Translation workers who work in media occupations spend a great deal of time talking about “doing the right thing.” However, their readers or viewers quite often find that there is something wrong with the “ethics” of these disseminators of news, information, and entertainment. What lies beneath the beliefs and the actions of our mass communication purveyors? Do they have a special obligation for ethical behavior that ordinary citizens do not; or do they, in fact, have a special waiver of the basic moral tenets that the rest of us must accept in order that we may have access to a “free marketplace of ideas”? These are the questions we must ask ourselves if we are to be moral agents of the mass media.

With this series of articles we make an attempt to provide for bilingual professionals the tools they need to use mass media in an honest and ethic way, both as a recipients of the media “products” and professionals who work in the field of journalism and other media. We think that new Chinese Translation workers, Polish Translation and Arabic Translation workers who will be working on such matters as Medical Translation and Legal Translation will benefit from this article most. This text, however, is not instructional - you will not find any rules regarding what is “right” to do when handling situations. Instead, we seek to provide some good suggestions that seem “most appropriate” for a given situation. in doing so, our main concern is to concentrate both on the subject and on why the suggested action might be the most appropriate. We have put a great effort in answering the numerous questions of our blog readers. Moreover, we fully explain each one at length.

As one Vietnamese Translation worker who also contributed to this article suggested, after all you will be the one who has to draw conclusions as far as the answers you find most acceptable are concerned. We suppose that you will realize to a greater extent how difficult it is to make a moral decision. At the very least, you will need to determine your personal benchmark according to which you can evaluate your decisions.

Thus, this series of posts will discuss news media, advertising, and public relations. Although entertainment media, such as television and movie industry, are the fields that mainly attract the interest of translation workers, the above three are most popular among the college graduates who have majors both in Translation studies and Journalism or Communication. The experience gained by translation and interpretation workers in these three fields can be used in other forms of communication, information based or otherwise. Moreover, a Polish Translator member of our team has collected reams of information related to entertainment industry and its effect on culture all over the world. And, of course, in different societies volumes have been written in opposition to the condition state of modern journalism. Here we have to mention that advertising and, public relations in particular, are often paid little attention or, worse, are compared with journalism, taking for granted that the moral norms of the one are the same as of the other. Since that is rarely the case, this book is an attempt to outline the differences that exist among these three types of media in the hope of enhancing the development of sound and specific guidelines by which they may be analyzed and, if necessary, judged according to their specific functions. At last, the principle to tell the truth and to do least harm should be obligatory for all mass media, but to a different extent and for undoubtedly different reasons.

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