Translation and Interpreting Studies have documented declining rates and deteriorating working conditions, while commercial intermediaries have raised concerns about the difficulty of attracting and retaining skilled translators and interpreters. Yet a fundamental question remains largely absent from these discussions: What would actually make a rate of pay fair?
Discussions of fair pay often move quickly towards numbers: hourly rates, per-word rates, minimum rates or market rates. But before asking how much constitutes fair pay, we need to ask what makes pay fair in the first place. A fair rate cannot be determined solely by asking what the market will bear, what clients are prepared to pay, or what rate is sufficient to keep enough translators and interpreters willing to accept the work.
My research approaches this question through an institutional political economy, drawing principally on the work of economist Joseph Stiglitz. It combines analysis of market and government failure, unequal economic power and distribution with an explicit orientation towards practical ethics and institutional reform.
From this perspective, markets do not simply determine a naturally occurring “correct” price. Prices emerge within institutional arrangements: procurement systems, contracting practices, employment law, competition, access to information, bargaining power and the alternatives realistically available to those selling their labour. This matters enormously for translators and interpreters. If an interpreter repeatedly accepts the rate offered by a commercial intermediary, does that demonstrate that the rate is fair?
1. Fair pay should, at minimum, do no harm
A useful starting point comes from Stiglitz’s discussion of practical ethics: before asking what an ideally fair economic arrangement would look like, we can begin with a much more modest ethical requirement: do no harm (Stiglitz, 2006, pp.277-279).
Applied to translation and interpreting, this provides a minimum threshold rather than a complete theory of fair pay. A remuneration system should not foreseeably leave the people providing skilled professional labour economically worse off because of the way the work is organised. Nor should apparent efficiencies be achieved by transferring costs and risks to workers who have less power to influence the arrangements and less capacity to absorb their consequences.
This changes the question we ask about rates. A rate might appear acceptable when viewed in isolation, but become much harder to defend once we account for unpaid waiting and preparation, travel costs, cancellations, periods without assignments, sickness, holidays, pension provision and the occupational risks associated with the work. If these are necessary or foreseeable costs of providing the service, shifting them onto individual translators and interpreters does not make them disappear.
My PhD research into outsourced public service interpreting illustrates why this matters. Among the 54 interpreters who responded to my survey, half reported earning less than £10,000 per year from PSI work, only 4% reported earning more than £25,000, and none reported earnings above £35,000. When asked whether their earnings from PSI and all their other work were sufficient to meet their financial needs, 62% said this was infrequently the case. At the same time, 98% received no paid sick leave, 94% no paid holiday leave and 96% no pension contributions from agencies or public-service institutions.
The ethical question, then, is not simply whether translators and interpreters are willing to continue accepting the work. It is whether the institutions through which their work is purchased are generating foreseeable economic harms, who has the power to prevent or mitigate those harms, and who is being required to bear them.
2. Fair pay must sustain a livelihood
The principle of avoiding harm gives us a minimum ethical threshold, but it does not take us far enough. Preventing translators and interpreters from being pushed into financial insecurity is not the same as remunerating them fairly. Fair pay should positively enable people to sustain a reasonable livelihood from that work.
But even this requires us to think beyond the headline hourly or per-word rate. A freelance translator earning £17 for an hour of billable work is not in the same economic position as an employee earning £17 per hour. The translator may also have to absorb unpaid administration, periods without work, software and equipment costs, professional development, pension contributions, holidays and sickness. Similarly, for interpreters, a nominal hourly rate may conceal unpaid travel, waiting time, cancellations, preparation and gaps between assignments.
Who bears these costs and risks is therefore part of the pay question. A rate cannot meaningfully be described as fair without considering the economic risks transferred to the person providing the labour. What ultimately matters for livelihood sustainability is the income that can realistically be generated from the work once the availability of assignments, unpaid time, employment-related costs and absence of social protections are taken into account.
3. Fair pay should recognise expertise and value, not merely subsistence
There is something troubling about setting the ethical threshold at the point at which translators and interpreters can just about meet their basic needs. A sustainable livelihood should surely provide a floor, not a complete theory of fair remuneration.
Language professionals invest considerable time and resources developing linguistic competence, specialist knowledge, qualifications and professional expertise. They create economic and social value through that knowledge. Fairness therefore requires us to ask not only whether a person can survive on their income, but also: how is the value created through their expertise being recognised and distributed?
One useful benchmark might be the earnings of workers with comparable levels of education, expertise and professional responsibility. This does not mean that translators and interpreters should automatically receive the median salary of another profession. But if highly qualified language professionals consistently earn substantially less than workers requiring comparable levels of education, expertise and responsibility, that disparity is relevant to any serious discussion of how their knowledge and labour are economically valued.
For freelance translators and interpreters, such comparisons would also need to account for costs and risks that salaried professionals do not personally bear, including periods without work, unpaid administration, equipment, professional development, pension provision, sickness and holidays. An apparently comparable hourly rate may therefore produce very different levels of economic security.
This question of relative professional valuation also emerged strongly in my research: 96% of respondents believed they would earn more in another sector requiring the same level of education or professional experience, while none believed they would earn less. This is, of course, a perception rather than an objective comparison of occupational earnings. It nevertheless raises an empirical question worth investigating: how does the remuneration of translators and interpreters actually compare with national earnings for professions requiring comparable levels of education, expertise and responsibility?
The question of value becomes particularly important as technology increases productivity. If new technologies allow considerably more value to be generated from language work, fairness also requires us to ask how those productivity gains should be distributed between those who own the technology, those who control access to work, clients and the language professionals whose expertise and labour remain part of the production process.
4. Fair pay is also a question of power
Suppose hundreds of translators are willing to accept a particular rate. Does their willingness establish that the rate is fair? A conventional market answer might place considerable weight on voluntary exchange. A political-economic approach asks another question: how much power did each side have to say no?
Where access to substantial volumes of work is controlled by commercial intermediaries while individual translators and interpreters compete separately for assignments, formal freedom to reject a rate may coexist with substantial inequality in bargaining power. This is precisely why “the market rate” cannot settle the ethical question. The market rate is itself an outcome of a particular distribution of economic power.
5. Fair pay is an institutional question
Publicly funded interpreting and translation add another dimension. Government cannot be treated simply as an external observer of the market. Public authorities design procurement systems, determine contractual structures, select commercial intermediaries and establish many of the rules within which interpreting and translation are purchased. The question of fair pay therefore cannot simply be delegated to “the market.”
If public procurement achieves lower costs by transferring unpaid time, income insecurity, occupational risks or other costs downwards to individual translators and interpreters, we should at least ask whether this represents genuine efficiency or simply cost displacement. Value for money for the state should not mean poor value for the people whose labour delivers the service.
So what would a fair rate be?
A Stiglitzian framework cannot tell us with precision that £X per hour or £Y per word is universally fair. But practical ethics does not require that degree of precision before it can provide useful guidance. We can identify a minimum threshold: economic arrangements should not foreseeably harm those whose labour sustains them, particularly where those workers possess less power to shape the arrangements and less capacity to absorb the risks. From there, we can ask the more demanding questions of fairness: whether remuneration sustains a reasonable livelihood, recognises expertise and contribution, and distributes the value created through language work fairly. Fair remuneration would, at minimum, need to consider:
- whether earnings provide a sustainable livelihood rather than mere subsistence;
- the expertise, education and continuing investment required to perform the work, including comparison with the remuneration of similarly skilled professional work;
- unpaid labour and the real costs of providing the service;
- how occupational and economic risks are distributed;
- access to sickness, holidays, pensions and other protections ordinarily associated with decent work;
- inequalities in bargaining power and the realistic ability to refuse poorly paid work;
- how productivity gains and the economic value generated through language work and technological change are distributed; and
- whether public policy and procurement correct inequalities of power or reinforce them.
None of these considerations, individually, produces a definitive fair rate. Avoiding foreseeable harm establishes a minimum ethical threshold. A sustainable livelihood takes us beyond that minimum. Comparisons with similarly skilled professional work can tell us something about relative economic valuation. Analysis of costs and risks reveals what the headline rate may conceal, while examination of bargaining power tells us something about how meaningful apparent market consent really is.
Together, however, these considerations provide a more defensible basis for discussing fairness than either the prevailing market rate or the minimum rate required to maintain an adequate supply of translators and interpreters. I am aware that this does not give us a neat figure to insert into a rate card. But perhaps that is precisely the point. Fair pay is not simply a price. It is an institutional question about how value, power, costs and risks are distributed.
So rather than asking only “What is the going rate?” or “How much do we need to pay to keep enough linguists in the market?”, perhaps the first question should be: Does the way we are paying for this work cause foreseeable harm?
Avoiding such harm would not tell us exactly what a fair rate should be. It would only establish the minimum. From there, we can begin the more difficult conversation about what translators and interpreters should reasonably expect from an economic system that depends upon their knowledge and labour.
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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