One of the most striking observations from my three years of PhD research into the translation and interpreting industry is how little attention is paid to a basic question: why are translators and interpreters so often underpaid, and who is responsible?

Across professional events, academic discussions, and institutional collaborations, these questions remain largely unaddressed. When they are raised, they are often explained away through external factors or normalised as market outcomes.

There is still limited scrutiny of how translation companies set pay rates, or how responsibility becomes diffused across outsourcing chains—particularly in public service provision. Instead, low pay and precarity are frequently reframed as individual challenges, shifting responsibility away from those who design and benefit from the system.

This article comes as a deliberate intervention in the public interest, aimed at re-centring responsibility in a field where it is often displaced onto individual practitioners. Financial insecurity in the translation industry is primarily produced through corporate practices that treat translators as cost variables rather than workers, and is enabled by weak legal protections that allow these arrangements to persist with limited accountability.

Beyond this, a wider set of structural and ideological factors—outsourcing, inequality, and corporate-aligned institutional and academic narratives—serve to normalise and obscure these conditions. Persistently low pay is therefore not accidental, but structurally produced.

For ease of reading, the term “translators” is used throughout to refer to both translators and interpreters. While individual factors—such as effort, skill, talent, and opportunity—play a role, the focus here remains on systemic and structural dynamics.

1. Translators Are Treated as Costs Variables Rather Than People

Across much of the translation industry, translators are increasingly treated as interchangeable units of production rather than as a workforce entitled to fair pay and decent working conditions. This cost-based logic reduces translation labour to a commodity. The primary concern becomes price minimisation—often justified through competition, efficiency, or client expectations—while questions of fair pay and working conditions are sidelined or ignored.

A relevant example can be found in the Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry. In a chapter authored by Raisa McNab, CEO of the Association of Translation Companies (ATC)—an interest group representing translation companies that predominantly act as intermediaries between translators and end clients—the project management process is presented in ways that offer a revealing lens into how translation companies sometimes conceptualise their workforce in terms of cost optimisation and profitability. Translators are described as “resources” within workflows, rather than as skilled knowledge workers with rights.

Such a framework risks normalising a practice in which translator pay is not treated as a question of fair compensation or labour rights, but as a variable to be managed within pricing models, alongside discounts, productivity gains from technology, and client budgets. Practices such as automation and machine translation are presented primarily in terms of efficiency gains, with little acknowledgment of their impact on translators’ ability to earn a sustainable income. Translators are thus positioned as “resources” within project management systems, with limited attention to their working conditions, professional autonomy, or wellbeing.

It is important to note that, in a previous article, I critiqued the Handbook for adopting a corporate-aligned narrative that risks normalising and depoliticising current practices in the translation industry through a market-fundamentalist approach, rather than questioning the structures that produce them. The Handbook largely presents market outcomes as neutral, thereby obscuring the structural decisions and power dynamics that actively produce low pay and insecurity. I also argued that the author’s institutional affiliation and representational role should have been more clearly identified, given the author’s role in a corporate representative organisation. This is not a neutral way of describing the world—it is a way of shaping it.

Figure 1: illustration of representational asymmetry in academic publishing

It is equally important to recognise that these pricing dynamics do not only harm translators; they also disadvantage ethical translation companies that seek to provide fair pay and decent working conditions. When the underpayment of linguistic labour becomes normalised, such companies may struggle to compete with companies able to offer lower prices by suppressing translator compensation. At this level, responsibility lies with those who design and implement pricing and management systems that treat translators as cost variables. In this way, such practices reshape market conditions, further reducing choice for translators.

This pricing logic is sustained not only through corporate decision-making, but also through weak legal protections that enable translators to be treated as cost variables with limited accountability.

2. Weak Legal Protections and Contractor Classification

These pricing logics are reinforced by weak legal protections governing the employment status of translators. In many contexts, they are classified as independent contractors rather than employees, which places them outside the scope of basic labour protections. As a result, fundamental rights associated with employment—such as minimum wage guarantees, paid sick leave, and paid holidays—do not apply.

This legal classification means that translators are typically treated as self-employed service providers, even when their work is structured, scheduled, and controlled through agency systems and client requirements. While this status is often presented as offering flexibility, it also shifts significant risks onto individual workers, including income instability and the absence of social protections that are normally associated with standard employment.

In practice, this creates a regulatory gap in which remuneration and working conditions are not governed by baseline labour standards, but are instead left to contractual agreements between parties with unequal bargaining power. The absence of employment status recognition therefore enables pricing systems to operate without being bound by minimum protections that would otherwise apply in standard labour relationships.

In this way, the classification of translators as contractors is not a neutral administrative category, but a key legal mechanism that allows low pay and precarity to persist while remaining formally compliant with existing labour frameworks.

Even in the context of recent political commitments in the UK to address labour exploitation, including the new Employment Protection Act 2025, professions such as translation remain largely unaffected due to their classification as independent contractors. As a result, they continue to fall outside the scope of key employment protections, despite policy rhetoric emphasising fairness, security, and the reduction of precarious work.

Ironically, at the other end of the spectrum, the UK has introduced far more decisive regulatory measures when contractor status is associated with higher-income forms of work. The IR35 reforms, implemented in April 2021, were designed to address tax avoidance in cases where contractors were effectively operating as employees while benefiting from contractor tax status. This stands in marked contrast to the absence of equivalent protective measures for low-paid contractor professions such as translation and interpreting.

The asymmetry in regulatory attention is striking: where financial loss to the state or higher-income contractors is concerned, regulatory frameworks are actively strengthened; where low-paid, precarious labour is concerned, protections remain limited or absent.

3. Outsourcing and the Diffusion of Responsibility

Outsourcing reduces oversight of labour conditions while redistributing responsibility across complex supply chains. Even ethically minded organisations and investors may rely on intermediaries that treat translators as cost variables, often without visibility into downstream practices.

In public services, translation and interpreting are frequently delivered through multi-layered contracting arrangements. At each stage, cost pressures are passed downward and accountability becomes increasingly diffuse, often ending with the translator.

Institutional responses reinforce this fragmentation. Public bodies routinely emphasise that contractors are independent and responsible for their own pay structures. Responsibility is therefore not absent—but displaced through contractual distance.

These dynamics extend beyond translation, affecting a wide range of publicly funded outsourced work. Global outsourcing further intensifies the issue by placing workers in unequal competition without equivalent protections.

This system is not incidental. It is structured in ways that make responsibility harder to locate—while allowing cost minimisation to persist.

4. Increasing Inequality Within the UK and Globally

Rising inequality plays a central role in shaping labour conditions. Structural barriers—linked to migration status, discrimination, socio-economic background, and care responsibilities—limit access to secure and better-paid work, channeling many into precarious sectors such as translation.

As a result, the ability to refuse low rates is often constrained. What appears as “choice” is frequently shaped by limited alternatives.

Within the UK, translation labour is highly racialised and feminised, contributing to its systematic undervaluation. Globally, unequal economic structures further restrict opportunities, meaning that poorly paid translation work may still represent one of few viable income sources. These inequalities are historically and structurally produced, reflecting global power imbalances and economic arrangements that limit labour protections.

They also fragment professional solidarity. Downward pressure on rates is often attributed to individual behaviour, rather than to structural conditions—redirecting attention away from the systems that produce precarity.

In this way, inequality does not merely shape the industry; it sustains it.

5. Responsibility Displacement in Narratives of Technological Development

Technological developments, particularly machine translation and AI-assisted workflows, are often presented as direct causes of declining pay, increased precarity, and deteriorating working conditions in the translation and interpreting industry. In this framing, responsibility is implicitly displaced onto technology itself, as if AI were an autonomous force reshaping labour relations independently of human decision-making.

However, this framing obscures a more fundamental point: responsibility does not lie with the technology, but with the organisations and actors who design, deploy, and integrate it into working practices. AI systems do not make decisions in isolation; they operate within infrastructures governed by corporate, institutional, and political choices.

This distinction is crucial because it determines where accountability is located. When translation companies adopt AI tools to reduce costs, fragment work, or increase throughput, the responsibility for resulting pay reductions or deteriorating conditions rests with those companies and their executives—not with the technology itself. AI functions as an instrument within existing economic logics, not as an independent causal agent.

This issue of misplaced responsibility can be illustrated more broadly. In military contexts, for example, reports have documented cases where AI-assisted targeting systems have contributed to the identification of targets. Yet when harm occurs, accountability is not attributed to the algorithm itself, but to the military institutions that chose to deploy, trust, and act upon its outputs. The responsibility remains with the chain of command and the decision-making structures that authorised its use.

A similar principle applies in the translation industry. If AI-assisted systems are used in ways that lead to downward pressure on rates, increased surveillance, or reduced professional autonomy, responsibility cannot be shifted onto the technology. It remains with the companies, agencies, and executives who integrate these systems into labour processes and determine how value is extracted from human work.

In this sense, AI should not be understood as an external force acting upon the industry, but as a tool whose effects are shaped by existing power relations. To attribute responsibility to the technology itself is to obscure the decisions of those who benefit from its implementation. It is precisely through institutional and academic narratives that this displacement of responsibility is often reinforced.

6. Corporate-Aligned Institutional Narratives

When professional bodies echo corporate narratives, they risk obscuring structural realities and diffusing responsibility away from those who shape pay and working conditions.

Across institutional discourse—particularly in collaboration with industry groups—persistent issues such as declining rates and financial precarity are reframed in terms of adaptability, professionalism, and continuous development. While valuable in principle, this emphasis shifts attention from structural conditions to individual responsibility.

As a result, insecurity is reframed as a matter of personal effort. Translators are encouraged to invest in training and skills development, even where there is little evidence that such investment improves pay or conditions. This creates a burden of self-responsibilisation: individuals are expected to adapt to the market rather than question its structure.

This framing also displaces ethical scrutiny. Professional expectations are directed primarily at translators, while far less attention is given to the responsibilities of translation companies that set rates and conditions.

A further limitation emerges in claims that such bodies cannot address pay because they are not trade unions. While they do not negotiate wages, this does not preclude them from addressing labour conditions as matters of ethics, evidence, and public interest. Labour rights are integral to professional standards and directly affect the quality of work.

Other organisations, such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, demonstrate alternative approaches by raising awareness of insecure work without acting as bargaining bodies. A similar model could be adopted in the translation sector.

More fundamentally, there is an imbalance in how accountability is applied. Individual translators are subject to strict professional criteria, while equivalent scrutiny of translation companies remains limited. Standards such as ISO certification address processes, but not labour conditions.

This raises a central question: why is ethical responsibility consistently framed around individual conduct, rather than corporate practice?

Institutional narratives that prioritise adaptability without addressing structural conditions risk reinforcing the very dynamics they are supposed to help practitioners navigate.

For transparency, I note that I was previously a Chartered Linguist registered with the CIOL, but cancelled my membership in response to these issues. This is not a personal position, but an indication of the concerns outlined here. These dynamics may prompt some translators to reconsider whether continued membership remains justified without meaningful change.

7. Corporate-Aligned Academic Narratives

A similar dynamic is evident in academic discourse. While the primary drivers of financial insecurity lie in corporate practices enabled by weak protections, parts of academia have contributed to normalising these conditions by failing to consistently centre them as core analytical concerns.

The industry is frequently presented as dynamic and evolving, but this framing often coexists with limited engagement with declining pay, precarity, and power asymmetries. These issues are acknowledged, but rarely treated as central.

Instead, attention shifts towards how translators can adapt—through upskilling and professional development—rather than examining how such conditions are produced. Responsibility is therefore subtly displaced from corporate actors to individual practitioners.

This has important implications. When precarious conditions are framed as inevitable, rather than as outcomes of specific decisions about pricing and labour structures, questions of power and accountability are weakened or obscured.

Industry–academic collaboration can reinforce this dynamic. While valuable, it may narrow the scope of critique, particularly when corporate actors are involved in shaping discourse. Structural questions—about labour conditions, value distribution, and responsibility—may receive less sustained attention (see, for example, my critique of the event “Studying Translation in the Age of AI,” the conference “Better Together” organised by the Association of Programmes in Translation and Interpreting Studies in the UK and Ireland (APTIS) and held at UCL, and the edited volume the Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry).

A further consequence is selective representation. Academic narratives often foreground success and opportunity, while the experiences of those facing financial insecurity remain less visible. This produces a form of survivor bias, in which outcomes of stability and progression appear more common and attainable than they are in practice.

As with institutional narratives, technological change is often framed in terms of adaptation rather than responsibility. Yet, as argued earlier, outcomes are shaped by how technologies are implemented—not by the technologies themselves.

The issue, therefore, is not that academic accounts are incorrect, but that they are partial. When structural conditions are not consistently foregrounded, they become easier to overlook in policy, education, and public discourse.

If these issues are to be addressed, academic engagement must move beyond adaptation and more directly examine how power, responsibility, and value are organised within the industry.

Conclusion

The persistent underpayment of translators and interpreters is not merely an inevitable outcome of market forces or technological change. It is the result of a system in which translation companies set rates and conditions while treating translators as cost variables rather than as workers. This is enabled by weak legal protections, outsourcing structures that diffuse accountability, and inequalities that constrain translators’ ability to refuse unfair terms.

Institutional and academic narratives often reinforce this system by shifting attention towards individual adaptation rather than structural responsibility. In doing so, they risk normalising conditions that are neither neutral nor inevitable.

If meaningful change is to occur, If the industry is to change, the starting point is clarity about responsibility. Translation companies and their executives must be recognised as the primary actors shaping pay and working conditions. Legal frameworks must address the gap created by contractor classification. Responsibility must also extend across supply chains: public institutions, private companies, and investors alike should be accountable for the labour conditions under which outsourced linguistic work is performed. Professional and academic actors, in turn, must move beyond narratives of adaptation to engage directly with questions of power, labour rights, and accountability, which also requires due diligence and critical vetting of industry actors before collaboration.

Without such clarity, responsibility will continue to be displaced—and the conditions that produce low pay will persist.

About the author

Fardous Bahbouh is a Researcher and Consultant specializing in Labour Rights, Public Policy, and the Political Economy of the Translation Industry.

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