STUDENTS' AWARENESS OF ETHICAL ISSUES IN PUBLIC SERVICE INTERPRETING DOMAIN: EMPIRICAL STUDY

The article analyses the relevance of interpreter's professional ethics competence in public service interpreting domain from students' perspective. Modern world sets numerous challenges to professional training of public service interpreters competent to work in socially significant contexts such as healthcare, legal-administrative and educational. The mentioned settings are becoming increasingly diverse both in terms of languages spoken and culture. In these conditions public service interpreters are often called on to act not only as interpreters, but also as lingua cultural mediators bridging linguistic and cultural gaps between service users and service providers. The cross-cultural context of communication is characterized by high potential for ethical issues and dilemmas arising in the course of public service interpreter's professional activity. However ethical aspect of interpreter's professional practice tends to be undervalued and often is not included into the curriculum. The article aims to investigate the degree of awareness regarding ethical issues of students who are doing master's program on public service interpreting. To achieve the aim a number of tasks have to be fulfilled: - To study the relevant research literature; - To explore the social context of public service interpreter's professional activity; - To conduct a practical experiment with the view of assessing the degree of students' awareness regarding ethical aspects of interpreter's work. The research methodology rests on quantitative method and includes method of survey and statistical analysis. The research findings revealed that students generally become aware of ethical issues mostly through hands-on experience and have very little prior theoretical training on the subject. On the basis of the experiment the author formulates recommendations on enhancing ethical competence of public service interpreters-to-be.