Many translators and interpreters today do not have a single career. They have a patchwork. A few hours of translation here. Some teaching there. A training session next week. A short editing project next month. A handful of regular clients and intermediaries, a stream of one-off assignments, and a constant search for the next opportunity. In professional discourse and some academic textbooks, this reality is often described using more positive terms such as “diversification” and “portfolio careers.” But what might these labels be obscuring?

While it is important to acknowledge that many professionals have varied interests and might enjoy doing multiple projects, I find myself increasingly uneasy with the way diversification is often discussed. Not because diversification is always bad. But because the term may obscure important questions about power, labour, insecurity, and the changing structure of the language services industry.

1. Are We Confusing Investment Diversification with Labour Diversification?

In finance, diversification is commonly understood as a strategy for reducing risk. Investors spread their resources across different assets so that poor performance in one area can be offset by stronger performance elsewhere.

However, when we encourage translators and interpreters to diversify, are we talking about the same thing? Are we genuinely helping translators reduce risk, or are we simply encouraging them to spread the consequences of the same structural problems across multiple activities?

Today’s language services market is increasingly characterised by large intermediaries with significant market power. In many sectors, a relatively small number of Language service providers (LSPs) control access to large volumes of work and possess considerable influence over rates, working conditions, and contractual arrangements.

A translator may diversify across multiple clients, platforms, or services, yet remain exposed to the same underlying market pressures: declining rates, increasing competition, technological disruption, and diminishing bargaining power. Under these conditions, diversification may not reduce risk at all.

2. Are We Ignoring the Hidden Labour of Managing Multiple Jobs?

Discussions of diversification often focus on income generation. Less attention is paid to the labour required to sustain multiple income streams. Every additional service, client, or professional activity generates unpaid administrative work. Freelancers must:

• search for opportunities,
• prepare applications and proposals,
• market themselves,
• try to negotiate contracts,
• understand different client requirements,
• maintain professional development,
• manage accounts,
• issue invoices,
• follow up on late payments,
• resolve disputes.

This work is rarely paid. For many freelancers, chasing invoices and managing cash flow can become a significant source of stress and lost working time. When we celebrate diversification, are we accounting for the unpaid labour required to make it possible? Could diversifications for freelance workers be a strategy that actually increase risks rather than reducing it?

3. Does the Language of Diversification Obscure Structural Problems?

The language we use matters. “Diversification” sounds positive. “Portfolio career” sounds modern and entrepreneurial. A “patchwork of insecure jobs” sounds rather different. The concern is not simply semantic. Positive language can sometimes obscure uncomfortable realities.

Many translators and interpreters operate within markets characterised by weak labour protections, significant power imbalances, and, in some cases, unfair or exploitative practices. If diversification becomes the dominant response to these conditions, we risk shifting attention away from the structural factors producing insecurity in the first place. The conversation becomes: How can workers adapt?

And here I find myself going back to my main question that I have asked in multiple articles: Why are linguists being encouraged to adapt to conditions that many find increasingly difficult to sustain rather than challenging those conditions?

4. Are We Individualising a Collective Problem?

One of the risks of diversification discourse is that it may inadvertently place responsibility for financial insecurity onto individual translators and interpreters. The implicit message can become that “If you are struggling financially, perhaps you have not diversified enough.”

Yet many of the forces shaping translators’ livelihoods operate far beyond the control of individual workers. These include procurement systems, outsourcing arrangements, market concentration, technological change, industry practices, and lack of labour regulation.

When structural problems are reframed as individual challenges, workers may come to view financial difficulties as personal failures rather than consequences of broader economic conditions. This can produce frustration, guilt, and self-blame while leaving the underlying causes untouched.

5. Are We Ignoring Opportunity Costs?

Every hour spent building an additional income stream is an hour that cannot be spent elsewhere. Discussions of diversification rarely acknowledge this. If a highly skilled translator must devote increasing amounts of time to supplementary activities simply to maintain a reasonable income, an uncomfortable question arises:

Would some professionals be better off pursuing secure employment outside the sector altogether?

This is not a question that anyone likes to ask. Yet it becomes increasingly relevant if the profession can no longer provide sustainable livelihoods for a significant proportion of its practitioners. A serious discussion of diversification should therefore include discussions about opportunity costs, career alternatives, and long-term economic sustainability.

6. Can We Even Still Call It a Career?

The concept of a career traditionally implies some degree of progression, continuity, predictability, financial security, and professional development. Yet many translators and interpreters now navigate fragmented forms of work characterised by uncertainty and fluctuating income.

If individuals must continually assemble temporary income streams across multiple activities simply to remain economically viable, we should ask whether traditional notions of career still apply to translation and interpreting. It might be, but the question deserves consideration. Because the answer has implications not only for workers, but also for how professional bodies, educators, policymakers, and researchers understand the future of the profession.

Where Is the Evidence?

None of these observations imply that diversification is necessarily harmful. For some professionals, it may indeed provide greater autonomy, resilience, and satisfaction. The question is whether these benefits are being assumed rather than demonstrated. If diversification is being actively promoted as a professional strategy for translators and interpretors, what evidence supports that recommendation?

Do diversified translators earn more?

Do they experience greater economic security?

Do they report higher levels of well-being?

Do portfolio careers reduce precarity, or merely distribute it across multiple activities?

These are empirical questions. They deserve empirical answers. Without robust evidence, there is a risk that diversification becomes less an evidence-based recommendation and more a positive label attached to increasingly precarious labour market 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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