CEO’S REPORT ETHICS IN INTERPRETING

Star Grieser | RID CEO MA, CDI, ICE-CCP

ASL Video: https://youtu.be/RKoslb6eIJs?si=be3x1Ro1OTlGEhqO

Did you know that “Chief Executive Officer” is referred to as many different things and - insults and expletives aside - “Chief Ethics Officer” is one of them. “As the highest-ranking executive, the CEO sets the tone for the organization. By directly overseeing the ethical framework, they can foster a culture of integrity and accountability throughout the association.”

Sure enough, the topic of ethics comes up in conversation daily, if not more often, whether it pertains to issues in front of the board, things our headquarters staff are confronting, conversations among our members, or inquiries from the consumers our members serve, or any stakeholder in our profession, and when it does, people will stop and turn to RID, to me. No pressure. While I always aim to hold myself to the highest ethical standards possible, I also - to paraphrase my new friend and esteemed colleague, Dr. Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Ph.D., philosophy professor and bioethics professor at Gallaudet University - “I don’t have all the answers but I do know to ask a lot of questions, and most importantly, ask the right questions.”

In the past few months, I’ve been involved in ongoing conversations with the Deaf Advisory Group for SAFE-AI - Stakeholders Advocating for Fair and Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence in Interpreting. We recently held a symposium at Brown University where many developers, researchers, interpreters, stakeholders came together to discuss the potential of artificial intelligence in interpreting - whether that is automated or augmented interpreting, as what’s disrupting the spoken language interpreting industry, or other applications of AI that would assist interpreters in their work - e.g. use of generative predictive text to summarize a con- sumer’s case when soliciting an interpreter for an assignment. That, by itself, raises so many ethical issues surrounding privacy and protection. Nonetheless, ethics came to the forefront for many, many concerns: if mistakes are made by AI, who is responsible? If harm is caused by misapplication of the AI, who is accountable? If “informed consent” or if the option to forgo AI for a “live” interpreter, is denied to consumers, then who is liable? We already see these issues with the use of Video Remote Interpreting in health care and mental health settings, and continue to confront these issues.

These issues will not go away and the ethical quandaries will not become more clear without serious ongoing dialogue directly confronting these issues. I urge all readers to read the SAFE-AI’s “Interpreting SAFE AI Task Force Guidance (Ethical Principles) AI and Interpreting Services” and join the Advisory Group or Task Force and join the conversation.

On this note, I recently gave a talk at 2axend’s Deaf in Health Care Summit where I discussed RID’s vision and mission for the future of our profession and engaged in conversations about what RID does, what challenges our interpreters working in health care settings face, and what RID could do better to support our members. I shared that in the past ten years, out of 917 documented Ethical Practice System reports or grievances made, only 85 were related to medical or health care settings - a mere 9% of all complaints. As interpreting in health care settings is one of the largest sectors for ASL interpreters and one of the chief complaints that deaf consumers have regarding lack of or poor quality communications access, this number tells me that the issues are systemic rather than individual. Health care systems routinely put profits over people and earnings over ethics, unfortunately at the detriment of our consumers, that is until a lawsuit forces that health care system to improve their communications access and services to Deaf, DeafBlind, Hard of Hearing and Deaf diverse patients. Individual interpreters will try their best to reduce barriers or advocate for patients but when entire systems are set up to disregard ethically sound policy and procedure, ultimately, who is liable? I know this is one of many long, complicated conversations to have and I do look forward to having them, and it’s important that we take the time to understand and discuss the complexity and multiple perspectives involved. I invite each and every one of you to actively engage in questioning the “known unknowns’’ together, as a profession.

On that note: This year, we celebrate RID’s 60th birthday. The Code of Professional Conduct - formerly the Code of Ethics - was written in the first year of RID, in 1965 by Lottie Reikehof, the chair of the ethics committee and since, has seen many changes. In 2005 The Code of Ethics morphed into the Code of Professional Conduct, codified by the RID and the National Association of the Deaf. For the past 19 years, the CPC has served as a compass for our professional ethics, behavior, standards, and conduct both with our consumers and fellow interpreters. A code of conduct is the “meat and potatoes’’ to the code of ethics, as we see with the NAD-RID CPC, it behaves as a guiding document that demonstrates how the code of ethics are applied. The seven tenets of the CPC, along with guiding principles that break down into subsets of illustrative examples, essentially demonstrates “how to ‘’ react, behave, and apply judgment in a given situation by the very ethics we hold as sign language interpreters. Having a code of ethics in tandem with a code of conduct is the cornerstone of any relevant professional organization that holds itself to high standards of moral, ethical, and social justice virtues if such tenets are applied consistently for both the good of the communities we serve and the consistent tangible behavior of our members as a profession.

We’re also celebrating the one year anniversary of the launch of the newly reformed Ethical Practices Systems. ASL interpreting is a “trust profession” in that practitioners and service providers are privy to some very personal events of consumers, and have access to their extremely sensitive information. To be effective in their work, interpreters are held in trust that they will adhere to, at the very least the Code of Professional Conduct, but also the highest ethical standards. The EPS policy and enforcement procedures differ from the CPC in that the CPC is aspirational in nature - interpreters shall aspire to incorporate these values into our daily work, the EPS holds us accountable to ourselves, to our colleagues and to our consumers for doing so across all arenas of our professional endeavors.

While RID, its members, and the communities we serve have come a long way in establishing sign language interpreting as an ethical profession with high standards, there is still much to be done. The world watches our actions and looks to us for guidance as trailblazers in the field of sign language interpreting. I hope you will continue to join us in the pursuit of strengthening our ethical practices, alongside our standards and principles to provide superior stewardship to the communities we serve.