I am writing ahead of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) conference because I believe meaningful change is still possible. My aim is not only to critique ITI, but to contribute to a discussion about what translators and interpreters urgently need from professional institutions at a time of intensifying precarity and labour insecurity, as widely documented in academic research.

Recently, I became aware that ITI represents both translators and language service providers (LSPs), including companies operating within systems associated with downward pressure on rates. The conference is framed around communication, collaboration, and “community”. This raises a fundamental question: what kind of community is being constructed when translators experiencing worsening precarity are asked to share professional space with intermediaries whose business models may be responsible for that precarity, while questions of exploitation and labour rights remain marginal?

In a previous article, I questioned whether translators are genuinely lacking entrepreneurship skills and introduced Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to Be?” (WPR) approach. WPR shows that discourse does not simply describe problems, but actively constructs them—shaping what is seen as the problem, and what is excluded from view. It influences procurement policy, funding priorities, accountability, and even what is taught in universities.

Applied to ITI statements and its conference programme, WPR reveals how declining pay and precarity are often framed as individual deficits in entrepreneurship, negotiation, or adaptability, rather than as outcomes of structural conditions such as intermediary control over pricing, outsourcing systems, and weak bargaining power. Even when structural pressures are acknowledged, they are often presented as a neutral “changing landscape”, without clear attribution of responsibility to LSPs, procurement systems, or policymakers. This is particularly visible in public sector translation and interpreting, where outsourcing in courts, the NHS, and asylum systems embeds procurement logics that depress rates while dispersing accountability.

The conference’s three strands—entrepreneurship, ethics, and engaging with clients—further reinforce this framing by locating solutions at the level of the individual practitioner: how to run a business, how to navigate ethics, and how to manage client relationships. From a WPR perspective, the key issue here is what this renders invisible: procurement structures, rate-setting power, and accountability gaps. These are displaced from the centre of discussion, shifting responsibility onto individuals and contributing to the depoliticisation of exploitation and precarity.

It is likely that ITI is not intentionally denying these structural pressures, but offering tools for practitioners to survive within them. Yet while such support may help individuals, it also risks naturalising the idea that worsening labour conditions are external inevitabilities. This narrows the space for intervention: adaptation becomes visible, while redistribution, regulation, and accountability are marginalised. In this sense, professionalisation can function as a mechanism through which insecurity is normalised and depoliticised. It is also important to emphasise that good translation work depends on good translation companies—companies that ensure fair, transparent, and sustainable pricing structures.

Before moving to what changes are needed for the conference and for ITI itself, I want to pause briefly and speak directly to translators and interpreters reading this.

I recognise that these reflections may land differently. For some, they may confirm what has long been felt but not always said. For others, especially those who see ITI as a professional home, they may feel unsettling or disappointing. I understand that institutional narratives are often tied to identity, investment, and hope for a stable professional future. My intention is not to diminish that, but to open space for a conversation that is often difficult to have in public—one that includes labour conditions, power, and the structures shaping our working lives.

If this resonates with you, I invite you to stay with it—not only in agreement, but in reflection. The aim here is not to close debate, but to begin to make space for collective understanding and, potentially, collective action.

What changes are urgently needed?

Since ITI recognises that translators and interpreters face declining rates and financial insecurity, the conference should move beyond entrepreneurship, ethics, and client engagement as primary frameworks. The conference should include labour economists and sociologists of work, particularly those studying precarious labour in highly feminised and racialised forms of freelance work. It should also create space to examine how professionalisation rhetoric can function as a precarity trap, where workers are continually encouraged to invest time, money, and emotional labour into careers that may not provide stable livelihoods. It should further address labour rights, outsourcing structures, contractor classification, intermediary power, and the unequal distribution of value across supply chains, as these are central to understanding the current crisis.

Beyond the industry, ITI should encourage alliances with labour organisations, anti-poverty groups, human rights organisations, the Living Wage movement, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, trade unions, and media organisations engaged with precarious work. Translation precarity is part of broader transformations in labour markets and freelance work.

There should also be open, non-stigmatised discussion of exit from the profession. Given that parts of the sector are economically unsustainable, professional bodies have an ethical responsibility to support transitions into secure work. This could include retraining pathways, public sector roles, academic routes, communications work, and other sustainable career options. A professional body should not only support staying in the profession, but also protect dignity and long-term wellbeing.

What changes are necessary within ITI’s structure

I have previously raised concerns, in both public writing and private correspondence, that ITI’s public statements often appear to align more closely with LSP interests than with those of translators and interpreters. Initially, I attributed them to strategic and ethical failure of behalf of ITI leadership. However, given ITI’s structure of representing both linguists and language service providers, this now appears more as an internal contradiction in representation. This is a question of institutional design as much as discourse.

This raises broader questions of governance and accountability within organisations that are often perceived to represent practitioners, while also including companies benefiting from downward pressure on practitioners’ rates of pay. Representation is difficult to sustain when actors with divergent economic interests are included without strong safeguards. This leads to a fundamental question: can a professional community exist when parts of it benefit from conditions that weaken others?

If ITI continues to include LSPs, this cannot remain informal or unexamined. It requires transparent and stringent criteria, including scrutiny of pay levels, contracting practices, and working conditions. Any organisation included within the “community” must demonstrate adherence to decent work standards. Otherwise, “community” risks becoming a rhetorical frame that masks structural inequality and normalises exploitation.

ITI should also invest in independent, evidence-based research into translators’ working conditions, including pay distribution, workload, and the impact of intermediary structures. This research should serve practitioners rather than institutional reputation. This contrasts with previous commissioned research that has been used to make misleading claims about membership value without adequately engaging with labour realities. I therefore maintain my earlier argument that the “real value” of ITI membership may in fact be negative if these structural issues are not addressed.

Finally, I want to situate this discussion within a broader social context. Translation and interpreting is a highly feminised and increasingly racialised field in which many enter seeking meaningful work and upward mobility. Some of us have travelled thousands of kilometres, and many have paid international tuition fees—often double those of domestic students—to access this profession. Against this background, persistent precarity can produce a deep frustration and disappointment, as one participant in my research described it as “a shitty choice of a career.”

This is not an individual failure. It reflects a structural gap between the promise of professionalisation and the realities of working in the translation industry. We owe it to ourselves and to future generations to speak out and to make sure this precarity trap ends with us. We should demand meaningful representation and hold decision-makers accountable within organisations that claim to speak for us.

Ultimately, translators and interpreters are not asking for impossible things. We are asking for the minimum conditions of a dignified profession: fair pay, decent working conditions, meaningful representation, and the ability to sustain ourselves and our families without chronic insecurity. I therefore urge translators not to fund ITI unless it begins to meaningfully listen to translators and interpreters.

Professional communities cannot be built only through networking, branding, and “collaboration” while labour precarity remains marginal to the discussion. If ITI genuinely wants to speak about ethics, sustainability, and the future of the profession, then the material conditions of translators and interpreters must become central to that conversation and responsibility should must not be shifted from LSPs to individual translators and interpreters.

Conclusion

What I hope this article contributes to is not cynicism, but honesty — and from that honesty, the possibility of meaningful collective change. I also acknowledge that the profession is diverse, including literary translators, public service interpreters, technical translators, agency-dependent freelancers, and direct-client professionals. This article cannot address all differences in detail.

It is important to be clear that this is not a rejection of translation organisations, language service providers, or collaboration itself. It is a critique of how power, representation, and labour conditions are currently structured within these relationships, and of what becomes invisible when they are treated as neutral.

My main arguemts is that precarity in translation and interpreting is structurally produced rather than individually caused; that professionalisation can, under certain conditions, function as a form of depoliticisation; and that representation and “community” language are not neutral when economic interests diverge. At a minimum, any claim to legitimate representation must therefore be grounded in transparent scrutiny of labour conditions, pay, and contracting practices, not only in symbolic inclusion or professional branding. The point is not that change is impossible, but that it cannot be meaningful if it avoids these structural conditions altogether.

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.

Blog Image

Knowledge Sweatshop by Leo Lau & Digit
http://www.instagram.com/unun.leg/
digital-dialogues.co.uk/