For those who haven’t met her yet, Nora is the interpreter at the centre of my forum theatre play Professionally Speaking.

Nora is scrolling through LinkedIn again.

She has just discovered that someone from the Association of Translation Companies (ATC), who previously co-authored academic research about finding “fair pay rates” for translators, has shared new research documenting declining earnings and poor working conditions, while advising translators to:

“Adopt the ‘brace’ position folks, it is tough out there but we human linguists will endure!”

Nora stares at the screen for a while.

Then she turns to a character called THE TRANSLATION INDUSTRY.

NORA:
Excuse me!

THE TRANSLATION INDUSTRY:
Yes?

NORA:
What exactly am I bracing for?

THE TRANSLATION INDUSTRY:
Economic- and tech-driven change.

NORA:
And after I brace?

THE TRANSLATION INDUSTRY:
You endure.

NORA:
And the fair pay?

THE TRANSLATION INDUSTRY:
Working conditions need some time to recalibrate.

NORA:
How long?

THE TRANSLATION INDUSTRY:
These things take time.

NORA:
Right. And while they’re recalibrating, who’s paying the £400 to fix my car so I can go to work?

THE TRANSLATION INDUSTRY remains silent.

Nora waits.

Nothing.

NORA:
Isn’t the “brace position” what they tell you to adopt when the plane is about to crash?

In the background, the IVORY TOWER becomes illuminated again.

An authoritative academic voice descends from above.

ACADEMIC VOICE:
You also have a duty to self-care!

BLACKOUT.

A note on the Academic Voice

Just in case anyone thinks I have plucked the Academic Voice’s references to self-care and self-actualisation randomly from the air: I haven’t.

In The Good Life?, Penet, Lambert and Walker conclude that freelance translators can achieve “considerable self-actualisation despite deficits at lower levels”, and that the fulfilment they derive from their work can enable “significant trade-offs in lower-order needs”, in some cases offsetting low pay, isolation, stress and wider dissatisfaction.

The paper also argues that, alongside a collective duty of care, freelance translators themselves “have the duty to self-care so they can actively maintain their wellbeing.”

So, yes. The IVORY TOWER really did say that.

Nora merely responded.

Just in case anyone thinks I have plucked the Academic Voice’s references to “self-care” and “self-actualisation” randomly from the air: I haven’t.

They appear in published research by JC Penet, Joseph Lambert and Callum Walker. Penet, Lambert and Walker conclude that freelance translators can achieve “considerable self-actualisation despite deficits at lower levels”, and that the fulfilment they derive from their work can enable “significant trade-offs in lower-order needs”, in some cases offsetting low pay, isolation, stress and wider dissatisfaction.

The paper also argues that, alongside a collective duty of care, freelance translators themselves “have the duty to self-care so they can actively maintain their wellbeing.”

But there is another aspect of the framing that interests me.

The paper approaches translator wellbeing through the concept of “human capital sustainability”. Translators’ wellbeing is connected to the industry’s ability to retain its human capital and ensure the sustainability of the translation industry. Shouldn’t we be prioritising the livelihood of Translators?

So, no. I haven’t invented the IVORY TOWER.

Nora merely responded.

Is this merely an unfortunate side effect of the increasingly close collaboration between industry, academia and the profession? Or is it precisely the kind of outcome that should make us examine that collaboration — and the assumptions it can normalise — much more critically?

Perhaps THE IVORY TOWER, THE TRANSLATION INDUSTRY and THE PROFESSION have earned themselves another scene.