Recently, in a conversation with a senior representative of a translation and interpreting professional body, I found myself saying something quite simple: it does not make sense for us to be positioned on opposite sides of this discussion, because one side represents translators, and the other is trying to write about their rights.

This perplexing feeling reflected a broader pattern I have encountered in discussions about translation labour—not because of disagreement, but because it highlights a deeper structural question about power in knowledge creation: what constitutes constructive, credible, or actionable knowledge?

Similarly, over the past weeks, I’ve also been in conversation with the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) about what a labour-conscious “theory of change” for the translation industry might look like. As part of that exchange, I developed two pieces of work:

• a theory of change for the translation industry
• a set of 10 concrete, practice-oriented changes ITI could implement to move from abstract “adaptation” narratives toward labour-centred institutional framing

But these were dismissed as “polemic” rather than “anything resembling a credible theory of change.”

On the one hand, translators are often encouraged to “know their value.”
On the other hand, labour-centred critiques are frequently dismissed unless they conform to pre-existing frameworks of what counts as a “credible” theory of change.

My work starts from a simple premise: discussions about “the value of translation” are incomplete unless they address how that value is distributed, and who benefits from it.

one can’t help wondering how are contributions assessed—according to whether they align with established policy logics? Are they implementable or pragmatic? Do they fit within an existing institutional framework? Is “credible theory of change” produced through institutional expectations about what kinds of knowledge are legitimate, and what kinds are not? Are some forms of knowledge systematically privileged over others?

When critique is asked to become “constructive”

A recurring dynamic in these exchanges is the expectation that critique must take a specific form in order to be taken seriously.

It is not enough to identify structural issues in labour conditions or value distribution. The critique is often required to conform to institutional expectations and fit established narratives and public positioning. In effect, this determines not only what counts as agreement or disagreement, but what counts as knowledge in the first place.

This matters because if only certain forms of knowledge are recognised as credible—those that align with existing institutional frameworks—then the boundaries of debate are quietly narrowed. This has direct implications for how translation labour is understood and governed.

Perhaps the more difficult question is not how to produce better agreement about the value of translation. It is how credibility itself is constructed—and how that construction shapes whose knowledge is allowed to define the terms of the debate.

Meanwhile, other forms of knowledge—particularly those that foreground power, extraction, and distribution—are often treated as too critical, too abstract, or insufficiently practical.

But practical for whom?

And practical toward what end?

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 unfair intermediaries to all translation companies or agencies.

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Deborah Lupton / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/