Over the past three years, I’ve spent a great deal of time analysing the role of professional organisations in the translation and interpreting sector as part of my research on the ethical governance of precarious labour. I’ve written extensively about what I believe is going wrong. I’d now like to shift the conversation towards what good institutional leadership could look like.

Below is a first draft of Ethical Principles for Professional Organisations in the translation and interpreting profession. I’m sharing them in the hope of starting an honest conversation and encouraging translators and interpreters to contribute their own ideas.

Here are my initial thoughts:

1. Place translators’ and interpreters’ livelihoods, dignity, and wellbeing at the centre of institutional decision-making.
2. Recognise that the ability to earn a decent living is part of what makes a profession. Professionalism includes promoting fair work, ethical business practices, and institutional accountability.
3. Ensure that institutional narratives do not obscure or normalise exploitative labour practices or unfair market arrangements.
4. Apply ethical scrutiny not only to individual practitioners but also to commercial collaborators, sponsors, speakers, partners, and intermediaries.
5. Be mindful of the intended and unintended consequences of institutional decisions, partnerships, publications, and public narratives.
6. Be transparent about governance structures, funding arrangements, partnerships, and potential conflicts of interest.
7. Base training, guidance, and policy positions on robust evidence rather than assumptions, tradition, or commercial interests.
8. Create space for open discussion of labour conditions, financial insecurity, structural inequalities, and differing viewpoints without treating criticism as disloyalty.
9. Ensure that public communications, reports, and statistics are accurate, balanced, and do not present incomplete or misleading pictures of the profession.
10. Engage with expertise beyond the translation profession—including labour economists, business ethicists, employment lawyers, sociologists of work, and researchers on precarious labour. Ethical leadership requires intellectual humility as well as linguistic expertise.

What would you add, remove, or rewrite?

I’m genuinely interested in developing something constructive that reflects a broad range of views from across the profession and beyond.

Edit 1 (to add suggestions from comments and private messages)
11. They must not pose as representatives of the profession. That’s misleading, especially that their members represent only one part of the profession.

12. They must confuse translators’ membership for benefits such as support community and lists in directory as translators’ endorsement of their public statements and collaboration with commercial actors.

13.  It is unethical to use research, events, or publications to push their own commercial interests or those of their business partners while presenting themselves as objective voices for the whole industry.

14. The head of a professional organisation should have proven expertise in that field as well as comprehensive understanding of precarious work. 

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

Anton Grabolle / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/