Over the past few years, I have spoken and written extensively about labour rights, power, and industry–academia collaboration within Translation Studies. Some readers may wonder why these issues have become such a central focus of my work. The answer lies partly in my own experience.

I joined an industry–academia doctoral collaboration believing it would provide an opportunity to incorporate valuable perspectives from multiple stakeholders. Collaboration appeared to offer the best of both worlds: academic rigor combined with practical insight from stakeholders.

What I did not anticipate was the extent to which collaboration itself could generate attribution bias and confer reputational capital on commercial actors long before even a single paper had been published.

That experience fundamentally changed how I think about collaboration, research ethics, and universities’ responsibility to undertake rigorous due diligence before entering partnerships with commercial organisations, and during the collaboration.

The Initial Framing

The doctoral project had already been designed and funded before I joined it.

Its description framed the central challenge facing public service translation and interpreting primarily in terms of shortages of qualified translators and interpreters. It argued that it was often “difficult to procure qualified T&I professionals” working with community languages because of inequalities in education, training opportunities, and migration policy.

The project therefore presented inequality largely as a problem of workforce supply, without empirical evidence or theoretical framework to justify such attribution. Like many researchers entering collaborative projects, I wanted to critically evaluate these assumptions. However, conflicts started from the very beginning of the research because I wanted to critically evaluate these assumptions and investigate whether pay and working conditions were the major factors contributing to interpreters and translators leaving public service work. The collaboration broke even before we could agree on the research question.

I continued my doctoral research independently. The findings of the research proved I was right to refuse to follow the commercial actors’ directives.

Rather than identifying shortages of qualified interpreters as the principal problem, my research documented structural inequalities within the outsourced public service interpreting market itself.

These included:

• financial insecurity;
• low remuneration;
• deteriorating working conditions;
• inadequate attention to interpreters’ health and safety;
• diminishing bargaining power;
• procurement systems that transferred risk onto language workers; and
• technological developments with the potential to intensify precarity.

Perhaps the most striking finding was that more than half of the participants in my study reported being unable to earn enough to cover their basic needs.

I was right to ask why experienced interpreters were struggling financially and quitting public service interpreting.

The Biggest Shock

The most important lesson, however, extended beyond my research findings.

While I was engaging with multiple stakeholders, I became aware that the commercial organisation collaborating in the project was referring to its involvement in equality, diversity and inclusion research when meeting public officials responsible for decisions about outsourcing. At that moment, I realised something that had been making me uncomfortable about the collaboration.

The collaboration itself had value for the commercial actor. Long before any research findings had been published, the collaboration with a university already carried symbolic authority. Simply being associated with academic research appeared to confer credibility and legitimacy, while the focus on equality, diversity, and inclusion further supported ethical positioning.

I do not think this was intentional on the part of my university, but I still wish they had conducted thorough due diligence before the collaboration started.

The experience forced me to recognise that universities do not simply produce knowledge. They also confer legitimacy.

Due Diligence Cannot End When a Project Begins

Importantly, I am not suggesting that industry–academia collaboration is inherently problematic. Nor am I suggesting that commercial organisations should be excluded from research. I acknowledge that collaboration can generate valuable knowledge.

However, collaboration also creates ethical responsibilities. Universities should undertake extensive due diligence, especially in an industry where serious labour rights issues and exploitation have been documented in many academic studies, including:

Researchers and universities should continually ask:

• Who is the industry actor, who are their clients and their workers?
• Are they involved in problematic labour practices?
• Are the collaborators’ assumptions supported by the evidence?
• How are collaborative relationships influencing public narratives?
• What forms of legitimacy are being conferred through institutional association?
• Are conflicts of interest being adequately managed?
• Are the experiences of those most affected by the issues under investigation meaningfully represented?

These questions become particularly important when collaborations involve organisations that also participate in policy discussions, procurement systems, or lobbying activities.

A Broader Responsibility

Looking back, I no longer see my experience simply as part of my doctoral journey. I see it as an institutional lesson. Universities rightly devote considerable attention to research ethics involving participants. Perhaps it is now time to devote similar attention to the ethics of institutional collaboration itself.

I urge universities to apply the same level of critical scrutiny to collaborative partnerships that they rightly expect researchers to apply to their own empirical evidence. They should also do their due diligence when inviting commercial actors to speak at university events.

For me, this experience fundamentally changed how I think about research ethics. It is one of the reasons I now argue that universities do not merely produce knowledge. They also confer legitimacy. That legitimacy should never be granted without continuous critical reflection because it could introduce attribution bias, misallocate responsibility, and potentially hurt the people working in the industry.

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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