you don’t, it shows. And that, just like it is with people, is a two-way street, if you don’t like teaching, then teaching is not going to like you (and neither will your students). If you think teaching is standing there in front of your students bragging about your professional and personal achievements, again, you are wrong.
Then, my question is: is it ethical to become an untrained and unqualified teacher simply because you are a translator and interpreter? Shouldn't you get proper teaching training before teaching?
*"Ethical" almond milk matcha latte
