Abderrahman Boukhaffa. Self-Care, Translation Professionalization, and the Translator’s Ethical Agency: Ethics of Epimeleia Heautou. London and New York, Routledge, 2025, 316 p.

Abderrahman Boukhaffa’s Self-Care, Translation Professionalization, and the Translator’s Ethical Agency: Ethics of Epimeleia Heautou targets a familiar object—translator organizations’ codes of ethics—while refusing the equally familiar assumption that codification straightforwardly delivers ethics. In this volume, Boukhaffa advances therefore the claim that codified ethics may operate less as a vehicle for ethical judgement than as a site where professionalization, power asymmetries, and ethical subjectivity crystallize—and where professional reassurance can be purchased at the cost of moral autonomy and wider accountability. In other words, by embedding a transfer-and-compliance concept of translation (faithfulness/accuracy, neutrality, confidentiality), codes may narrow responsibility to patrons and professional insiders and, in so doing, inhibit both symbolic recognition and ethical agency of the translators …