A recent academic study titled “Working Conditions of Audiovisual Translators in Europe” by A recent academic study titled “Working Conditions of Audiovisual Translators in Europe” by Kristijan Nikolić, Mirjana Tonković, and Jorge Díaz Cintas offers one of the clearest empirical snapshots to date of the growing insecurity affecting the profession. This article summarises the main findings before highlighting major analytical issues in how responsibility for deteriorating conditions is explained and distributed within the analysis.

Based on large-scale survey responses from 1,966 audiovisual translators across Europe, the study examines income levels, employment practices, contract negotiation, professional identity, and working conditions within what the authors describe as an increasingly globalised and platform-driven sector.

What makes this research particularly important is that it moves concerns many translators already recognise from lived experience into documented academic evidence grounded in large-scale data. The findings paint a worrying picture of the profession.

Despite the fact that nearly 70% of respondents held a master’s degree or higher, 62% reported earning at or below the median wage in their respective countries. Perhaps even more strikingly, the study found only a limited correlation between experience and income. In other words, years spent building expertise and professional experience do not reliably translate into significantly improved earnings. The authors describe this as evidence of the “economic fragility” of the audiovisual translation sector despite the profession’s high levels of qualification and professional dedication.

Another important finding concerns the role of language service providers (LSPs) and intermediary-controlled workflows. The study finds that:

“Most translators operate through LSPs, who exert considerable control over pay rates, turnaround times, and quality standards. The resulting loss of direct negotiation power significantly constrains professional agency.”

This is a particularly important observation because it situates translators’ working conditions within broader market structures rather than framing them solely as questions of individual skill or effort. The authors also reference wider industry research suggesting that the top ten LSPs control around 60% of the market, leaving many individual translators with limited leverage over pricing and working conditions.

Additionally, the study documents widespread dissatisfaction with working conditions, as a large percentage of translators expressed unwillingness or reluctance to recommend the profession to newcomers.

The words most frequently used to describe participants’ perceptions of audiovisual translation included “underpaid” and “stressful,” reflecting growing frustration with low remuneration, increasing responsibilities, and professional undervaluation.

The authors note that many participants reported facing uncertainty regarding future projects, limited access to social protections, weak contractual enforcement, and the absence of collective bargaining mechanisms. The study also highlights concerns about automation and AI, with many respondents expressing anxiety about technological developments and worsening financial prospects.

Limitations of Attribution

While this research makes an important contribution through urgently needed empirical documentation of deteriorating working conditions and intensifying financial insecurity, there are a few serious attribution problems that raise concerns about theoretical and analytical limitations in how some of the findings are interpreted.

The most striking sentence appears in the introduction:

“The surge in demand for streaming content during the pandemic was followed by a sharp contraction in production budgets, adversely affecting not only producers and distributors but also language service providers (LSPs) and, consequently, the translators who localise audiovisual content.”

I personally struggled to read past this sentence and had to return to the article multiple times before finishing it. The sentence attributes the problems primarily to external pressures and frames LSPs mainly as actors affected by those pressures. It implies that LSPs themselves have little or no role in the intensifying financial insecurity of translators.

I asked the authors whether their data actually supported such attribution, or whether it was simply assumed that LSPs were primarily transmitting external pressures along the supply chain.

Professor Kristijan Nikolić responded that: “There probably is scope to consider the role of intermediaries in shaping the pricing structures and value distribution. However, we don’t have data.”

The authors therefore did not have access to LSP finances, company budgets, intermediary margins, or value flows within the supply chain. Should there not have been more serious consideration of the role intermediaries play in shaping pricing structures and value distribution, especially given how concerning the findings are?

Additionally, there is external evidence regarding the size of the translation industry and the healthy revenues of large LSPs. An Association of Translation Companies and Nimdzi Insights (2021) report states that translation companies self-reported gross margins of up to 77%. The real percentage could potentially be even higher, given that these are self-reported figures.

These distinctions are genuinely important for me as someone also working on questions of labour precarity, outsourcing, and inequality within translation and interpreting markets.

A similar attribution problem appears in the analysis of responses indicating that a large percentage of translators do not negotiate rates of pay. The authors mainly attribute this to translators lacking financial training and negotiation strategies. While this might be a contributing factor, the authors seem to place significant emphasis on translators’ individual abilities without fully considering whether some translators avoid negotiation because they fear losing future work, or because they already know that certain LSPs will simply refuse to pay more.

For example, in my own PhD study on public service interpreters in the UK, many respondents indicated that assignments are often offered on a “take it or leave it” basis. Some interpreters also stated that when they attempted to negotiate rates, they subsequently received less work from LSPs. In other words, what may appear superficially as a lack of negotiation skills may in practice reflect structural power imbalances within highly unequal labour markets.

Professor Kristijan Nikolić responded that they did not collect data on this issue. He stated that “I think both things are at play here. Freelancers are not trained enough in terms of financial literacy and negotiation strategies, but also structural constraints are at hand.”

Another attribution issue appears in the comparison between the incomes of translators who are members of professional associations and those who are not. The authors seem to imply that membership in professional organisations helps translators earn more, without sufficiently considering whether the opposite causal direction might also be true. Could the observed association between professional membership and income reflect, at least in part, differences in prior positioning within the market — for example, more established translators being more likely to join professional organisations in the first place?

I have not come across data that conclusively support either interpretation. This is precisely why I believe the role of professional organisations needs to be studied more critically and empirically.

Professor Kristijan Nikolić responded that

I can only repeat what we have stated in our article: according to the data, those who are more established have better rates, but I would refrain from adding anything else.”

It is important to note that this particular attribution problem is actually relatively common within parts of translation studies, as well as within the promotional narratives of some translators’ organisations. For example, similar attribution problems appear int the study “Love’s Labour’s Found? A Data-Driven Exploration of Job Quality among UK-Based Freelance Translators” by JC Penet, Callum Walker, and Joseph Lambert. Additionally, the Institute of Translation & Interpreting commissioned research on translators’ rates (Walker et al., 2024) in which the authors explicitly acknowledged that correlation does not imply causation, yet the findings were still publicly framed in ways that strongly implied proof of organisational “clear value.”

Finally, I personally found it frustrating that the study offered only limited insight into how low translators’ incomes actually are in practice. I wish the authors had asked questions that went beyond whether respondents earned below or above the national average in their country of residence, particularly given that low pay was already a central concern of the research.

For example, I would have been interested to know what percentage of translators are actually able to meet their basic living needs through translation work alone, and what percentage rely on other family members, loans, savings, or state benefits to survive. In my own study of public service interpreters in the UK, such questions provided a much clearer indication of the severity of financial insecurity within the profession.

Ultimately, how we explain deteriorating working conditions matters because attribution shapes where responsibility for change is placed. I have already started this conversation in a previous article.

About the author
Fardous Bahbouh is a researcher and broadcast interpreter specialising in labour rights and the political economy of the translation and interpreting industry. Alongside her academic research, she continues to work with agencies and production companies that value interpreters and translators and provide fair working conditions. She also runs a small translation company and does not generalise critiques of large intermediaries to all translation companies or agencies.

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Janet Turra

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