Power dynamics and research ethics in translation studies

Abstract This article applies Bourdieu’s field theory together with the concept of nested fields to examine the ethical dilemmas and power asymmetries that researchers face in translation studies. Conventional ethical frameworks typically assume that researchers exercise unidirectional power over participants. This study challenges that assumption by showing how researchers themselves may occupy vulnerable or ambivalent positions within overlapping academic, cultural, and professional fields. Drawing on two real-world cases involving Chinese translation researchers, the article demonstrates how ethical decision-making is conditioned by cross-field positionality, field-specific logics, and culturally embedded normative frameworks. Rather than treating ethics as a matter of rule-following, it argues that ethical agency emerges through situated negotiations among structural pressures, relational dynamics, and cultural expectations. The study contributes a relational and context-sensitive framework for understanding researcher vulnerability and ethical complexity in translation studies, and calls for a more reflexive approach to research ethics that attends to the entanglement of researchers and participants across intersecting fields.