Over the past three years, my PhD research has focused on inequality in the UK’s public service interpreting sector. Through survey research, policy analysis and documentary evidence, I have been investigating what outsourcing and commercial intermediation have meant for the people who actually provide language services. The picture that emerged is deeply troubling.

Public service interpreters described a profession characterised by multidimensional precarity: unstable incomes, limited labour protections, significant occupational risks, and persistent financial insecurity despite exceptionally high levels of education, professional expertise, and the enormous public value of their work. Interpreters’ testimonies consistently described working conditions they regarded as fundamentally unfair, highlighting extensive unpaid work-for-labour, limited negotiating power, emotional exhaustion, and growing uncertainty associated with technological developments, including algorithmic work allocation and artificial intelligence (AI). Although interpreters repeatedly reported they found their work meaningful and socially valuable, these intrinsic rewards coexisted with institutional vulnerability, chronic financial insecurity and, for many, a perception of exploitation.

Perhaps because I have spent years researching the political economy of translation and interpreting, I was genuinely astonished when I saw the Association of Translation Companies (ATC) posting about research it had collaborated on with the University of Surrey’s Centre for Translation Studies.

The ATC is not simply an industry actor. It is the interest group representing commercial translation companies and agencies—the commercial intermediaries that play a significant role in shaping the pay, contractual arrangements and working conditions of translators and interpreters across the UK.

According to one recent MA dissertation, the ATC’s Chief Executive Officer acted as the recruitment gatekeeper. Beyond those facts, there is no publicly available information about what influence, if any, the ATC had over the supervision, research process, participant selection or the final dissertation. I know from correspondence with other universities, to whom the ATC suggested similar collaborations, that it wanted to suggest the research topic and to be involved in supervision.

What concerns me is whether universities have sufficiently robust governance arrangements to reassure both researchers and the wider public that critical inquiry remains genuinely independent.

The dissertation itself is carefully written and addresses an important topic: inclusive language in translation and healthcare communication. I do not question the researcher’s integrity or commitment. In fact, I think the author genuinely cares about dignity, representation, inclusion and justice.

What fascinated me was not what the dissertation says, but what it leaves outside its analytical frame.

Throughout the study, participants discuss implementation challenges, institutional constraints, client expectations, technological limitations and professional responsibility. They describe market pressures, deadlines, budgets and the practical difficulties of implementing inclusive language. The dissertation repeatedly acknowledges that translators work within systems that prioritise speed, consistency and client expectations.

Yet some remarkably important questions never appear.

Nobody asks whether pricing structures discourage inclusive practice. Nobody asks whether translators are paid for the additional work required to post-edit inclusive translations. Nobody asks whether agency contracts give translators sufficient professional discretion to implement inclusive language. Nobody asks whether procurement rewards or penalises ethical translation. Nobody asks whether commercial incentives are actually aligned with the ethical values the dissertation seeks to promote.

Those questions never enter the empirical field. The dissertation repeatedly refers to “market pressures”, “client expectations” and “institutional norms” as environmental conditions rather than institutional arrangements created by identifiable actors.

Who creates these market logics? Who decides that speed should be valued more highly than inclusive editing? Who determines pricing structures? Who bears the financial cost of producing more inclusive translations? Who absorbs the additional labour required to produce more inclusive translations? Instead of becoming the beginning of an institutional analysis, however, these questions largely remain framed as implementation challenges for individual practitioners.

As I continued reading, I noticed that responsibility seemed to move steadily away from the commercial intermediaries whom the ATC represents. Instead, responsibility is shifted to translators, communicators, educators, trainers and communities, who are repeatedly presented as the actors responsible for delivering change. Far less attention is given to commercial governance, procurement systems, commissioning organisations, contracting models or the industry-wide economic incentives that shape professional behaviour. It is not that these structures are denied. Rather, they remain largely outside the analytical focus.

Even the recommendations for future research are revealing. They suggest further work on multilingual comparison, machine translation, translator training, professional associations and longitudinal studies. All worthwhile topics. Yet there is no suggestion that future research might investigate procurement, outsourcing, commercial governance, business models, labour conditions or the institutional role of commercial intermediaries themselves.

My concern is about governance and control over the narrative.

When an industry interest group proposes research topics, acts as the recruitment gatekeeper, and collaborates with a university on research concerning ethics, diversity, justice and representation, should we not expect equally rigorous scrutiny of the industry’s own institutional role? Should research not ask difficult questions about the commercial arrangements that shape translators’ ability to implement the very ethical practices being promoted?

Perhaps this is simply an example of a broader question about the governance of industry–university partnerships and how university can confer legitimacy on commercial actors and obsecure structural inequality. What safeguards should universities have in place to ensure that academic inquiry remains free to examine not only how professionals work within existing systems, but also whether those systems themselves deserve critical scrutiny?

I think it is a conversation worth having.

Blog image:
Gloria Mendoza / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/