This article offers a chronological review of professional representation in UK public service interpreting over the past three years. It raises questions about whether professional organisations are adequately representing practitioners’ interests or have become increasingly aligned with commercial interests.

In 2023, the BBC published an investigation linking interpreting failures in healthcare settings to cases of death, bodily harm, and serious communication breakdowns. The investigation also highlighted reports of exploitative working conditions within outsourced interpreting systems, including interpreters effectively being paid below minimum wage while continuing to work out of commitment to patients with limited English proficiency.

At around the same time, professional organisations issued the Working Together framework in collaboration with the Association of Translation Companies (ATC), an interest group representing language service providers (LSPs). Presented as a response to structural challenges in the sector, the framework emphasised collaboration with LSPs, professionalisation, qualifications, and system-wide coordination as the primary routes to reform. There was comparatively little discussion of the responsibilities of LSPs holding public contracts, the distribution of public funds within outsourced supply chains, or mechanisms to ensure that improvements reached interpreters themselves.

This contrast raises an important question about representation. While the BBC foregrounded patient harm, interpreter precarity, and exploitation, institutional responses focused largely on credentialism, workforce development, and collaboration within existing outsourcing structures.

The pattern continued in 2024 when the Working Together document was cited in the House of Lords inquiry into court interpreting. Representatives of professional organisations gave evidence to the committee, largely repeating familiar themes of professionalisation and talent pipelines. They lobbied for making certain diplomas and registrations mandatory for interpreters, adding further financial burdens into already underpaid interpreters.

I made a deliberate intervention in the public interest to raise concerns with the House of Lords committee about the lack of meaningful interpreter representation within the inquiry. A further closed session was subsequently held with interpreters, to which I was also invited. While this was a positive development, it also highlighted that representation itself had become a matter of concern.

A similar pattern can be observed in subsequent maternity and women’s health interpreting standards, on which NRPSI was consulted. The standards contain valuable recommendations regarding communication and interpreter wellbeing, including debriefing support. However, they pay comparatively little attention to interpreter remuneration, employment status, procurement practices, or working conditions.

This omission is significant because many NHS interpreters continue to report low pay, insecure work, limited employment protections, and exposure to challenging clinical environments, as documented in my PhD research. When quality and safety are discussed primarily through the language of training, qualifications, and availability, responsibility risks being shifted onto individual interpreters rather than the systems that organise and fund their work.

Unfortunately, problematic collaboration between some professional organisations and the ATC has continued. For example, ITI and CIOL subsequently issued joint work relating to language learning in the UK, and more recently ITI is celebrating its anniversary alongside the ATC.

Viewed together, these developments reveal a consistent pattern. Across policy frameworks, parliamentary inquiries, professional standards, and institutional partnerships, structural problems are repeatedly translated into questions of professionalism, qualifications, and workforce development, while issues of labour rights, outsourcing, remuneration, intermediary accountability, and power remain comparatively marginal.

I argued that this reflects broader processes of credentialism and responsibilisation, in which structural instability is reframed as a matter of individual professional development and adaptation, while the responsibilities of LSPs receive comparatively little scrutiny. Whether intentionally or not, such framings risk obscuring the governance structures and power relations that shape interpreters’ working lives.

This raises a fundamental question: when evidence of harm, exploitation, and precarity emerges, are professional institutions helping policymakers and the public understand the structural causes of these problems, or are they directing attention towards solutions that add burdens on interpreters and leave those structures largely intact?

More broadly, are professional organisations being captured by commercial interests, or do these patterns reflect deeper structural shortcomings—including epistemic oppression, institutional racism, ethical and strategic failures, conflicting institutional incentives, organisational arrogance, or some combination of these factors?

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.

Blog Image

IceMing & Digit / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/