As someone researching equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), with a focus on labour rights and working conditions in the translation and interpreting industry, I have been deeply concerned by growing calls for industry–academia collaboration within Translation Studies. The value of collaboration is often asserted rather than supported by evidence or logical arguments. These collaborations are frequently presented as progressive, inclusive, and necessary to ensure that research remains relevant to the realities of the sector.

Over the last few years, I have increasingly observed that the actors included in these collaborations are often those who already possess organisational resources, institutional visibility, and access to decision-making processes. Meanwhile, translators and interpreters experiencing financial insecurity, declining bargaining power, or precarious working conditions remain largely absent from these conversations. What is often lacking is a critical analysis of power.

As a deliberate intervention in the public interest, I have written extensively to Translation Studies scholars urging them to give greater attention to the unintended consequences of such collaborations. Are we doing justice to translators and interpreters experiencing financial insecurity, declining rates, deteriorating bargaining power, algorithmic management, platformisation, and exclusion from decision-making processes? Should we not be investigating why advocacy is often weak or absent? How can we justify the lack of critical engagement with power?

Therefore, I argue that we must scrutinise who is invited into the conversation, who influences the agenda, whose interests are represented, and whose experiences remain marginalised—or even excluded. What legitimacy is academia, however unintentionally, conferring on commercial actors within a sector already characterised by inequality?

Who Should Shape Research Agendas?

A recent summary of a panel discussion at the Centre for Translation Studies conference at the University of Surrey provides an instructive example. In a LinkedIn post, a Surrey faculty member wrote:

Yesterday’s closing panel at the CTS Conference, ‘Academia, Industry and Practice: A Trialogue on the Future of Translation and Interpreting Research’, made it clear that collaboration between academia, industry, practitioners and professional associations already exists. The challenge now is how to make it more intentional and sustainable, creating an ecosystem in which practice, research and advocacy continuously inform and strengthen one another.

There was broad agreement that LSPs and professional associations have an important role to play in shaping research agendas.”

It is really concerning when a Translation Studies event concludes that LSPs and professional associations should play an important role in shaping research agendas while describing an ecosystem in which research, practice, and advocacy continuously inform one another.

Also, I have argued previously that the choice of the word “ecosystem” itself is political. It suggests balance, collaboration, and harmony. It evokes the image of a naturally occurring system in which different actors coexist and contribute to a larger whole. Yet industries are not natural systems; they are shaped by unequal relationships, competing interests, and power.

The central question therefore becomes: why is the focus increasingly on sustaining collaboration between academia and commercial actors rather than sustaining translators’ and interpreters’ livelihoods?

Another detail from the Surrey conference particularly caught my attention: the inclusion of the word “advocacy” in the event agenda. Initially, this inclusion of advocacy appeared to be an improvement. At a previous Surrey event involving many of the same organisations, advocacy was mentioned only once by Professor Joss Morkens. Following the event, I wrote open letters to the heads of Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) and Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI), urging them to acknowledge the increasing financial difficulties experienced by translators and interpreters in their public statements. However, according to a translator who attended the recent Surrey event, the discussion did not address who should undertake advocacy, whose interests advocacy should represent, or how conflicts of interest within collaborations should be managed.

However, there appears to have been limited discussion about what advocacy should mean in practice, who would undertake it, whose interests it would represent, or how potential conflicts of interest would be managed. If the inclusion of advocacy in the event agenda was not merely tokenistic, then difficult questions should have been raised about the role of intermediaries in shaping labour conditions, remuneration, exploitation, procurement systems, outsourcing arrangements, and the distribution of value within translation supply chains.

Another potential area for advocacy concerns how translators’ labour is framed within industry-academia collaborations. For example, Raisa McNab, Head of the Association of Translation Companies (ATC), the interest group representing intermediaries, contributed a chapter to The Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry (2025) that discusses translators primarily through the lens of cost management. Why is this framing not being challenged?

Another necessary question is: Are we discussing the future of the industry so extensively that we are neglecting the people currently working within it? Much of the current discussion within Translation Studies focuses on the future: artificial intelligence, technological change, new business models, and evolving professional roles. These are undoubtedly important topics. However, an excessive focus on the future risks obscuring the struggles many translators and interpreters face today.

These questions become particularly important when organisations representing commercial intermediaries are positioned as partners in shaping research agendas. Too little attention is given to examining how intermediary business models may contribute to declining rates, financial insecurity, deteriorating working conditions, or shifting bargaining power within the sector.

When the Language of Inclusion May Conceal Significant Exclusion

Within equality, diversity, and inclusion scholarship, inclusion is often understood as ensuring that those most affected by decisions have meaningful opportunities to participate in shaping them. Yet within some Translation Studies discussions, inclusion appears increasingly to mean the inclusion of already powerful actors: language service providers (LSPs), organisations representing LSPs, professional organisations that sell training and certifications, and organisations that access parts of translation work through their directories.

For example, The Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry (2025) was repeatedly praised for bringing together academic and industry voices. I previously wrote a detailed critique of the book. Here, however, I want here to highlight that many “critics’ reviews” celebrate its “inclusive approach,” its ability to “bridge scholarly insight with industry expertise,” and its collaboration between researchers and industry leaders.

What they do not discuss is power.

One reviewer wrote that

it feels like a group of friendly experts are letting us in on their brilliant conversation.

But who is often excluded from the conversations of friendly experts? These endorsements reveal something important: the presence of industry actors is treated as evidence of inclusivity. However, including commercial actors does not automatically mean including all necessary perspectives.

Ironically, the editors of the Routledge Handbook. were also writing elsewhere about deteriorating job quality among UK translators, yet this issue did not receive sufficient analysis within the “inclusive” Handbook.

Universities Do Not Only Produce Knowledge. They Also Confer Legitimacy.

One aspect of these collaborations receives surprisingly little attention: the reputational capital universities confer upon their partners.

Universities are not neutral venues. Their involvement signals credibility, expertise, and legitimacy. When commercial actors participate in university conferences, contribute to academic publications, shape research agendas, or appear as EDI champions in discussions about the industry, they benefit from the symbolic authority associated with academic institutions.

A question I have repeatedly raised within Translation Studies is this:

What legitimacy and reputational capital are universities, however unintentionally, granting commercial actors within an industry increasingly characterised by low pay, financial insecurity, deteriorating working conditions, and documented concerns about exploitation?

More broadly, where is the discussion of the ethical responsibilities of universities when collaborating with commercial actors whose business models may benefit from existing inequalities? This is not an argument against dialogue. It is a call to recognise that collaboration is never politically neutral. It requires attention to the unintended consequences of institutional choices.

This is particularly important in the translation and interpreting sector because many organisations invited into these spaces are not neutral observers. They are stakeholders with material interests in existing industry structures and business models. These questions become even more pressing when the same organisations participate in policy discussions and call for the continuation of outsourcing of public services.

This question also applies to professional organisations that were present at the Surrey event and that claim to speak for translators and interpreters. Representation itself requires scrutiny: who is being represented, whose interests shape advocacy, and whose experiences remain underrepresented? Organisations such as the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) and the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) run professional directories where translators and interpreters join these organisations in the hope of being listed. However, membership should not automatically be interpreted as endorsement of those organisations’ policies or public statements.

The ITI’s membership base consists of language service providers and individual translators and interpreters. Both ITI and CIOL have lobbied policymakers to make the diplomas CIOL offers mandatory for public service interpreters, despite a growing body of media and academic investigations—including my own doctoral research—showing that public service interpreters are facing intensifying financial insecurity. In my study, more than half of participants reported that they were unable to earn enough to cover their basic needs.

This makes it even more crucial for Translation Studies to critically examine institutional incentives and priorities. The presence of these organisations at the Surrey meeting should not automatically be interpreted as representation of translators and interpreters. We need to ask how the interests of individual language workers are balanced with those of other stakeholders.

Universities must critically examine what assumption of representations they hold and how their institutional authority may be mobilised beyond the conference room, the handbook, or the research project itself.

I had initially intended to discuss these issues in relation to the Association of Programmes in Translation and Interpreting Studies (APTIS). However, APTIS has granted membership to the Association of Translation Companies (ATC), the interest group representing intermediaries.

So I am back to my original question: Is there still space to critically examine the role of intermediaries in shaping translators’ pay and working conditions?

More broadly, we must ask whether the growing pressure on Translation Studies scholars to demonstrate relevance, impact, and engagement is unintentionally narrowing the space for critical examination of power, inequality, and labour conditions.

Note
This article builds on my wider body of work on language justice, labour rights, and the translation and interpreting profession. For further reading, see my Language Justice Reading List, where I have compiled previous articles including empirical research, policy analysis, and critical commentary.

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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