I just finished reading an academic paper entitled “In search of a fair MTPE pricing model: LSPs’ reflections and the implications for translators.” The study examines machine translation post-editing (MTPE) pricing through a focus group of eight representatives of commercial intermediaries, referred to in the study as Language Service Providers (LSPs). The participating companies were selected by the Association of Translation Companies (ATC), an interest group representing commercial intermediaries, which collaborated on the research. The study is authored by Akiko Sakamoto and Sarah Bawa Mason. Mason discloses a part-time paid consultancy role as the ATC’s Commercial Collaborations Lead.

The study acknowledges low pay and precarious income, questions pricing based on edit distance, discusses algorithmic surveillance and the pressure to work faster, and raises important concerns about technology ownership and the growing power of large technology-driven LSPs. It also explicitly seeks to approach low and precarious income as a structural rather than merely individual problem.

What I found missing, however, is a normative discussion of fairness itself. I also found it perplexing that, when considering the consequences of low rates, considerable attention is given to translators’ motivation and intermediaries’ ability to recruit them, rather than to the impact of low pay on translators’ financial security and livelihoods.

This shifts the point of concern: from what low pay does to translators, towards what low pay means for the industry’s ability to recruit and retain their workforce. For me, this raises a broader question about what academia chooses to treat as the problem: translators’ economic insecurity, or the industry’s difficulty in securing their labour?

There is no substantive discussion of what makes a price fair. Is fairness about adequately compensating translators for their time and expertise? Providing a sustainable income? Sharing productivity gains generated by technology? Accounting for unequal bargaining power between translators, intermediaries and clients? Or ensuring that those whose labour is being priced have meaningful participation in determining the terms?

The empirical analysis instead examines how intermediaries choose different pricing models and what messages these practices may send to translators, particularly in relation to motivation, recruitment and the psychological contract. Indeed, the authors describe pricing models as potentially functioning as a “relationship management tool” shaping translators’ psychological contracts.

This distinction matters. A pricing mechanism can be transparent, predictable, motivational and commercially workable without necessarily being fair.

It is particularly notable that a study whose title invokes the search for a “fair” pricing model obtains its empirical evidence from eight intermediaries’ representatives — CEOs, managing directors and COOs — selected by the interest group representing translation companies. While the article explains that the ATC selected participants from member companies active in MTPE, it does not explain the criteria by which those particular participants were selected. Translators themselves were not participants in the focus group.

The authors appropriately acknowledge that their conclusions about translators concern hypothetical responses and call for further research into translators’ actual experiences. But this leaves me with a fundamental question: can we meaningfully investigate fair pricing for translators without actually asking translators what fairness means to them?

For me, this illustrates a broader question for industry–academia collaboration. Collaboration can provide valuable access, expertise and data. But when research concerns contested concepts such as fairness, value or decent remuneration, it is especially important to ask whose understanding of fairness structures the research, whose voices are represented, and what normative principles are being used to judge the outcome.

Perhaps the bigger question I am grappling with is whether commercial interests are having a growing influence on what Translation Studies researches, how it frames problems, and whose interests become the point of concern.

This connects with concerns I have raised previously about the ethical risks of industry–academia collaboration when it is not accompanied by sufficiently critical and independent scrutiny. The risk is not necessarily overt interference in research. It can be much subtler: whose perspective shapes the research question, how the problem is framed, which outcomes become matters of concern, and whose voices are included in producing knowledge about them.

Interestingly, the article itself raises concerns about corporate actors increasingly shaping industry discourse and about whose voices are sufficiently represented. Perhaps we need to apply the same critical question to academic knowledge production itself.

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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