Like many questions that challenge established assumptions, I am aware this may be an uncomfortable one to ask. My aim in raising it is knowledge creation through a political economy analysis of membership organisations and translators’ labour. This article examines how institutional narratives, incentive structures, and representational arrangements shape what is made visible or invisible about labour conditions in the translation industry, and how this contributes to the depoliticisation of translators’ work.
Although parts of this discussion could apply to other organisations, I focus on the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) because it has repeatedly promoted the claim that research demonstrates a “clear value” associated with membership, despite the absence of evidence establishing such a conclusion.
More importantly, ITI frequently participates in public narratives about the profession, often alongside the Association of Translation Companies (ATC) — an interest group representing LSPs — which frame industry problems in ways that shift responsibility away from the role of intermediaries in shaping labour conditions. My concern is not only with individual statements, but with the broader institutional function these narratives perform.
What is most significant is how organisations like ITI increasingly shift attention away from structural problems within the translation industry and onto individual translators. Issues such as declining rates, weakened bargaining power, outsourcing, platformisation, and technological disruption are frequently reframed as matters of individual adaptability, resilience, branding, training, and competitiveness.
Within this framework, economic insecurity becomes personalised rather than politicised. The question, then, is whether ITI’s narrative of professionalisation functions less as a defence of translators’ labour interests and more as a mechanism for managing, depoliticising, and normalising their deterioration.
Theoretical framing
This analysis draws on political economy approaches to precarity and risk, including work by Joseph Stiglitz, Guy Standing, Nancy Fraser, Nancy Folbre, Mariana Mazzucato, Isabell Lorey, Judith Butler, and Ulrich Beck.
Depoliticisation is understood here as the process through which structural labour problems are reframed as matters of individual behaviour, adaptability, and mindset, rather than questions of power, economic organisation, collective bargaining, or public policy.
1. Are translators and interpreters institutionally funding narratives that conflict with their labour interests?
I have repeatedly critiqued ITI for producing public statements that promote corporate-aligned narratives which often obscure or downplay increasing precarity and intensifying financial insecurity among translators and interpreters, while simultaneously absolving language service providers (LSPs) of responsibility. This raises an important question: are translators and interpreters knowingly funding narratives that harm their own labour interests? As Ulrich Beck observed, “there is no better breeding ground for risks than denying them.”
The following four examples illustrate this pattern:
Example 1
When the CEO of ITI spoke at the event Studying Translation in the Age of AI, she presented an optimistic account emphasising collaboration and relationship-based working practices, without foregrounding research on increased monitoring, downward pressure on rates, fragmentation of work, and reduced bargaining power associated with platform-mediated labour and AI-assisted translation.
No explicit reference was made to the intensifying financial insecurity experienced by many translators and interpreters.
Example 2
ITI co-issued the report The Strategic Case for “Languages in UK Higher Education” alongside the Association of Translation Companies (ATC) and the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL). The report framed the language sector through narratives of market growth, educational pipelines, and economic opportunity for the whole UK while omitting discussion of worsening financial realities facing many translators and interpreters.
When I raised concerns about the absence of labour conditions and remuneration from the discussion, the CEO of ITI stated that rates of pay are “discussed elsewhere.” This was not an isolated justification; I had previously encountered the same argument from the CEO of the ATC, who suggested that my equality research should not focus on deteriorating pay and working conditions because they are simply being discussed elsewhere.
However, the ATC represents LSP interests. This raises important questions about why translators and interpreters continue to support institutions that repeatedly exclude labour conditions from public policy discussions.
Example 3
When the CEO of ITI participated in the House of Lords inquiry into court interpreting, the discussion was framed primarily as a problem of workforce retention rather than labour rights, precarity, or exploitation.
Interpreters were discussed primarily in terms of workforce supply rather than as workers experiencing deteriorating labour conditions and entitled to fair pay, dignity, and decent working conditions.
This discussion also included proposals requiring interpreters to pay for diplomas, registration, and membership fees, despite widespread acknowledgement of low pay and financial insecurity in the sector.
Example 4
ITI also participated in issuing the white paper Working Together in collaboration with the ATC and other organisations. The paper attributed problems in public service interpreting primarily to procurement complexity and external pressures, while omitting any substantial discussion of how outsourcing structures and intermediary business models shape interpreters’ pay and working conditions.
Instead, in its recommendations, it promoted continued outsourcing and increased public funding routed through intermediaries, without proposing mechanisms to ensure that improvements would reach interpreters themselves.
2. Who benefits from the personalisation of risk in ITI’s rhetoric?
One of the most striking features of ITI discourse is how systematically industry-wide problems are reframed as individual responsibilities. Rather than examining declining rates, weakened bargaining power, platformisation, AI-driven devaluation, and increasing economic insecurity, attention is redirected toward questions of individual adaptability.
Translators are encouraged to train more, market themselves better, specialise further, become more entrepreneurial, strengthen their personal brand, diversify income streams, and continuously adapt to changing market conditions.
While some of these strategies may help individuals navigate difficult conditions, they also perform an ideological function: they personalise risk and shift responsibility away from LSPs and onto the constructed ideal of the “professional translator.”
The underlying implication becomes that financial difficulty results primarily from insufficient adaptation rather than structural conditions in the market itself.
Within this framework, systemic inequalities are internalised as individual shortcomings. Economic insecurity becomes a skills problem. Exploitation becomes a competitiveness problem. Market oversupply becomes a branding problem. Deteriorating labour conditions are reframed as a matter of resilience and mindset.
This shift matters because personalised problems are harder to challenge collectively. Once precarity is understood primarily as a matter of self-improvement, structural questions about labour value, bargaining power, outsourcing, procurement systems, and economic distribution become less visible.
The question, then, is who benefits from this framing.
Certainly not translators and interpreters experiencing declining incomes, fragmented work, unpaid labour, or sustained economic insecurity.
By contrast, the personalisation of risk can massively benefit LSPs and other market actors by reducing scrutiny of the structural conditions shaping the industry. If insecurity is framed as a problem of adaptability, there is less pressure to address rates, outsourcing models, intermediary power, lack of legal protection, or value distribution across the supply chain.
This dynamic is particularly evident in ITI’s Continuing Professional Development (CPD) expectations, where members are encouraged to undertake at least 30 hours of CPD annually to remain professionally recognised and responsive to industry demands. Professional development itself is not the issue. The issue is the economic context in which it operates. Translators are increasingly expected to absorb the costs of adaptation—financially, temporally, and emotionally—even when such investment does not necessarily lead to improved earnings or stability.
In effect, responsibility for adapting to deteriorating market conditions is increasingly transferred onto individual translators. Structural pressures such as declining rates, weakened bargaining power, outsourcing, and technological change are reframed as matters of individual preparedness, self-investment, and self-care.
At the same time, this model can benefit corporate actors by sustaining a continuously upskilled workforce whose training costs are increasingly borne by translators themselves. A system that promotes continuous self-funded adaptation may simultaneously serve intermediaries who benefit from skilled labour without assuming equivalent responsibility for its long-term sustainability. This is particularly significant in a highly feminised and racialised workforce where access to better opportunities and more stable work is limited.
The result is a form of depoliticisation: labour conditions are reframed in ways that obscure power relations, economic interests, and collective leverage. Translators increasingly appear not as workers embedded in unequal structures, but as self-managing micro-entrepreneurs responsible for navigating them.
3. Is optimism itself a conflict of interest?
A further question follows from this analysis.
If translators and interpreters operate in a labour market characterised by declining rates, weakened bargaining power, increasing platformisation, and intensifying economic insecurity, the issue is not only how these conditions are described, but which futures institutional narratives make visible.
ITI’s public messaging, particularly around professional development, is largely framed in optimistic terms: collaboration with corporate actors, emerging opportunities from technological change, and the importance of continuous upskilling, alongside an emphasis on sustaining membership and professional participation.
Given that ITI charges translators membership and training fees, this creates an alignment of incentives that may favour continued professional participation over explicit discussion of the conditions under which exit or transition may be economically necessary. This tension becomes more pronounced when optimistic narratives coexist with widespread reports of declining incomes, instability, and unsustainable working conditions. It raises a structural question: is ITI encouraging continued investment in a field of work that does not guarantee economic sustainability for all practitioners?
Optimism, in this context, becomes politically significant. It shapes perceptions of risk, influences decision-making, and frames what counts as a viable future, potentially narrowing the space in which translators can consider exit, transition, or diversification.
This is where a potential conflict of interest emerges. When a professional body depends on continued membership and professional participation, its institutional incentives may discourage explicit engagement with the possibility that long-term sustainability within the translation industry is unevenly distributed.
The question becomes whether institutional narratives accurately reflect the range of materially available options, including exit as a rational response to labour-market conditions. Given that current translation industry structures treat translators as independent economic actors responsible for managing increasing risks and encouraged to learn business skills, it is reasonable to ask whether ITI should also acknowledge that one of the most important business competencies is the ability to decide when to persist, when to pivot, and when continued investment in the sector is no longer economically rational. Is ITI providing a sufficiently democratic and safe space for discussing whether translators may, in some cases, be better off partially or fully exiting the translation industry?
These questions become even more significant when examined in relation to ITI’s institutional structure and the range of interests the organisation formally represents.
4. Do translators, researchers and policy makers know who ITI actually represents?
A key assumption in discussions about membership organisations is that they represent a relatively coherent group of practitioners within a given field. In translation, this is often understood to mean translators and interpreters.
However, the structure of representation within ITI is more ambiguous than this assumption suggests.
According to its formal institutional description, ITI is a professional membership association not only for practising translators and interpreters, but also for a broader set of actors within the language services sector, including language service providers (LSPs) operating as intermediary organisations, and commercial entities within translation and interpreting supply chains.
This means that within a single membership structure, actors with different—and in some cases structurally conflicting—economic interests are brought under a shared institutional umbrella.
Yet this structural composition is not always clearly communicated outside the organisation itself. The distinctions between translators, professional bodies, and commercial intermediaries are often blurred under the generic category of “the industry” or “the profession.”
This lack of clarity becomes particularly visible in formal policy settings.
For example, during a House of Lords inquiry into court interpreting, the CEO of ITI appeared alongside representatives from the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) and the National Register for Public Service Interpreters (NRPSI). When members of the Lords committee asked for clarification on the distinct roles and structures of these organisations, the CEO of ITI did not clearly articulate whom she actually represents.
This matters because representation is not only about who speaks, but about what structural position is being represented when they speak. The ambiguity is not incidental. It has consequences for how labour conditions, responsibility, and accountability are understood within policy discourse. It is also notable that this structural ambiguity is not always clearly visible even to translators or those studying the field.
Personally, I have been researching the UK translation and interpreting industry for three years and only recently learnt that ITI represents individual translators, intermediary and commercial actors.
This creates a significant interpretive gap between formal institutional structure and public understanding of that structure. This gap matters, because it shapes how the organisation’s narratives about “the profession” are received by policymakers, academics, and translators themselves.
When institutional boundaries are unclear, questions of representation become easier to diffuse across multiple actors. This ambiguity makes it more difficult to locate where particular narratives originate, whose interests they serve, and how they should be evaluated.
Additionally, in academic literature, membership organisations are often implicitly positioned as part of the solution to deteriorating pay and working conditions (see, for example, my reviews of the study on job quality among UK-based freelance translators and the study on working conditions of audiovisual translators in Europe). In these accounts, institutional actors are frequently treated as representative voices within the sector, without sustained interrogation of their internal composition or the potential conflicts of interest embedded in their dual relationship with both individual practitioners and commercial intermediaries.
5. How could translation labour be repoliticised?
Repoliticising translation labour would require moving beyond narratives centred exclusively on adaptability, resilience, and professional self-investment. It would require professional bodies to openly confront issues such as declining rates, outsourcing structures, platformisation, financial precarity, and the unequal distribution of economic value within the translation industry.
In a previous article I raised the question: why are translators and interpreters so often underpaid, and who is responsible? My analysis indicated the following factors:
The main factor is corporate practices that set rates and treat translators as cost variables rather than workers, rather than as skilled labour entitled to fair compensation. These practices are enabled by weak legal protections, particularly contractor classification, which places translators outside standard employment safeguards and shifts income risk onto individuals.
Outsourcing structures further diffuse responsibility across complex supply chains, making it difficult to locate accountability for pay and working conditions, while allowing cost pressures to be passed down to translators at the end of the chain. These dynamics are reinforced by wider inequalities—such as gendered and racialised labour segmentation and global economic disparities—which constrain translators’ ability to refuse low-paid work.
In addition, institutional, academic, and industry narratives often reinforce these structures by framing low pay as a matter of individual adaptability or market inevitability rather than as the outcome of specific organisational and regulatory choices. Technological change, particularly AI and machine translation, is similarly misattributed as a causal force, obscuring the role of corporate decision-making in how such tools are deployed to restructure labour and reduce costs.
Taken together, these dynamics produce a system in which responsibility for low pay is systematically displaced away from those who design and benefit from labour arrangements, and onto individual translators themselves.
Repoliticising translation labour therefore requires acknowledging and scrutinising these mechanisms of responsibility displacement. It is not an argument against professional organisations themselves, nor against professional development or networking. It is questioning whether the organisations translators fund are adequately representing their material interests and labour realities.
If translators and interpreters continue funding institutions like ITI through memberships, training fees, registrations, and professional participation, then it is reasonable for them to ask:
• whose interests institutional narratives primarily serve;
• which risks are foregrounded and which are minimised;
• and whether labour conditions are being represented with sufficient clarity in public, academic, and policy discussions.
Therefore, the most pressing question is what forms of accountability translators should expect from the organisations that claim to represent them.
Conclusion
The questions raised in this article encourage translators to ask what impact ITI has on their pay and working conditions, and whether the perceived positive aspects—such as community support and institutional listings—outweigh the negative aspects of obscuring lived realities and promoting a misleading narrative of “happy communities” combining struggling translators with more financially secure intermediaries.
The article argues that when professional organisations promote narratives of adaptation while downplaying labour deterioration, and increasingly shift responsibility for survival onto individual practitioners, professionalisation risks becoming less a defence against precarity and more a mechanism for normalising it.
Perhaps the central crisis facing translators and interpreters today is not only technological disruption, but the depoliticisation of their labour itself: the erosion of their ability to collectively name exploitation, contest deteriorating conditions, and define the value of their work beyond the language of individual adaptability.
None of this means that everyone within ITI acts in bad faith. The issue raised here is the structural effects produced by a particular institutional configuration and the narratives that emerge from it.
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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Deborah Lupton / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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