02 Apr Let’s Test Your Ethics: Confidential Conversations
Let’s Test Your Ethics
The NAJIT Observer Team
Welcome to “Let’s Test Your Ethics”
As professional interpreters and translators, we often navigate challenging situations that test our ethical judgment. Whether it’s balancing confidentiality with transparency or maintaining impartiality in emotionally charged settings, these dilemmas are part of our work’s complexity.
This segment, “Let’s Test Your Ethics,” is designed to spark thoughtful discussion and provide a platform for our community to engage with hypothetical yet realistic scenarios. By exploring these challenges together, we can deepen our understanding of ethical principles and share insights that strengthen our collective professionalism.
Remember, there’s rarely a one-size-fits-all solution to ethical dilemmas. Your unique perspective, shaped by your experiences and values, is invaluable to this conversation.
Ethical Dilemma: Confidential Conversations
The Situation
Exploring ethical principles: A foundation for professional integrity in translation and interpretation
You are interpreting during a private meeting between a defendant and their attorney. The conversation is protected under attorney-client privilege, and you are there to ensure accurate communication.
During this meeting, the defendant admits to committing a serious crime that is completely unrelated to the current case. The admission is clear, intentional, and unexpected. You interpret it faithfully in the moment, but the weight of the information lingers afterward.
As you reflect on the situation, you are caught between two conflicting responsibilities:
- If you report what you heard, you may violate the ethical obligation to maintain confidentiality and compromise the integrity of the attorney-client relationship—potentially jeopardizing your role and the case.
- If you remain silent, you uphold your ethical duty but struggle with the burden of knowing a serious crime has been confessed and unreported.
To complicate matters, the nature of the unrelated crime is severe, and you feel it may involve victims who are unaware of the danger or harm done to them.
Question:
Should you uphold your obligation to maintain confidentiality, knowing the information cannot be acted on, or do you report the confession in the interest of justice and public safety, risking ethical and legal repercussions?
Reflect on This:
1. What would you do in this situation?
2. How do you weigh your ethical duty to maintain confidentiality against your sense of moral responsibility?
3. How does the severity of the unrelated crime influence your decision?
4. Would consulting with a supervisor or legal advisor help resolve the dilemma, or could that complicate things further?
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Share Your Response
We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
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- How would you handle this ethical dilemma?
- Have you faced a similar situation?
- What principles guide your decision-making in scenarios like this?
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Disclaimer
The scenarios presented in this series are fictional and intended solely for discussion and educational purposes within our professional community. They are not based on real events or specific cases but are designed to foster engagement and dialogue about ethical dilemmas that may arise in the field of judiciary interpretation and translation.
Thank you for reading!
The NAJIT Observer Team
Keep the Conversation Going
If this topic resonated with you, be sure to check out our previous blog posts for more insights on the realities of our profession, and the evolving world of judiciary translation and interpreting:
- Beyond Language: The Expert Interpreter – Examines the interpreter’s role beyond language delivery, focusing on judgment, ethics, and professionalism.
- When to Let Compassion Take the Driver’s Seat – The article explores how court interpreters can balance professionalism with empathy, recognizing when compassion should guide their actions to support those they serve.
- Writing for Proteus – Share your expertise and insights with the judiciary translation and interpreting community by contributing to Proteus, NAJIT’s quarterly publication
- The Failings of the Ivory Tower — A critical look at the disconnect between academic institutions and the practical realities of the judiciary translation and interpretation profession.
You can find these and more in our blog archives!
Interested in sharing your insights with our community? Check out Writing for The NAJIT Observer to learn how you can contribute.
The images used in this post are sourced from Unsplash. They are used for illustrative purposes only.
What an interesting question. I believe the attorney has the more challenging decision, since presumably their client has not yet hired them for defending against charges that are not yet brought. Attorney-client privilege might not apply in that case, although perhaps it does, in the sense that receiving additional charges would likely hurt their client’s overall situation, thus necessitating the attorney’s discretion. (Not an attorney, just exploring the ideas here).
For the interpreter it’s more straightforward. Any information received during the course of carrying out our duties must not be divulged, discomfort be damned. If we were approached alone in the hallway, that’s a different matter. Confidentiality does not apply in situations where we are not actively engaged in providing interpreting services.
The only exception for the interpreter might be if the new information implies ongoing criminal behavior that hurts another. I’ve never been entirely clear on the “imminent harm” aspect of our code of ethics in regard to the duty to report. Does that mean, if someone tells us, in a format where confidentiality doesn’t apply, something that suggests they plan to do harm within the next—24 hours, five minutes, month?—that we have a duty to report it? What if confidentiality does apply? That then gets us back close to the original question: Is the confession in regards to something all in the past, or something with ongoing effects and/or actions? What if the harm in question is more abstract, not physical? “Imminent harm” could be construed in so many ways.
Trust—between attorney, interpreter and the LEP—is central to our ability to function effectively in our role. We can assuage our moral twinges by reminding ourselves of the much greater good to society that comes from having competent language professionals who can be trusted to abide by their professional ethics. Sometimes, however, maintaining trust could come in conflict with the occasional duty to protect the public in our role as officer of the court. Perhaps the best person with whom to discuss the feelings of dilemma might be the attorney who also heard the new information, especially if the interpreter feels they may have some duty to report.
I was once interpreting next to the defendant who, right after the DA gave her summation to the jury, turned and made a comment to me that sounded something like (in Spanish) “she nailed it”. I wasn’t 100% sure that he’d said it, and since we were at the defense table, presumably he might have been speaking to his lawyer, in which case it was definitely confidential. Defendants will often initiate questions and comments to the lawyer by first turning to the interpreter. I kept my mouth shut about what I thought I’d heard, but it still feels like a gray area. Should I have brought the comment to the judge’s attention?