An investigation into university–industry partnerships, student supervision, commercial interests, academic independence and the political economy of knowledge production

This journalistic investigation examines relationships publicly presented by the Association of Translation Companies as “Partnerships” with 11 UK universities when this investigation began. The ATC is an interest group representing corporate actors in the translation and interpreting industry and lobbies the UK government on matters relating to public-sector outsourcing contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds. It operates within an industry characterised by a highly feminised and racialised workforce, in which low pay, precarious working conditions and potentially exploitative labour practices have been documented in numerous academic studies.

What is at stake is much more than whether these relationships are formally labelled “partnerships”. It is about who gains access to academic spaces and knowledge production, how that access is governed, whose interests acquire institutional legitimacy, and whether universities retain sufficient critical distance to scrutinise an industry in which the workforce they help to educate faces documented low pay and economic insecurity. It also raises a more fundamental question: if collaboration is not an unconditional good, what would make a prospective partner unsuitable for collaboration? At what point should evidence of exploitative labour practices become a deal breaker rather than simply another issue to be discussed within the collaboration?

I have used direct correspondence, Freedom of Information requests and follow-up requests for underlying records to investigate how these university relationships are constituted and governed, whose interests they represent, and what they permit the ATC to do within academic spaces. I have also offered the institutions concerned and the ATC opportunities to respond before publication.

I am conscious that individual academics work within institutions that increasingly expect them to demonstrate impact, build external partnerships, enhance employability and engage with industry, often under considerable pressures of time and resources. I am hardly outside that system myself. My purpose in telling the story that follows is not to attribute responsibility to individual scholars, but to examine the institutional arrangements within which these relationships become possible, desirable and sometimes expected. That is why this investigation focuses primarily on universities, associations and governance structures rather than on individual academics.

1. Where the investigation began

My interest in the governance of industry–academia “partnerships” began at my own institution. The ATC publicly presents the University of Leeds as one of its “University Partners”. As a PhD researcher investigating inequality in outsourced public service interpreting, my research had documented low remuneration, economic insecurity, weak employment protections, diminishing bargaining capacity and inadequate health and safety protections. It also examines how outsourcing arrangements shape these inequalities, and how they might be challenged and reformed to create more ethical and equitable public supply chains through a focus on rights, value distribution and voice.

Against that background, I was increasingly uneasy about my university’s institutional “partnership” with an interest group representing commercial intermediaries operating within the very sector I was critically examining. The Head of my School told me that she had looked into the matter and concluded:

as we do not have any formal ties or links with ATC, we will not need to take any action here.”

There was an obvious discrepancy: why was an external interest group publicly describing the University as its partner if the University did not consider such a formal relationship to exist? The distinction was particularly interesting because the ATC’s CEO, Raisa McNab, had previously been permitted to act as a “supervisor” on my publicly funded PhD, attending supervisory meetings and commenting on my writing. And before me, Ms McNab had “supervised” an MA student’s “thesis analyses.”

In Phantoms in the Brain, the neurologist V. S. Ramachandran, along with Sandra Blakeslee, makes a related methodological point through the wonderfully improbable example of a “talking pig.” If we encountered one genuinely talking pig, he argues, the scientifically interesting response would not be to dismiss it or demand a larger sample of talking pigs before taking it seriously. The anomaly itself presents an opportunity to learn something we did not previously know and, potentially, to arrive at important insights.

That example raises questions that have been troubling me for some time as a social scientist: what do we do with the things that go wrong in the process of producing knowledge? Do we have an ethical responsibility to share unsuccessful outcomes so that others can be better prepared if they encounter something similar — even when doing so might expose us to criticism or ridicule?

I want to ask you to hold those questions while I tell you a story. Before dismissing my talking pig, however, let me introduce her properly.

My research began as a publicly funded collaborative doctoral project with the ATC. For eight difficult months, however, we remained in fundamental disagreement about how the problem at the centre of the research should be framed. The ATC sought to steer the project towards “the wider concept of understanding EDI barriers in the routes into and retention in the profession, for the benefit of all ecosystem stakeholders to build a robust future pipeline.”

I could not accept that framing, for several reasons.

First: material conditions and the pipeline. How can you investigate recruitment and retention without investigating the conditions into which people are being recruited?

Second: EDI and material equality. Who gets to define what EDI means, and can equality be separated from economic security, working conditions and power?

Third: institutional responsibility. Could a recruitment-and-retention framing obscure the role of commercial intermediaries themselves, and therefore prevent questions about rates, value distribution, risk and power?

Fourth: academic independence and public interest. Could collaboration require accepting an external organisation’s preferred definition of the problem, particularly in publicly funded research?

The disagreement was therefore not simply about terminology. We disagreed about what the problem was. Was the central problem that the sector needed a more sustainable pipeline of people entering and remaining within it? Or did recruitment and retention difficulties themselves require explanation as possible consequences of the way the market was organised?

Other comments made during the collaboration sharpened that concern. Among the directives addressed to me were: “We must remember that translation companies do complex work” and “We must remember it’s a hugely complex procurement landscape…” I did not dispute either proposition. What concerned me was what such statements appeared to do within a research relationship: before particular questions had been investigated, they seemed to establish a defensive boundary around one category of actor whose role I believed should itself remain open to examination. I subsequently asked whether the ATC had signed any conflict-of-interest declaration. I received no response to this specific query.

That experience made me genuinely curious about how other students and academics had navigated collaboration with an interest group and, when problems within the sector were identified, where critical scrutiny had been directed. I also began asking the other universities publicly presented as ATC “University Partners” a simple question: what, exactly, is the relationship? The purpose of asking this was not to assume that other researchers had been constrained, nor to infer influence merely from the existence of collaboration.

2. Eleven universities, very different relationships

Similar to Leeds, both Cardiff University and the University of Birmingham said they had no formal partnership agreement with the ATC. Birmingham had nevertheless contracted the ATC to provide training services. It also told me that it undertakes due-diligence checks on all external collaborators and that any information identified concerning labour conditions and working practices would be considered. Cardiff, meanwhile, had developed a Due Diligence Policy and supporting procedure for partnership assessment. I have not received documentation showing how these arrangements were applied specifically to the ATC relationships examined here. I published those initial findings in May. Despite the universities’ responses, all three remain listed as University Partners on the ATC website.

Other universities acknowledged relationships while explicitly describing them as informal. Warwick described an “informal, project-specific collaboration” and stated that “the University has informally consented to being listed as a University Partner on ATC’s website.”

Aberdeen took a different position: although it has no separate formal partnership agreement, it participates in the ATC University Collaboration initiative and considers itself appropriately listed as a collaborating university. The same public designation – “University Partner” – therefore encompasses relationships of substantially different scope and institutional status. In some cases, however, these relationships extend beyond institutional affiliation into the production of academic knowledge itself, through student research.

The ATC’s Collaborative MA Project Partnership operates across participating universities, although the precise arrangements vary. Surrey provides one example. The University initially told me that it held no record of a formal written partnership agreement with the ATC, while confirming an “informal partnership” encompassing education, research and dissemination. Subsequent correspondence shows the ATC proposing the relationship and Surrey accepting it and supplying its university logo.

The Collaborative MA Project Partnership formed part of that relationship. The ATC described it as an “informal programme” through which partner universities could offer collaborative dissertation projects to Master’s students, supplied Surrey with proposed topics, invited interested students to discuss “the topic and its scope”, and invited the University to explore other joint research opportunities. Surrey responded that the dissertation projects were “equally interesting for us” and said it would follow up with the ATC.

Westminster participates in the same Collaborative MA Project Partnership but describes it as an “informal programme” and “not a formal university-level partnership”. Participating universities can nevertheless select dissertation projects from a continuously updated list supplied by the ATC, and Westminster says the arrangement was agreed by its Head of School of Humanities. Asked what due diligence it undertakes before entering relationships with an interest group representing commercial actors, Westminster said it held no information specifically responsive to the question, while emphasising that its procurement processes and due diligence “for formal partnerships are extremely robust”.

Portsmouth described a “strong informal working relationship” involving “a range of teaching and research initiatives”. Yet when I requested records concerning the establishment and governance of that relationship, its teaching and research activities, funding, due diligence, conflicts of interest and academic independence, Portsmouth told me that it held “no information relevant to the terms of your request”.

The University of Bristol, the most recent addition to the ATC’s list of University Partners, provided correspondence documenting how the relationship developed. In May 2026, the ATC approached Bristol with the opportunity to become a “University Partnership with ATC” and participation in its Collaborative MA Dissertation Projects. Bristol responded, “We would be delighted to partner with ATC!”, but asked specifically about “dissertation supervision”, requesting details of the collaboration’s “process, timelines, roles, and legal issues”.

The ATC CEO then explained that each year she proposes topics in which the organisation is interested. Where a student chooses one, the topic is narrowed through discussion between the student, university supervisor and ATC CEO so that it remains something “the industry would find useful”. She said she would typically participate in scoping, facilitate access to language companies and remain available to support the student during the research. Once approved, dissertations would normally be published and promoted through ATC channels.

After receiving that explanation, Bristol replied: “The dissertation scheme sounds great too, and I am happy with everything you describe.” It also asked whether it could “advertise our partnership and the dissertation opportunity” through its social-media channels and suggested producing a short video interview to highlight the opportunity.

That video was subsequently produced. In it, McNab describes students, their university supervisors and herself “together” moulding dissertation topics around both university requirements and questions in which the ATC is interested. She says ATC colleagues can provide access to industry participants and “help direct the study” towards “maximum impact and maximum usefulness for the industry topic that we’re looking at together”.

Bristol later provided important clarification in response to my right-of-reply questions.

The University is aware of engagement between colleagues in the School of Modern Languages and the Association of Translation Companies (ATC). To clarify, the proposed activity relates to the sharing of industry-related questions that students may, entirely voluntarily, choose to consider as the basis for Masters dissertation work. The ATC would have no role in supervising or marking dissertations, and students’ academic work and intellectual property would remain under the University’s control.

The University does not consider that this amounts to a commercial partnership or that academic independence has been compromised. We nevertheless recognise the importance of ensuring that arrangements involving external organisations are considered through the University’s appropriate governance and approval processes.

Bristol also said the proposed arrangement had been reviewed through relevant university processes, with School-level oversight and institutional assurance through its University Education Committee acting on behalf of Senate.

At the time I conducted this investigation and corresponded with the University, Bristol was publicly listed by the ATC as a “University Partner”. As of 25 September 2026, it no longer appears on the ATC’s published list of university partners. I have not established the reason for this change.

Taken together, these records show that relationships described as informal can extend into student research. External organisations can propose dissertation topics, participate in scoping them, facilitate access to companies, interact with students and potentially disseminate the resulting work. The formal title of “supervisor” is therefore only one possible measure of external involvement in the production of academic knowledge.

The correspondence from multiple universities suggests that students may already be enrolled on their MA programmes when these collaborations begin. I have not established how participating students fund their degrees. Some may be self-funding or relying on postgraduate loans; international students may pay substantially higher tuition fees; others may be supported by scholarships or other public or charitable funding. In each case, postgraduate education represents a substantial financial investment borne by someone.

At the same time, students can undertake research on topics proposed by the ATC and refined partly according to what “the industry would find useful”, with findings potentially contributing to the ATC’s own activities and initiatives.

Before asking whether student research is useful to industry, there is perhaps an even more elementary question: who is paying for that usefulness?

I have so far been unable to obtain the information needed to establish the financial arrangements surrounding these collaborations. That limits what can be concluded. What the documents do establish is that student research can form part of university relationships with the ATC. What they do not establish is the full economic architecture surrounding that research: who ultimately funds it, whether resources or payments flow between the organisations, and how the value generated through the research is distributed.

Of the eleven universities publicly listed by the ATC when this investigation began, Manchester has not yet responded to my FOI requests. UCL’s response raises a different set of questions and is discussed in the following section.

3. What does the ATC sell — and what does “independent” mean?

The Surrey correspondence reveals that student research was only one part of what the ATC was offering its university partners. In the same communication in which it promoted its Collaborative MA Projects, the ATC also offered a project-management training course, discussed internships and recruitment, and proposed closer connections between university partners and its member companies.

The project-management course was offered to university partners at what the ATC described as a “very affordable price”. The email identified language-service companies as its main target audience and described Birmingham as the first university formally implementing the course as an optional module within its Translation MA. Birmingham separately confirmed to me that it had contracted the ATC to provide training.

This makes the governance of such teaching particularly important. In her authored chapter in The Routledge Handbook on the Translation Industry, ATC CEO Raisa McNab presents an approach to project management in which translators can be entered as cost considerations in profitability calculations. When an organisation representing commercial interest is permitted to provide university teaching on project management, the universities also have a responsibility to ensure that students encounter the economic assumptions underlying those managerial approaches as objects of critical scrutiny, rather than simply as professional practice to be learned.

The same Surrey correspondence described recruitment and internships as “very much on the map” and said that opening channels of communication between member companies and university partners was one of the key ways of ensuring that ATC members had “access to new talent as students come out of university”. The proposed University Partners webpage would provide information about degree programmes and university contacts for internships, recruitment and local collaboration with language-service companies.

The university relationships examined here therefore encompass more than an exchange of academic and industry perspectives. The documented activities include student research, training sold to universities, internships, recruitment and connections between students, graduates and ATC member companies.

UCL adds another role. The University describes the ATC as “a trade association representing the interests of language service companies in the UK and internationally.” Yet it also states that, for its Centre for Translation Studies, “the ATC is an independent assessor for ISO standards”. UCL additionally confirmed collaboration with the ATC on professional-skills modules.

Placed alongside the other evidence, the word “independent” becomes important. The same organisation can represent the interests of language-service intermediaries, sell training to universities, participate in professional-skills education and act as an independent assessor.

I have asked UCL for the underlying agreement, records defining the ATC’s assessor role, documentation showing how its independence was determined, and records concerning conflicts of interest and academic independence. Those requests remain outstanding.

4. These partnerships are only part of the picture

The 11 university relationships examined here may be only part of the ATC’s institutional presence within Translation and Interpreting Studies. Its reach also extends into organisations and spaces connecting universities across the field. The Association of Programmes in Translation and Interpreting Studies (APTIS) provides a particularly interesting example. APTIS describes itself as “a UK Charity that aims to advance T&I education for the public benefit in the UK and Ireland.” The ATC announced in its own promotional material that it had become a “member” of APTIS. When I investigated how that decision had been made, however, I found that many universities belonging to APTIS had not known that the ATC had been admitted. I also found out that APTIS had only admitted the ATC as an Affiliate member. This created a pattern that was becoming familiar from the university-partnership investigation: the ATC’s public description of an institutional relationship could appear more straightforward than the governance arrangements behind it.

The significance is not simply terminological. Admission to a charitable organisation encompassing a much wider group of university programmes potentially places an external interest group within another institutional space connected to universities, teaching and research. APTIS has a much larger university membership than the 11 institutions on the ATC’s “University Partners” list, potentially extending the ATC’s institutional reach across a considerably wider academic network.

In previous articles, I have examined university events and APTIS events where industry perspectives are prominent and calls for more collaboration are pervasive, while the relationship between managerial practices, low pay and financial insecurity receives much less attention. I also examined other parts of the same institutional ecosystem: including authorship in academic textbooks such as The Routledge Handbook on the Translation Industry as mentioned above. The Handbook contains 133 mentions of the word collaboration, while only one sentence, from one scholar cited once, refers to the need to maintain critical distance. One of the endorsements reproduced by the publisher praises

the editors’ open and inclusive approach to recruiting contributors (both industry leaders and researchers).

This raises an important question about what “inclusion” has come to mean in this context. Does bringing powerful commercial actors into academic knowledge production itself constitute inclusivity – or should inclusivity also require attention to whose interests, experiences and perspectives may remain comparatively marginal within that collaboration?

In correspondence for this investigation, Professor Joanna Drugan, who provided that endorsement, clarified that by “inclusive” she meant the editors’ inclusion of both academic and industry perspectives, particularly in a publication series that had traditionally included only academic voices. She also pointed to an ethical difficulty in broadening participation further: because contributors are not paid, some editors consider it inappropriate to ask freelance translators and interpreters to contribute their labour for free.

That clarification is important, and the concern about asking economically insecure professionals to undertake unpaid academic labour is one I take seriously. But it also sharpens rather than resolves the question I am asking. If the inclusion of academics and industry representatives constitutes an “inclusive” range of perspectives, where are the people whose labour constitutes the industry but whose economic interests may differ from those of the organisations that buy, manage or intermediate that labour? The difficulty of including freelancers without asking them to work for free is itself revealing: participation in knowledge production requires time and resources, and those resources are not distributed equally.
The question, then, is not whether the editors acted improperly by inviting industry contributors, nor whether every publication must contain every possible perspective. It is what happens when “academia and industry” comes to function as shorthand for a plurality of perspectives, while the workers whose labour makes the industry possible may remain comparatively difficult to hear.

One scholar whose endorsement appears on the Handbook subsequently clarified to me that they had not reviewed the volume and had been asked only to provide a short endorsement, based on an overview and a limited selection of sample chapters. They had not been given the ATC CEO’s chapter and told me that she was one of the few contributors whose work they did not already know. The scholar nevertheless stood by their endorsement, citing the breadth of the volume, the quality of the material they had read, and what they regarded as the value of bringing academic and industry perspectives into closer contact.

This distinction matters. An endorsement should not be treated as equivalent to peer review or as evidence that the scholar endorsing a volume has scrutinised every contribution or institutional relationship represented within it.

The concern is not only who is brought into academic knowledge production, but also which ways of understanding the industry travel through it. Recently, I have begun encountering echoes of the ATC’s recruitment-and-retention argument within translation and interpreting scholarship itself. Prominent academics have written about the need to sustain the translation industry’s “human capital.” I find this particularly troubling. When translators and interpreters are conceptualised as human capital whose sustainability matters to the industry, there is a risk that the analytical question becomes how to sustain the supply of labour regardless of the economic arrangements under which that labour is supplied. To me, the resemblance to the “pipeline” framing with which this story began is difficult to ignore.

What I particularly struggle with is why those who are so enthusiastic about collaboration do not collaborate more with scholars in fields such as politics, economics or race studies, where questions of labour, power, exploitation and institutional interests have long been examined. I put this question to an economist at my university, who told me that framing the issue in terms of the sustainability of human capital risks concealing exploitation. Shouldn’t we also ask where, in our ethical considerations, matters of equality, fairness, race, gender and the livelihoods of a workforce we contribute to producing belong? These questions become especially important when universities and researchers collaborate with an interest group that actively promotes its involvement in research on topics including diversity, inclusion, minority representation, fair pricing, ethics and sustainability. Collectively, these examples have made me ask what becomes normalised through repeated collaboration, which perspectives acquire institutional legitimacy, and which questions remain at the margins.

The same questions about institutional legitimacy arise beyond academic knowledge production. My analysis of this ecosystem also documented overlapping relationships between academia, professional bodies and commercial interests. The Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) provides a particularly revealing case. Its membership encompasses individual translation and interpreting professionals alongside corporate members, including universities. Questions of professional representation therefore cannot necessarily be separated from potentially divergent economic and institutional interests within the sector. This becomes particularly significant where there are concerns that an organisation claiming to represent the profession may itself contribute to obscuring the lived economic realities of professionals.

I have previously examined the broader problem of representational legitimacy in translation and interpreting: what does it mean for an organisation to present itself as “the trusted voice of the profession” while also occupying a position that may influence professional recognition, visibility and access to work through mechanisms such as its translators’ directory? The question here is narrower: what happens when the same professional organisation occupies a position connecting commercial interests, individual professionals and universities?

One example illustrates why this question matters. Following the BBC’s 2023 investigation into serious failures in outsourced public service interpreting, ITI and other organisations responded through the Working Together public statement, produced in collaboration with the ATC. The statement continued to envisage outsourcing as the model through which services would be delivered. What struck me was where the statement located – and did not locate – responsibility. Commercial intermediaries were absent from critical scrutiny, while attention was directed towards the complexity of public-sector procurement and commissioning. That particular distribution of scrutiny felt strangely familiar, given my own experience with ATC.

ITI’s wider relationship with the ATC adds another dimension to this governance question. Last July, ITI awarded the ATC an Excellence Award. ITI’s CEO is also due to speak at an ATC event in a discussion framed around “academia, associations and community”. This raises another question I have asked before: why would an organisation whose membership combines individual professionals, commercial interests and universities consider itself in a position to speak for “academia”?

The significance of these academic affiliations may also extend beyond academia. I have been told independently by two sources, one of them the ATC’s CEO, that the organisation has referred to its academic affiliations when engaging with procurement officials in relation to outsourced public services. I have not established what weight, if any, procurement officials attach to those affiliations. But that possibility is itself relevant to due diligence. Where an external organisation may invoke its relationships with universities in dealings with public bodies, universities should consider not only what happens within the collaboration, but how their institutional affiliation may be presented and used beyond it.

This matters particularly here because the ATC is not simply participating in academic discussions about an industry. It represents companies operating within that industry and engages with government on public-service outsourcing. Academic affiliation can therefore acquire value outside academia, irrespective of whether universities intended it to do so.

Seen together, these relationships suggest why examining the ATC’s 11 named university partnerships alone cannot capture the full governance question. The relevant institutional ecosystem also encompasses academic associations, knowledge production, professional representation and relationships through which academic legitimacy may potentially acquire value beyond academia.

5. Resetting the ethical compass

Our field has developed sophisticated ways of thinking about ethics, representation, technology, professional practice and social justice. But ethics cannot stop at what happens during an interpreting encounter, how a translator represents another person’s words, or whether a new technology is used responsibly. A field concerned with the value of linguistic knowledge must also examine the political economy surrounding that knowledge: who has the power to shape its institutions, whose interests acquire academic legitimacy, which problems become researchable, and what happens to the people whose labour gives that knowledge economic value. I believe Translation and Interpreting Studies needs to reset its ethical compass and establish stronger self-correction mechanisms.

This matters particularly when universities educate highly skilled translators and interpreters while research continues to document low pay, insecurity and weak bargaining power in parts of the labour market into which those graduates emerge. Under those conditions, employability cannot simply mean preparing students to accommodate themselves to the market as it exists. “Industry needs” cannot be treated as self-evidently synonymous with the needs of translators, interpreters, students, service users or the public.

If recruitment is difficult, the answer is not limited to better recruitment, but also investigating the conditions being offered. People leaving a profession may also be telling us something about remuneration, insecurity, recognition or power. Once those possibilities exist, universities have an intellectual responsibility not merely to help an industry solve the problem as the industry defines it, but to retain sufficient independence to ask whether the industry’s definition of the problem is itself part of what needs examining.

Universities do not need institutional partnerships with commercial interests in order to understand them. Academia, like journalism, can consult organisations, interview their representatives, examine their evidence, invite them to conferences, seek responses and represent their perspectives fairly while retaining the freedom to scrutinise their interests and practices. Engagement is not synonymous with partnership. Inclusion does not require institutional alignment. And refusing collaboration in a particular circumstance does not mean refusing dialogue.

Sometimes responsible engagement will require collaboration, accompanied by transparent governance, due diligence and safeguards for academic independence. Sometimes it will require greater distance. And sometimes responsible collaboration will mean choosing to work with companies that treat their workforce fairly.

I found support for this idea of differentiated engagement in my exchange with Professor Joss Moorkens of Dublin City University. I am particularly grateful that he did respond to my questions. Moorkens has been one of the leading scholars examining some of the more uncomfortable economic dimensions of contemporary translation, including translator precarity, digital Taylorism and the consequences of technological change for labour. His response to my questions resisted reducing university–industry relations to a simple choice between collaboration and non-collaboration.

Instead, Moorkens described an approach in which proposed collaborations are judged individually according to their purpose and possible consequences. He told me that he had declined proposed collaborative research with large translation organisations where he believed the research risked contributing to further reductions in labour costs. But he did not regard withdrawal from industry engagement as the answer either: academics may also be able to influence practices through engagement. The important distinction, in his account, was therefore between forms of collaboration according to what they are intended to achieve, whose interests they may serve and what consequences they may produce. As he put it:

If they have a problem that they feel research collaboration could solve, we need to think of what the repercussions might be and whether it serves an ethical research purpose rather than giving an excuse to cut costs.

I find that distinction important. It replaces the assumption that collaboration is inherently desirable with a more demanding question: what is this particular collaboration for, and what might it do? It also recognises something that I believe has been insufficiently visible in the enthusiastic discourse around university–industry collaboration: saying no to a particular collaboration can itself be an ethical academic decision.

While Moorkens and I shared common ground on the need for case-by-case scrutiny, we viewed the scope of institutional power somewhat differently. When I asked about academics’ responsibility to interrogate industry actors with influence over rates and working conditions, he reasonably questioned whether organisations such as the ATC or ITI really possessed that much direct power. I tend to take a broader view. That disagreement, however, sharpened rather than diminished the value of the exchange. It raises one of the questions underlying this investigation: what counts as power within a professional field? Is it confined to the capacity to determine prices or contractual conditions directly, or does institutional access—to universities, students, research, professional organisations, policymakers and the production and circulation of knowledge—also constitute a form of power?

Moorkens also identified something that makes the question considerably more complicated than the choices of individual academics. The institutional environment itself encourages engagement:

Our university, the EMT Network, our funders all want interaction with industry, but in most of those interactions I find that everyone is struggling with AI and geopolitical turmoil in their own way, even if they don’t want to say it publicly.

That observation matters. If universities, academic networks and research funders encourage interaction with industry, responsibility for the ethics of collaboration cannot rest solely with individual scholars. Individual academics can exercise critical judgement, as Moorkens’s own account demonstrates, but the institutions encouraging collaboration also need governance capable of distinguishing productive engagement from relationships that may compromise critical distance, create conflicts of interest or produce harmful consequences.

This brings me back to the talking pig with which I began. My experience of collaboration may be an unusual case. I do not claim that it represents every university–industry relationship, or even every relationship with the ATC. But that is not why it matters. An anomalous case can reveal institutional questions that successful relationships leave invisible. When researcher and collaborator agree, academic independence is rarely tested. Disagreement reveals where the boundaries actually are.

My PhD collaboration eventually ended because I would not relinquish questions I believed the research needed to ask, and the ATC would not accept the direction in which I wanted to take the project. That experience does not prove that other researchers have been constrained. It does, however, justify asking what would happen if they were. Where does the student go? What protection does the researcher have? Who determines whether the disagreement concerns legitimate academic independence or failure to collaborate appropriately? And what institutional mechanism exists when the relationship itself becomes the object requiring critical scrutiny?

Those are questions any institution confident in the integrity of its collaborations should be willing to answer.

6. A plea for transparency — and a few research questions for future researchers

After a labour-intensive investigation including email correspondence, Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and follow-up questions, I am conscious that I am also a PhD student who needs, at some point, to finish a PhD.

There are limits to how many FOI requests one PhD student can reasonably submit while still hoping eventually to submit the PhD itself.

I am therefore publishing this investigation with a relatively modest request to the universities concerned: please make these relationships transparent.

Universities are far better placed than an individual researcher to explain what their relationships with external organisations involve, how they were authorised, what due diligence was undertaken, whether money changes hands, what access external organisations have to students and research, and what safeguards protect against conflicts of interest and preserve academic independence.

Where universities are publicly presented as partners of an external interest group, they should not require students, journalists or members of the public to reconstruct the nature of those relationships through repeated FOI requests. I would welcome the universities discussed here publishing their own statements setting out the nature, scope and governance of their relationships with the ATC, and publicly correcting any descriptions they consider inaccurate.

Perhaps that would also finally resolve my original, apparently rather complicated question: what, exactly, is an ATC “University Partner”?

There are, however, questions this investigation has opened that I will not attempt to answer here. I leave some of them as possible research questions for students and scholars looking for a dissertation, thesis or article topic:

• Could this have been an age of prosperity for Translation and Interpreting Studies — and, if so, why has it not been? Globalisation, migration, digital communication and extraordinary technological advances have increased the circulation and economic importance of multilingual knowledge. Yet many highly educated translators and interpreters experience low or declining remuneration and economic insecurity. What explains the contradiction between the growing importance and productive capacity of language work and the declining material value attributed to those who perform it?
• Are university–industry collaborations unwittingly helping to normalise the economic devaluation of the knowledge universities themselves produce? Translation departments invest considerable intellectual and institutional resources in educating highly skilled graduates. What happens when collaboration focuses on employability, technological adaptation, productivity, skills pipelines or meeting “industry needs” without equally scrutinising why graduates may enter work characterised by low pay and insecurity?
• What does it mean when government itself begins to recognise problems that Translation and Interpreting Studies has been slow to confront? The Government has acknowledged worker vulnerability within agency work and now explicitly describes some arrangements as producing “one-sided flexibility”. If institutions responsible for regulating labour markets are increasingly willing to question whether formal flexibility translates into meaningful worker choice, why has Translation and Interpreting Studies not subjected the organisation of labour within its own field to comparable scrutiny? What might explain this critical lag — particularly at a time when university–industry collaboration has become increasingly prominent?
• What does it mean for a university to teach that specialist linguistic knowledge has intellectual and social value while the labour market into which its graduates enter assigns that knowledge diminishing economic value? Should Translation and Interpreting Studies merely prepare students to navigate that market, or should part of its scholarly role be to investigate how that market came to value their knowledge as it does — and who benefits from that valuation?
• What kinds of knowledge have been produced through university–ATC collaborations? This could include MA dissertations and externally funded doctoral research: which questions are foregrounded, which interests and experiences become visible, and which remain marginal?

There should be no shortage of questions for further research. These also offer opportunities for comparative analysis, because the governance issues identified here are not unique to Translation and Interpreting Studies. They form part of a much wider debate about the relationship between universities and organised economic interests: who gains access to academic spaces; under what conditions external actors participate in knowledge production; how universities distinguish engagement from institutional alignment or entanglement; and what safeguards preserve academic independence. Translation and Interpreting Studies provides the empirical setting for this investigation, but the questions it raises about power, interests, academic independence and the governance of collaboration extend well beyond the field.

Finally, I have reported the findings of this investigation to the best of my ability. There is only one riddle with which I am still grappling. If George Orwell were still with us, looking at an industry in which inequality can be discussed as opportunity and a highly feminised and racialised workforce can be invoked as evidence of diversity, I wonder what he would make of our language.

When does opportunity conceal exploitation? And when does diversity conceal inequality?

7. Right of reply responses

Before publication, I offered the universities discussed in this article, the ATC and APTIS an opportunity to respond and to correct or clarify factual matters. Their responses, where received, are reflected in the article.

Bristol provided the most substantive response, stressing student choice and academic control and confirming that the proposed dissertation arrangement had been reviewed through university governance and would proceed. Warwick declined to comment. Birmingham, Manchester and Portsmouth referred to outstanding FOI requests, while Cardiff asked for the questions to be dealt with through the FOI process.

The ATC confirmed that its university collaborations can include industry and careers talks, internships, collaborative MA dissertations and research collaborations. It did not substantively address the governance questions I put to it. APTIS had not responded at the time of publication.

Several Freedom of Information requests remained outstanding at the time of publication. Any outstanding FOI responses received after publication will be considered in a subsequent article.

In addition to the right-of-reply emails, I sent the completed article to the institutions and organisations mentioned above. I received three responses:

1. University of Portsmouth confirmed that the information included in the article was correct in terms of the responses provided by the University following my FOI request.
2. ATC stated that it “does not accept the characterisations presented within” the article and that it “is not entering into further correspondence regarding it.”
3. Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) responded that “ITI is an affiliate member of APTIS. We support APTIS and work alongside its members, but ITI has no authority to speak or act on behalf of APTIS.” And later added that “Information about the Excellence Award and the awards panel can be found on our website. Members are not consulted about any of our awards; it is a decision for the panel alone. We have had an MOU with ATC since 2019. Our purpose is set out on our website; we work with a range of stakeholders on projects and activities that are aligned with our purpose. Please note that we do not wish to participate further in your research.”

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to everyone who participated in this investigation, responded to my questions and requests for information, or took the time to correspond with me. Their contributions, including where perspectives differed from my own, helped me understand the relationships examined in this article more fully.

I am particularly grateful to Professor Joss Moorkens for agreeing to engage in detail with my questions about academic–industry collaboration, critical distance and labour conditions. I greatly appreciate both his openness and his willingness to articulate points on which we do not necessarily agree.

A special thank you goes to Professor Mona Baker, another giant of Translation and Interpreting Studies whose work has critically examined power, activism and the potential exploitation of volunteer labour in translation, for reviewing an earlier version of the article. Her careful reading and invaluable feedback significantly strengthened it.

Any errors, omissions or ramblings that remain are, of course, entirely my own.

Note
This article was updated on 26 September 2026 to incorporate additional responses received from scholars concerning The Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry and to clarify the discussion of its published endorsements.

About the Author

Fardous Bahbouh is a researcher and broadcast interpreter specialising in the political economy of the translation and interpreting industry. She has established a substantial body of public-facing research and writing, combining policy analysis and critical commentary on inequality, labour rights and institutional accountability in translation and interpreting: Language Justice Reading List.

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