I have firsthand experience of how being in academia can make you question your life choices!

And I feel slightly uncomfortable admitting this, but sometimes I look at our field and think: this should have been the golden age of Translation Studies.

Think about it.

Human beings have never been so connected, and multilingual communication has never been more important – or more possible. Digital communication and extraordinary technological advances allow knowledge to move between languages, countries and cultures at a scale that would have been unimaginable not very long ago.

Surely this should have been the golden age of Translation Studies?

You would think that the people who understand how multilingual communication happens – and the academic field devoted to studying it – would be having the time of their lives. Graduates of Translation Studies should be helping to govern new technologies, shape multilingual communication and determine how linguistic knowledge is utilised in increasingly interconnected societies.

And yet I keep coming back to a strange contradiction.

Universities spend years teaching students that linguistic knowledge matters. Translation departments develop specialist skills, expertise, professional ethics and critical thinking. They assess that knowledge, award degrees for it and celebrate their graduates.

And then those graduates may enter a labour market in which that same highly skilled knowledge is fragmented, intermediated and commissioned at rates increasingly disconnected from the expertise required to perform it.

That bothers me.

It also makes me think about what it must feel like to be an academic working within this field. You care about language. You research the extraordinary ingenuity and creativity involved in human communication across countries and cultures. You teach students that their knowledge matters. And then there is the small matter of fighting for your discipline within the university while trying to prepare those students for a rapidly changing world of work.

And on top of all that, you get an obscure equality researcher asking academics difficult questions about university–industry collaboration!

Well, I will probably continue asking those questions for a while.

But I also want to acknowledge something that can easily disappear from that conversation: academics did not create this political economy on their own.

There is something deeply uncomfortable about universities investing considerable intellectual and institutional resources in producing specialist knowledge while the labour market into which graduates enter may assign diminishing economic value to that same knowledge.

And sometimes I find myself listening to the language circulating around academia – talent pipelines, individual responsibility, productivity, skills, employability, meeting industry needs – and wondering how some of it came to sound so familiar.

Somewhere in all of that, shouldn’t somebody also be asking why the highly skilled graduates universities are working so hard to prepare may enter work characterised by low pay and economic insecurity?

And lately another thought has been nagging at me.

I spend quite a lot of my time writing to government departments about working conditions in interpreting. Increasingly, I am getting responses in which government itself acknowledges some of these problems. We now have government language about worker vulnerability and “one-sided flexibility”. Institutions responsible for regulating labour markets are at least beginning to ask whether being formally free to accept or reject work necessarily means having meaningful economic choice.

And I find myself wondering how we ended up in the rather peculiar position where I can have that conversation with government while still struggling to have it within parts of my own academic field.

I don’t say that as an accusation. It genuinely puzzles me.

Perhaps we became so preoccupied with technological change that we paid less attention to institutional change.

AI is transforming translation and interpreting, obviously. But AI did not invent outsourcing. It did not invent fragmented supply chains. It did not place increasingly powerful commercial intermediaries between the people who need linguistic knowledge and the people who produce it. And it did not begin the process through which highly skilled language work could be purchased at progressively lower prices.

So lately, when I hear the understandable anxiety about what AI might do to Translation Studies, another thought keeps occurring to me:

What if technology isn’t the only transformation we should have been watching?

Maybe we needed as much human innovation in our institutions, governance and democracy as we achieved in technology.

Maybe this really could have been our golden age.

And maybe understanding why it wasn’t requires us to talk much more about the political economy that grew around the knowledge we produce.

Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash