Moralistic Ideology in Translation Theory

Many of the human translation theories being currently applied in the realm of professional translation and translation service promotes a certain ideology or philosophy.
As such, whenever theorists go about criticizing rivaling theories that go in direct opposition to their own theories, they inevitably criticize the ideology beyond those theories as well.
After all, even when it comes to linguistic theories, you can’t make a theory out of thin air without any believable basis; you have to establish it in some sort of foundation or way of thinking, which is what ideologies are all about.

All the same, the most common characteristics of what is considered as good human translation work—particularly those promulgated by the academic institutions of translation pedagogy—are accuracy, faithfulness, and loyalty to the source text and source text author.
Then again, despite the fact that adherence and faithfulness to the original document to the point of considering it as gospel is considered the first and foremost criteria often mentioned for evaluating a professional translation (and the translation service responsible for it), it’s not necessarily the end-all, be-all of critiquing, as evidenced by the phenomena known as localization.

A Question of Ownership
The abovementioned virtues of faithfulness and accuracy appear to be the major moral values in the ideological system of those who believe in them.
Even though morals—or lack thereof—isn’t usually discussed in translation theory (it’s more often discussed in professional translation and overlaps with business ethics), the ideology behind a faithfully rendered translation or the kind of approach used to get such a result could be called a “moralistic ideology”.
Translating using the moralistic approach brings up the question of ownership and how it figures in the whole process.
The ideologies of localization and adaptation aside, the moralistic approach is geared towards introducing the source text authors as the rightful owners of their work, and as such, the translator in this context is viewed as someone who is intruding the exclusive realm of these original content writers.

Is Translation Unethical?
Under the moralistic ideology, the translator is viewed as the usurper, interloper, or fiend who’s trying to share in the source text author’s property and power, which in turn makes the process of translation a stigmatized and unethical act comparable to plundering, robbery, or plagiarism of ideas and original content.
The supporters to the moralistic ideology of translation see themselves as the vanguards that protect the interests of the authorial camp (in contrast to the interests of the translator camp and the target audience), so any changes to the words and the intent of the original makers of the document is seen as blasphemy by these people.
Furthermore, since they view translation as reprehensible, adherents to this belief expect translators to make their translations as close to the source text as humanly possible in order to compensate for their “unethical” acts.
In other words, this is the other side of the debate between localization versus equivalence, word-for-word transliteration versus sense-for-sense adaptation, and source text accuracy in favor of the author versus cultural accommodation in favor of the target audience.
Belief in ideology is the reason why preserving formal correspondence and literalism in translation is equaled to accuracy—the connection between the translated text and the source text is much more observable there when compared to localized texts and adapted contexts.