End clients—whether production companies, public institutions, agencies, or private service users—play a decisive role in shaping the economic conditions of translation and interpreting work. Through procurement choices, contracting models, and expectations around price and turnaround, they can influence how value and responsibility are distributed across translation supply chains. In this sense, end clients are not passive recipients of linguistic services, but structural participants in how translation labour is organised and remunerated.

This means that “educating end clients” is not simply about providing information. It is about shaping the conditions under which translation is commissioned, understood, and valued. What is made visible—or left unaddressed—has direct consequences for how labour is priced, managed, and sustained.

Over the past several years, as a practising translator and interpreter and a researcher working on translators’ and interpreters’ working conditions, I have closely followed the publications and policy positions of professional organisations in the UK. I have systematically reviewed a range of their public statements and, in numerous cases, corresponded with them to question how key issues are framed, prioritised, or omitted, both publicly and through direct communication via blog posts, and LinkedIn discussions.

Across this period, a recurring pattern becomes visible: institutional narratives often emphasise professional resilience, ethics, and sector growth, while paying comparatively limited attention to the structural conditions shaping income, bargaining power, and risk distribution. This is not presented as a polemical claim, but as an analytical conclusion drawn from sustained engagement with their outputs.

Against this background, and as part of my theory of change for the UK translation and interpreting industry, this article considers how translators and interpreters might hold representative institutions accountable, and how institutional narratives could contribute to more informed public understanding. In particular, it explores how professional organisations could play a stronger role in informing end clients about issues often absent from public discourse, including agency mark-ups, financial insecurity, and value distribution within outsourced supply chains. This is not only a matter of transparency, but of embedding translator’s rights within broader debates on procurement ethics, supply-chain responsibility, and labour inequality.

1. Educating end clients is a collective responsibility

The responsibility for informing end clients about the economic conditions of translation and interpreting cannot realistically rest with individual practitioners. While translators are often expected to explain linguistic or technical constraints, discussions about remuneration structures or subcontracting practices introduce a more sensitive dimension: the distribution of value within the supply chain.

At that point, translators are placed in a structurally difficult position. Speaking openly about pay or insecurity can require disclosing personal financial realities or challenging intermediaries on whom they depend for work. As a result, key aspects of the profession’s economic reality often remain unspoken at the point of commissioning.

For this reason, responsibility for communicating these conditions should be understood as primarily institutional. Professional bodies, associations, and trade unions are better positioned to provide consistent, evidence-based accounts of pay structures and working conditions. They can articulate ethical procurement standards, clarify expectations around fair remuneration, and contribute to policy discussions on transparent contracting.

However, this role should not be confined to sector-internal communication. It also requires engagement with external actors such as labour researchers, investigative journalists, and organisations working on precarious and platform-mediated labour. These perspectives situate translation within wider patterns of outsourced work, value extraction, and fragmented employment relations across contemporary service economies.

2. Professional organisations and the obscuring of working conditions

Some UK professional translation and interpreting organisations present themselves as representative bodies while issuing public statements that, in practice, understate or omit key aspects of economic precarity. Across different settings, labour conditions are either marginalised or reframed in ways that detach them from structural causes.

This is evident in the following cases that I have documented on this blog:

Example 1
At a university event on “Studying translation in the age of AI”, the Chief Executive of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) emphasised professionalism, ethics, and human expertise, without reference to pay structures or working conditions.

Example 2
At the same event, the Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Linguists focused on judgment, accountability, and linguistic excellence in the context of AI, without addressing remuneration or labour conditions.

Example 3
CIOL, ITI, and the Association of Translation Companies (ATC) issued a joint report framing the sector in terms of opportunity and growth. While acknowledging pressure and insecurity, it did not meaningfully address value distribution within subcontracting chains. The collaboration also aligned professional bodies with a commercial trade association representing LSPs, reinforcing a growth narrative without examining how value is allocated in practice. When I raised these concerns with ITI, they were acknowledged but redirected as issues “better tackled elsewhere.”

Example 4
A keynote speech by the Honorary President of CIOL, Baroness Jean Coussins, published in excerpt form by CIOL, presented the sector in terms of global value and growth, without reference to labour conditions or economic insecurity, reinforcing a depoliticised growth-oriented framing.

Example 5
NRPSI has frequently framed declining service quality as resulting primarily from insufficient regulation and qualification standards. Following reports of serious communication failures in healthcare, including cases involving patient deaths, its proposed responses focused on credentialism and registration requirements, with limited attention to outsourcing models, LSP practices, remuneration, or contracting structures. It has also used terms such as “pseudo-interpreters,” “bilinguals,” and “ersatz interpreters” to describe practitioners outside its preferred regulatory framework.

In other cases, working conditions are acknowledged, but responsibility is reframed in ways that shift attention away from outsourcing structures and LSPs.

Example 1
The Working Together framework (PI4J and ATC) acknowledges financial insecurity and retention problems in outsourced interpreting but attributes them primarily to market pressures and procurement complexity. Outsourcing models, LSP pricing practices, and subcontracting asymmetries remain largely unexamined. The document supports continued collaboration within existing outsourcing systems without enforceable mechanisms to improve pay or conditions, dispersing responsibility across an “ecosystem.”

Example 2
During the House of Lords inquiry into court interpreting, the heads of ITI, CIOL, and NRPSI acknowledged low pay and retention problems. NRPSI’s executive director, Mike Orlov, noted that experienced interpreters were leaving for better-paid work such as bakery jobs. However, discussion of outsourcing or remuneration structures remained limited, while proposed solutions focused on increased credentialing and registration requirements, adding further costs to practitioners.

Example 3
In an article that I submitted to the ITI magazine, financial pressures and deteriorating working conditions were acknowledged. However, sections analysing agency mark-ups, value extraction within subcontracting chains, and ATC-led narratives were omitted. This produced a framing that recognises precarity but not how value is distributed within outsourced systems. At the time, I was not aware that ITI also represents LSP interests, which is relevant to how such framing should be interpreted.

4. The missed opportunity to intervene in public narratives

A further issue concerns not only how professional organisations frame labour conditions, but their lack of intervention when public narratives misrepresent them.

When UK media reported that the Department for Work and Pensions spends approximately £8 million annually on translation services, with average costs of £250 per call, no clarification was issued regarding the distinction between agency billing and interpreter remuneration, despite evidence that interpreters may receive only £15–£25.

Similarly, an official response from the Department of Health and Social Care stated that outsourced providers determine pay according to “what is affordable within their financial models.” This statement was not publicly contextualised or challenged by representative bodies, despite its implications for accountability in subcontracted public services.

In another case, a Guardian article suggested that there is still hope for translators from AI-related disruption, without addressing worsening pay or insecurity. Despite my published response and practitioner endorsement, no collective institutional intervention followed. The only reply I received from CIOL was that the matter would be “considered.”

Finally, when the government acknowledged that the current UK framework does not adequately protect workers from exploitation, no corresponding public response or policy intervention was issued by representative organisations.

Taken together, these examples indicate a broader pattern of institutional non-intervention even when public discourse misrepresents the economic realities of outsourced translation and interpreting.

Conclusion

Educating end clients and policymakers about the economic realities of translation and interpreting cannot be left to individual practitioners. The structural position of translators within outsourced supply chains makes it difficult and often professionally risky for individuals to consistently raise issues of pay, value distribution, and working conditions.

However, meaningful change cannot begin without addressing the role of the institutions that claim to represent the profession. As the examples in this article show, professional organisations frequently shape public narratives while omitting, softening, or redirecting attention away from the structural conditions that determine income and sustainability.

This establishes a necessary starting point for change. Before focusing on educating external stakeholders, translators and interpreters must collectively hold their representative bodies accountable for how they frame the profession, whose interests they prioritise, and how accurately they reflect the lived realities of working conditions and value distribution.

A more honest public understanding of translation will only emerge if these institutions begin to represent, more directly and consistently, the economic realities of the practitioners they claim to speak for.

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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