There is a crisis across the translation and interpreting industry. An expanding body of academic research documents worsening working conditions across the profession: declining rates, fragmented work, weakening bargaining power, growing financial insecurity, and intensifying precarity. My own research shows that a large proportion of public service interpreters are struggling to earn enough to meet their basic needs.

Absurdly, these realities coexist with an ongoing emphasis on professionalisation. Translators and interpreters are increasingly encouraged to undertake continuous professional development, entrepreneurial training, personal branding, specialisation, networking, and AI upskilling in order to remain “competitive” within the market.

This raises a difficult but necessary question:

What happens when a profession continuously raises the demands placed on practitioners while becoming materially less capable of sustaining them?

The contradiction is striking. Professionalisation is traditionally associated with stability, dignity, autonomy, economic security, and upward mobility. Yet many translators and interpreters, including those with high academic qualifications and years of experience, are still being asked to invest time, money, emotional labour, and self-discipline into work that often no longer provide stable livelihoods.

In this sense, professionalisation risks becoming less a protection against precarity and more a mechanism for depoliticising and normalising it.

A particularly relevant insight here comes from the sociologist Angela McRobbie and her critique of professionalisation in creative labour. McRobbie argues that contemporary forms of freelance and creative work increasingly encourage individuals to internalise insecurity as a personal responsibility rather than recognise it as a structural condition. Workers are taught to continuously reinvent themselves, remain passionate, resilient, entrepreneurial, flexible, and endlessly self-improving, even as working conditions deteriorate and basic protections such as paid sick leave and pension contributions are weakened or absent. Under this logic, precarity becomes normalised through the language of aspiration, self-development, and self-actualisation.

Professionalisation can begin to function as a disciplinary mechanism for translators and interpreters: practitioners are encouraged to continuously invest in themselves emotionally, intellectually, and financially in order to remain “competitive,” while the structural causes of insecurity remain largely unquestioned. In this sense, the promise of professionalisation may paradoxically trap translators within a cycle of perpetual self-investment without corresponding material security, while obscuring the possibility that some practitioners may need to consider whether continued participation in the sector remains economically viable.

That is why I focus my research on the political economy of the translation industry. In a previous article, I examined the structural factors behind persistent underpayment in translation and interpreting. I argued that financial insecurity in the industry is not primarily the result of individual shortcomings, but is produced through corporate practices that treat translators as cost variables rather than workers, and is sustained by weak legal and institutional protections. I also emphasised how outsourcing, inequality, and corporate-aligned institutional and academic narratives contribute to the normalisation and obscuring of these dynamics.

Therefore, translators and interpreters should be aware of the potential of a “precarity trap.” They should demand a shift in narrative. Both academia and professional organisations must foreground the labour rights of translators and interpreters and directly examine the role of intermediaries in shaping rates, working conditions, and job allocation. Advocacy for stronger legal protections for translators and interpreters is also necessary. Above all, we need to centre the recognition that deteriorating pay is a structurally produced outcome, not an individual failure that can be resolved through further professionalisation.

In addition, translators need to scrutinise how translation and interpreting companies may shape dominant narratives about translation and interpreting work. The risk of corporate influence over academic and institutional discourse must be taken seriously and actively resisted. What is needed is research and professional representation that are genuinely independent of commercial interests and firmly grounded in human rights and the public interest.

Academia and professional organisations must focus on why secure, decent employment is becoming unattainable for translators and interpreters, despite their position as highly educated knowledge workers. Unfortunately, even current sustainability narratives sometimes imply that translators should sustain themselves without meaningful obligations on the part of translation and interpreting companies.

Translators and interpreters should also feel able to hold the executives of their professional organisations accountable, and to critically question academic and institutional narratives that place increasing pressure on them to continuously invest in upskilling without addressing the structural conditions shaping their incomes.

Translators and interpreters need to be aware that appeals to “human creativity” and professionalisation may unintentionally deepen the precarity trap by encouraging translators to invest even more unpaid emotional and intellectual labour into proving their value within a market structure that may still systematically undervalue them.

The problem is not professionalisation itself. The problem is when professionalisation rhetoric becomes detached from material questions of labour rights, income security, and precarity. Shouldn’t professionals be able to support themselves and their families? Shouldn’t professional work provide a realistic pathway to financial stability and dignity?

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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