Drawing on Jeremias Prassl’s concept of “Humans as a Service” (developed in relation to the gig economy) (2018), this article argues that translation work is increasingly organised in ways that combine formal independence with practical dependency. Translators are often presented as freelancers or professionals, yet in practice they operate within tightly structured systems where rates, deadlines, and access to work are largely determined elsewhere.

In many agencies and platforms, translators do not negotiate prices in any meaningful sense. Rates are often fixed in advance—frequently per word, sometimes per project—and presented as non-negotiable. A translator may receive a message stating that a legal translation is offered at €0.06 per word with a 24-hour deadline, or that an “urgent” job will only be allocated if accepted immediately at a discounted rate. Declining too often can reduce future visibility in allocation systems or lead to fewer offers.

Even where negotiation is formally possible, it is often bounded by procurement frameworks that prioritise cost predictability over linguistic expertise. Translation management systems and platforms increasingly standardise workflows, breaking work into units that can be tracked, priced, and compared across large pools of translators.

Professionalisation under pressure

Within the professionalisation narrative, translators are encouraged to engage in continuous professional development, master new CAT tools, adopt AI-assisted workflows, and maintain “best practice” standards in order to remain competitive.

In practice, this often translates into unpaid or self-funded labour. Translators are expected to invest in software subscriptions, terminology databases, training courses, and hardware upgrades, while per-word rates in many segments have remained stagnant or declined. A translator may be told to “upskill in post-editing AI output” while simultaneously being offered lower rates for machine-assisted work than for traditional translation.

This creates a contradiction: increasing expectations of expertise alongside decreasing financial return per hour of work. Rather than addressing pricing structures, professionalisation discourse often frames this as an individual adaptation challenge.

The entrepreneurial translator

Alongside this sits a second dominant narrative: the translator as entrepreneur. In this framing, translators are encouraged to treat themselves as small businesses responsible for branding, marketing, client acquisition, and financial strategy.

This reflects some realities of freelance work. Many translators do spend time responding to client enquiries, chasing late payments, negotiating terms, or maintaining profiles across multiple platforms and agencies.

However, the scope for entrepreneurial control is often limited. A large proportion of work is mediated through agencies that set rates unilaterally and distribute jobs through internal vendor lists. Platforms may rank translators based on acceptance speed, past availability, or automated quality scores, shaping access to work without transparent criteria.

In this environment, “entrepreneurship” often means absorbing administrative and financial risk—unpaid quoting time, irregular cash flow, and competition with globalised labour pools—without corresponding control over pricing or demand.

Structural constraints in everyday work

Across both narratives, a key feature of the industry is often overlooked: translators are operating within systems where economic decisions are largely externalised.

Rates are frequently shaped by agencies negotiating with corporate clients, platform-based bidding systems, localisation budgets set at enterprise level, and downward pressure from machine translation + post-editing models.

Deadlines are similarly structured around client-side production cycles rather than translator capacity. It is not unusual to receive jobs labelled “urgent” that require overnight turnaround, or to be asked to fit 3,000–5,000 words into a single working day without adjustment in pricing.

In this context, individual negotiation has limited structural impact. The translator’s role becomes one of adapting within predefined constraints rather than setting the terms of work.

Humans as a Service: a useful lens

The concept of “Humans as a Service,” developed by Jeremias Prassl in relation to the gig economy, helps clarify this shift. Prassl shows how platform work is often framed as flexible and independent while being tightly controlled through pricing systems, allocation mechanisms, and performance metrics.

Although his analysis focuses on gig platforms such as ride-hailing and delivery work, the underlying logic extends to translation. Translators may be labelled independent professionals, but their work is increasingly integrated into systems designed to standardise output, minimise cost, and maximise throughput.

In practice, this means:

• translation is broken into measurable units (words, segments, hours)
• performance is tracked through acceptance rates, delivery speed, and vendor ratings
• access to work is mediated through platforms or agency dashboards
• pricing is benchmarked across global supplier pools

The translator remains essential to production, but their labour is treated as a scalable input rather than a discretionary professional service.

This shift is not only anecdotal. Research on platform-based interpreting confirms similar dynamics in adjacent parts of the industry. Deborah Giustini (2024), for example, shows how interpreting platforms reproduce agency-like control while presenting themselves as neutral marketplaces.

She highlights how these systems can intensify precarious working conditions under the language of innovation and efficiency. Interpreters may face pressure to remain constantly available, accept work at short notice, and compete within opaque allocation systems where declining too many assignments reduces future visibility.

Importantly, power is not exercised by a single actor but distributed across platforms, agencies, and clients, creating situations where responsibility is difficult to locate but economic pressure is continuous.

Rethinking professionalisation and entrepreneurship

From this perspective, professionalisation and entrepreneurial narratives can be reinterpreted not as neutral descriptions of best practice, but as dominant discourses that help stabilise a system of managed flexibility, and even potential exploitation.

Professionalisation encourages continuous self-investment in skills, tools, and adaptability. Entrepreneurship encourages individual responsibility for securing work and managing income volatility. Together, they can shift attention away from the structural organisation of pricing, procurement, and value distribution.

“Humans as a Service” makes visible what these narratives often obscure: that translation labour is increasingly organised as a managed, standardised, and cost-sensitive input within larger production systems.

Conclusion: why this matters

Scrutinising how translators are being treated matters because the way a problem is framed shapes what kinds of solutions are considered legitimate, and what kinds of interventions are excluded from view.

If declining rates are understood as an individual business failure, the solution becomes more training, more entrepreneurship, more adaptation. If they are understood as structurally produced through procurement systems, platform governance, and outsourcing models, then the discussion shifts towards accountability, pricing transparency, collective representation, and labour rights.

For meaningful change in the translation industry, there is a need to reassert the political economy of translation labour by making visible how responsibility and leverage are distributed across procurement systems, labour classification frameworks, institutional governance, technology deployment, and professional representation.

Bibliography

Giustini, D. 2024. ‘You can book an interpreter the same way you order your Uber’: (re)interpreting work and digital labour platforms. Perspectives, studies in translatology. 32(3), pp.441–459.

Prassl, J. 2018. Humans as a service: the promise and perils of work in the gig economy. Oxford, United Kingdom; Oxford University Press.

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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Nacho Kamenov & Humans in the Loop / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/