Collaboration between academia and industry is increasingly presented as an unqualified good in Translation Studies. It is associated with relevance, impact, employability, and practice-oriented scholarship. Yet collaboration is not neutral. In fields shaped by precarious labour markets, outsourcing regimes, and concentrated commercial power, it can also provide certain actors with privileged access to knowledge production, agenda-setting, and institutional legitimacy.

This article raises a simple question: when collaboration becomes the dominant framework through which knowledge is produced, is there still sufficient space to critically examine the role of intermediaries in shaping translators’ pay and working conditions?

I argue that Translation Studies may be facing a growing risk of commercial capture, understood as a gradual process through which industry interests, priorities, and narratives become increasingly embedded within academic governance, research design, conferences, and disciplinary debates. As industry actors—particularly Language Service Providers (LSPs) and their representative bodies—become more closely integrated into these spaces, some questions receive considerably more attention than others.

Across reports, partnerships, publications, and public events, discussions frequently focus on translators’ skills, employability, artificial intelligence, resilience, and collaboration. By contrast, there appears to be far less sustained attention to the role intermediaries play in shaping rates of pay, working conditions, outsourcing arrangements, and the distribution of value across translation supply chains.

This imbalance matters because academic collaboration can generate institutional legitimacy. When commercial actors become closely associated with universities, academic associations, professional organisations, and scholarly publications, they may acquire reputational benefits that extend beyond academia. Such relationships can strengthen perceptions of authority, expertise, and ethical social responsibility without necessarily being accompanied by equivalent scrutiny of labour practices, supply-chain governance, or responsibility for working conditions. This is particularly significant in a profession characterised by intensifying financial insecurity and a workforce that is disproportionately feminised, and racialised.

This concern is not purely theoretical. It emerges within a wider context in which questions about outsourcing, worker protection, and precarious labour arrangements are increasingly recognised as matters of public importance. In response to concerns I raised about public supply chains, outsourcing, equality obligations, and the working conditions of interpreters and other workers delivering publicly funded services, I received a ministerial reply from the Cabinet Office acknowledging that the current legislative framework “does not prevent worker exploitation and leaves vulnerable workers without core employment protections.”

This acknowledgement raises broader questions about responsibility and accountability within outsourced systems. Where public services depend on complex supply chains involving commercial intermediaries, examining how value, risk, and responsibility are distributed is not simply an academic exercise. It is directly connected to the working conditions of those delivering essential services.

The concern, therefore, is not only what is studied, but what becomes normalised and de-politicised. If collaboration is consistently presented as inherently positive, there is a risk that academic engagement unintentionally contributes to legitimising dominant industry narratives while marginalising questions about power, accountability, and labour rights.

Translation Studies has long emphasised ethics, responsibility, and critical reflection. These commitments are most meaningful when they extend to examining the conditions under which knowledge itself is produced. The purpose of this discussion is not to argue against collaboration between academia and industry. Rather, it is to suggest that greater collaboration requires stronger commitments to transparency, due diligence, and critical reflexivity. The question is not whether collaboration should occur, but whether the field is preserving sufficient critical distance to examine the economic structures and power relations that shape translators’ working lives.

1. APTIS and the Problem of Institutional Alignment

These concerns become more pronounced at the level of disciplinary governance. The Association of Translation Companies (ATC), an interest group representing LSPs, has announced that it has been granted membership in the Association of Programmes in Translation and Interpreting Studies (APTIS) (ATC, 2025a). APTIS stated mission is to advance translation and interpreting education for public benefit.

APTIS organised the Better Together conference, sponsored by the ATC and other organisations. The framing of collaboration as inherently positive raises a broader question about how partnership is conceptualised within the field. While “better together” suggests cooperation and shared purpose, it may also obscure the asymmetries that structure academia–industry relations. This invites a more basic question: better for whom—students, universities, translators, interpreters, or commercial actors? The answer cannot be assumed in advance.

A similar pattern was visible at APTIS’s 2026 conference, Living with AI: From Disruption to Direction in Translation and Interpreting. The conference continued to emphasise collaboration while focusing heavily on the challenges and opportunities associated with AI. This reflects a broader tendency within Translation Studies, where AI has become a dominant concern while questions about translators’ rates of pay, labour conditions, procurement systems, and intermediary power remain comparatively marginal.

The issue is not that these topics were entirely absent, but that they were not central to the conference’s organising concerns. Questions such as the role of LSPs in determining remuneration, the negotiation of rates across supply chains, the distribution of value between actors, and the responsibilities of intermediaries regarding labour standards received far less attention than questions of technological change and professional adaptation.

This reflects a wider tendency within the field: technological transformation is often treated as the primary object of inquiry, while the role of intermediaries in implementing these technologies, and in shaping labour conditions remains comparatively underexplored.

The Pattern Across Events and Publications

The concern is not limited to one organisation or one initiative. It appears across a broader landscape of academic–industry engagement.

For example, The Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry (2025), edited by Joseph Lambert and Callum Walker, brings together a large number of scholars examining translation as an economic activity rather than only as a linguistic practice. This represents an important development in the field. However, the growing emphasis on collaboration between academia and industry raises questions about balance. When industry perspectives enter academic spaces, they require the same critical contextualisation applied to any other powerful actor. Organisations involved in shaping markets and employment conditions are not neutral observers of those systems.

Most notably, the head of the ATC, Raisa McNab, authors a chapter within the Handbook, yet the chapter does not clearly identify her institutional position as head of the ATC. The chapter conceptualises translators’ work primarily as a cost consideration within project-management processes rather than as skilled knowledge work performed by workers with rights. It prioritises cost optimisation and the profitability of LSPs while treating translator remuneration as one variable within a broader efficiency framework.

Similarly, academic events increasingly bring together scholars, professional organisations, and industry representatives to discuss the future of translation. A recent example is the University of Surrey event Studying Translation in the Age of AI: Why and How, which included academic speakers alongside representatives from professional and industry organisations, including the ATC, ITI, and CIOL.

The discussion was framed around questions about technological change and the future of translation studies. However, there was a recurring tendency to focus on adaptation: how translators should respond, develop skills, and remain relevant.

What receives less attention is the structural question of who shapes the conditions to which translators are expected to adapt.

Professional bodies chanting the song of collaboration

Similar tendencies can also be observed within professional organisations, where collaboration with industry is frequently emphasised while questions concerning the role of intermediaries in shaping working conditions receive comparatively limited attention. In a previous article, I highlighted how, in 2023, a BBC investigation revealed serious failures within outsourced public service interpreting systems, including cases involving patient harm, communication failures, and reports of interpreters working under exploitative conditions despite their commitment to supporting vulnerable service users. Around the same period, professional organisations issued the Working Together framework in collaboration with the ATC. While the framework emphasised collaboration, credentialism, qualifications, and system-wide coordination as solutions to sector challenges, it gave almost no attention to the responsibilities of commercial intermediaries delivering publicly funded services, the distribution of resources within outsourcing structures, or mechanisms to ensure that improvements directly benefited interpreters.

Similar to the findings of the BBC investigation, my own PhD research examining inequalities in outsourced public service interpreting in the UK has documented critical gaps relating to safety, working conditions, and economic security. These include inadequate consideration of interpreters’ health and safety, low pay and financial insecurities, challenging working conditions, the implications of technologies that may intensify precarity, and factors that contribute to diminishing bargaining power. 

This alignment has continued beyond the Working Together framework. For example, currently, ITI publicly highlighting its relationship with the ATC through repeated communications Linkedin posts celebrating the two organisations as partners in a shared professional journey. Such symbolism raises a broader question about representation and institutional roles: what happens when an organisation representing commercial interests and an organisation representing professional practitioners become increasingly closely aligned in their public narratives? In such contexts, the distinction between representing those who purchase language services and those who provide them risks becoming less visible, potentially limiting space for critical discussion about power, responsibility, and the distribution of value within the profession.

This contrast raises a broader question about representation: when professional responses focus primarily on collaboration within existing structures, is sufficient attention being given to the actors who shape those structures and the working conditions experienced by those delivering the service?

The Governance Gap: Transparency and Misrepresentation of Partnerships

Concerns about institutional alignment are reinforced by broader issues of transparency in academia–industry relations. The ATC claims partnerships with multiple UK universities; however, three institutions have denied the existence of formal partnerships, and I am awaiting responses to Freedom of Information requests from the remaining universities.

This discrepancy is not merely administrative. It highlights a governance gap in how institutional relationships are defined, verified, and communicated. Such claims can generate reputational legitimacy without corresponding scrutiny or formal agreement.

Similarly, the ATC claims that it has supported two academic books: Joseph Lambert’s Translation Ethics and Callum Walker’s edited volume The Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry (ATC, 2025b), even though neither publication explicitly acknowledges such support. More problematic is the legitimising effect of an industry body presenting itself as a supporter of academic work, particularly work on ethics. This raises the question of whether such framing contributes to obscuring labour rights issues within parts of the ATC membership, or whether it enhances the ATC’s efforts in relation to the continued outsourcing of public services.

In fields where labour conditions are contested and hundreds of millions of pounds in public funds are at stake, and billions of pounds in the overall size of the translation industry, such ambiguities matter because they shape how authority, legitimacy, and neutrality are perceived.

Conclusion:
After several years of reading reports, attending events, examining collaborations, and engaging with both academic and professional organisations, I am left with a simple question. Why is it so difficult to find sustained discussion of the role of language service providers in shaping translators’ working conditions? What mechanisms exist to manage situations where the interests of practitioners and language service providers do not fully align? How can academic independence and practitioner interests be protected when organisations bring together stakeholders with different economic interests?

This creates a broader concern: if academic spaces increasingly emphasise collaboration, employability, and industry relevance, where is the space to critically examine the institutions that define labour conditions?

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

Bibliography

ATC. 2025. END OF YEAR Report 2025. Acessed 3 January 2026. https://atc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/ATC-End-of-Year-Report-2025.pdf

ATC, 2025a. Not only are we trying to find opportunities for students, we are also supporting language research…. Linkedin. Accessed 21 December 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/association-of-translation-companies_weve-been-working-with-a-range-of-uk-based-activity-7396895372511686656-BnOY?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAADnCBsBeIGaEjttEK8wazG2iwGrFP4ZIZY