I read with interest the Guardian’s recent article on AI and translation labour titled “‘Being human helps’: despite rise of AI is there still hope for Europe’s translators?” While I am grateful for an article that acknowledges worsening precarity, declining rates, and reduced workflows, I believe it still reproduces a depoliticised and problematic framing, presenting AI itself as the primary force responsible for deteriorating labour conditions.
This framing risks obscuring the role of corporate and intermediary decision-making in shaping how AI is deployed within the translation industry. Technologies do not autonomously reduce pay or weaken working conditions. Responsibility lies with the organisations that integrate these systems into outsourcing models, pricing structures, and labour practices designed around cost minimisation, without adequate consideration of translators’ ability to sustain a decent living.
The article also frames the future of translators largely through the lens of human skills such as creativity, emotional understanding, and literary sensitivity, rather than through questions of labour rights, bargaining power, regulation, and accountability. There is a growing body of academic literature documenting the poor job quality experienced by translators and interpreters, including my own research, which found that a majority of public service interpreters in the UK are unable to earn enough to meet their basic needs.
Even with the UK Employment Protection Act 2025, translators remain vulnerable because they are classified as independent contractors (i.e. businesses) rather than workers. What remains largely absent from mainstream discussions is serious scrutiny of outsourcing chains, intermediary power, contractor classification, and weakened or absent labour protections.
The real risk may not be AI itself, but the de-politicisation of translation labour through narratives that treat worsening conditions as inevitable technological outcomes rather than the result of economic and political choices.
Absurdly, I came across the Guardian article through a LinkedIn post by Sara Robertson, CEO of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI), which represents both translators and interpreters, as well as the intermediaries who often underpay them. The ITI even gave an award to an agency that pays interpreters per minute of actual interpreting work, rather than an hourly or daily rate. That agency also transfers all legal responsibility if something goes wrong onto “freelance interpreters”. This is equivalent to The Guardian absurdly telling its freelance journalists that they will be paid only for the exact minutes spent writing investigative work, and that any resulting legal responsibility will be borne entirely by the journalists, not the institution. (But I digress.)
In her post, the CEO of ITI acknowledged that many translators are struggling with declining rates, reduced workflows, and growing uncertainty about the future of the profession. Yet the institutional response is still framed primarily through entrepreneurial adaptation, business skills, client engagement, and professional resilience. Translators are encouraged to market themselves better, articulate their value more effectively, and continuously adapt to changing market conditions. While these strategies may help some individuals navigate precarity, the broader structural question remains largely unaddressed: why are translators repeatedly expected to adapt to worsening labour conditions rather than institutions more directly confronting the economic structures, outsourcing models, and intermediary dynamics producing those conditions?
I strongly urge the translators’ and interpreters’ organisations to contact The Guardian directly and contribute to this discussion themselves and to demand forgrounding translator’s labour rights and intensifying financial insecurities.
If professional bodies genuinely recognise that translators and interpreters are experiencing declining rates, financial insecurity, and worsening working conditions, then these issues deserve to be publicly articulated not only through narratives of adaptation and resilience, but also through explicit discussion of labour rights, outsourcing structures, intermediary power, and economic accountability.
At a moment when mainstream media is finally paying attention to the crisis facing translators, professional organisations have an opportunity — and arguably a responsibility — to help re-politicise these issues rather than depoliticise them. Translators and interpreters do not only need advice on entrepreneurship, branding, and adaptability. They also need institutional actors willing to publicly address exploitation, precarity, and the structural conditions making the profession increasingly unsustainable for many practitioners.
If organisations claim to represent translators and interpreters, then this representation should include publicly advocating for their material conditions and human dignity, not simply helping them adapt to deterioration.
What translators and interpreters increasingly need is not only advice on adaptability, entrepreneurship, and resilience, but a serious political and institutional response to worsening labour conditions. This requires addressing translators’ intensifying financial insecurity through a political economy framework rather than treating it primarily as a problem of individual skills or technological disruption.
It also requires stronger labour protections for translators and interpreters, greater accountability and transparency in outsourcing arrangements — particularly in publicly funded services — and more critical scrutiny of the role of intermediaries in shaping pay and working conditions across the supply chain. After all, translation and interpreting in courts, healthcare, and asylum systems is a public infrastructure issue, not just a freelance market issue. Without this shift, responsibility continues to be located at the level of individual translators rather than the institutions that determine the conditions under which their labour is bought and used.
At the same time, if significant parts of the profession are becoming economically unsustainable, then governments, professional bodies, unions, and community organisations should also openly discuss what forms of support may be needed for translators seeking to transition into more secure and sustainable forms of employment. This should include retraining support, access to employment services, recognition of transferable skills, and financial support during transition.
A professional and journalistic discourse that only encourages continued adaptation, without acknowledging the possibility that exit may sometimes be rational or necessary, risks deepening rather than alleviating precarity.
For further context, I have explored these issues in more detail in the following articles:
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 – including the Guardian – 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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Pauline Wee & DAIR / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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