Unethical interpreting behavior

A recent Guardian article (“Chinese dissident says he was berated by ‘pro-regime’ interpreter for UK police”, by Daniel Boffey and Lyndon Li, 30 May 2026) describes a case that should make anyone working with interpreters uneasy.

Hong Qi, a Chinese dissident recently granted asylum in the UK, contacted police through the 101 non-emergency line after his bank accounts were frozen, leaving his family at risk of homelessness. According to Qi, the interpreter assigned to the call did not just interpret, but allegedly argued with him, questioned his political stance, and—most concerning—refused to pass on parts of his message.

If this account is accurate, it is not a gray area or simply a difficult interaction. It is a blatant breach of interpreting ethics.

Interpreters are not participants in the conversation. They are not there to challenge, filter, or improve what a speaker says. Their job is to render everything faithfully, including tone, intent, and emotional content. 

The reported line—“I will not translate your emotions”—is particularly telling. In a call about potential homelessness, emotion is part of the message, and removing it distorts reality.

What makes this more troubling is the context the Guardian points to: outsourced services, limited in-house language capacity, and credible concerns about political pressure within parts of the Chinese interpreting pool: this is not just about one interpreter having a bad day.

Translation and interpreting are often treated as a background service. Cases like this are a reminder that they are anything but. When the interpreter (or the translator) fails, communication collapses, with very real consequences.

Customers beware: the ethics of scattershot translation projects

Today I received a quote request from a new source, a translation company with which I had never worked before. They asked availability and rates for an urgent legal translation project. Together with their message they sent (not only to me, but to an unspecified number of English to Italian translators) a file with the source documents.

When I opened the files, I found a couple of very confidential documents, with the kind of information that, if I were the original customer, I would assume would be treated with the utmost caution by the agency.

At a minimum, this agency should have sent a message indicating the type of document to translate (e.g. "police records, about 1200 words"), and also that, before they could send it out to prospective translators, they needed to have a confidentiality agreement signed.

Sending confidential and sensitive documents to all and sundry, as they did, is a clear and serious breach of confidentiality.