Last week, I watched the drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office because I was looking for inspiration, strength and resilience. As I navigate my own efforts to complete my thesis on the injustices faced by public-service interpreters, I wanted to watch the story of people who persisted in questioning a system that seemed overwhelmingly more powerful than they were.

The sub-postmasters refused to accept that nothing could be changed. They found one another, recognised that what was happening to them was not simply an individual problem, and kept going. And on that level, the story certainly delivered. It is available to watch for free on ITV, if you don’t mind the ads.

But I also found something in the drama that I wasn’t expecting. As I watched the sub-postmasters contacting the Post Office helpline about unexplained discrepancies, only to find responsibility repeatedly pushed back onto them, I kept thinking: I have seen this pattern before. It’s not the same injustice. Not remotely the same consequences. But it is a familiar way of organising power and responsibility.

There is something profoundly moving about people who have been made to feel powerless discovering that they are not powerless after all. About individuals who have struggled separately beginning to talk to one another, recognising that what they had been experiencing was not simply an individual problem, and eventually challenging the system itself.

A system can produce a problem while responsibility for dealing with that problem travels downwards towards individuals who possess relatively little power to change the system itself. I know that some interpreters have to sign work agreements that shift all the costs of legal disputes onto interpreters rather than the commercial intermediaries that assign the work.

In professional and academic discussions about the challenges facing translators and interpreters, solutions are frequently directed towards the individual: invest in your skills, specialise, demonstrate your value, become more entrepreneurial, learn new technologies, keep adapting. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this advice. But there is another question we rarely seem to ask:

Why is responsibility for adaptation repeatedly placed on the individual, while the institutions producing these pressures are subjected to far less scrutiny?

That brings me back to something I wrote about last week. I offered translators and interpreters some slightly unusual reading advice: read Joseph Stiglitz. The reason is that Stiglitz encourages us to look differently at markets. Inequality does not simply emerge from some natural, neutral entity called “the market”. Markets operate through rules, norms, institutions and power. Those rules help determine who has bargaining power, who carries risk, who receives the rewards, who bears the costs, and who has the power to change the arrangement.

Watching Mr Bates vs The Post Office made that argument suddenly feel remarkably tangible and helped remind me that there might be a way forward. We should not all be struggling in silence and alone.

Many of us possess valuable skills in which we have invested considerable time, effort and money. It is easy to feel like underachievers, or even failures, when facing such immense financial pressure and insecurity.

That is why we need to remind one another that difficulties experienced repeatedly across a profession cannot always be explained as individual failure. Sometimes we need to look at the institutions governing the market itself. In the translation and interpreting industry, I believe there are compelling reasons to do exactly that. The Government has failed to enshrine adequate protections for freelancers.

This is not simply my characterisation of the problem. In response to my open letter to the Minister for Women and Equalities, the Government itself acknowledged that the current framework “does not prevent worker exploitation and leaves vulnerable workers without core employment protections.”

Furthermore, in outsourced translation and interpreting, public bodies are choosing to procure services through commercial intermediaries while failing to produce procurement contracts that prevent unfair or exploitative practices within their supply chains. That should raise a serious political-economy question: if public bodies spend taxpayers’ money through outsourced supply chains, where does responsibility lie for the working conditions those supply chains produce?

I am writing this article to emphasise that we are not alone. But we need more collective action and coordination. Collective action is not only about striking. It is about reclaiming power and reclaiming the narrative. It can mean writing to MPs, responding to consultations, submitting evidence, contacting journalists, joining or supporting unions, sharing evidence of working conditions, challenging institutional narratives, participating in professional governance, collecting data, using Freedom of Information requests, educating end clients, holding professional organisations accountable, and coordinating our efforts rather than responding individually.

I also appreciate that each of us has to consider our own options—whether to stay or leave—and that some of us have far more restricted choices than others. I respect that. But those who decide to leave should not simply be left to carry the costs of economic and technological restructuring themselves. They deserve proper government support to transition into other work. Many have invested years, considerable resources and substantial expertise in their careers. Placing the entire responsibility for adaptation on the individual simply reproduces the problem I have been discussing throughout this article: power and responsibility are located in different places. This connects to my earlier call to employers to recognise the transferable skills and linguistic expertise that translators and interpreters can bring.

I watched Mr Bates looking for resilience. What I found was an illustration of something political economy had already begun teaching me: institutions can individualise responsibility for problems produced by systems. Translators and interpreters are repeatedly encouraged to adapt individually to deteriorating economic and technological conditions. Individual adaptation may be necessary, but it cannot substitute for institutional reform. Recognising that distinction is not an invitation to helplessness. It is precisely what makes collective agency possible.

If the same problems are happening repeatedly to many of us, we should stop interpreting them as evidence of individual failure. And once we recognise a shared institutional problem, we can begin acting on it collectively.

About the author
Fardous Bahbouh is a researcher and broadcast interpreter specialising in 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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