This section in many ways brings together many of the theoretical ideas that came before. What translation is, what translators do, how the identity of the author and translator influences the decisions made and so on all relate to the idea of ethics. In the simplest sense, ethics are the values or morals that shape someone's behaviour. While the term today often refers to the ‘philosophical study of the concepts of moral right and wrong and moral good and bad, to any philosophical theory of what is morally right and wrong or morally good and bad, and to any system or code of moral rules, principles, or values’ (Singer 2022, n.p.), it is also the case that ‘[e]thics and morality are now used almost interchangeably in many contexts’ (Singer 2022, n.p., italics original).

In a translatorial context, someone's ethics might influence what jobs they choose to take on, how they translate the work in question, how they relate to the author, client or audience, whether they put their name to their translation, whether and how they promote the work and so on. We do not translate in a vacuum, however, so it is not always just a choice of whether to take on that assignment or not; sometimes we are affected by, for instance, our need to earn money to support our family, or the fact that a particular translation was assigned to us by a teacher or employer and not something we agreed to independently or would have chosen for ourselves. Also, of course, many translators are members of translators’ associations, which often have their own codes of conduct and guidelines, and these rules or suggestions may clash with translators’ own preferences or values.

Schwimmer suggests that the ‘third language’ of translation ‘is fundamentally ethical’ (2017, p. 57), with the first two languages presumably the source and target tongues.