Suppose an employer imposes extremely taxing conditions of work on three workers. For two of them the work is punishing and destroys their enjoyment of life, but for the third– and no one could have predicted or expected this– it is experienced as a source of self-affirmation. Does it seem odd to say that two are exploited while the third is not? I have to confess that I have been thinking about such issues for too long to have untutored intuitions here, but at least at one time I thought that if the two were exploited then so was the third. If this seems accurate then it seems also we are forced to consider exploitation as analogous to negligence: no harm need to be done, but insufficient precautions are taken to avoid harm. In other words, to be an exploiter is to use another’s circumstances to obtain their actual compliance with a situation without having sufficient regard to whether that situation violates fairness, flourishing, or suffering norms. To be exploited is to be treated in this way, whether or not actual harm is suffered. This is the final step in our fully general analysis of exploitation.
— Jonathan Wolff, Marx and Exploitation (1999, p.115)
Reading this passage gave me an extraordinary sense of recognition. Wolff had articulated with remarkable clarity something I have struggled for some time to communicate in conversations with translation and interpreting professional organisations:
A worker’s capacity to find meaning, fulfilment or even self-affirmation in their work does not tell us whether the conditions under which that work is performed are fair. It seems a simple distinction once stated. Yet my attempts to make it have repeatedly been met with dismissal and disengagement from institutions that claim to represent the profession. This concerns me because when workers’ capacity to find meaning or fulfilment within adverse conditions becomes part of how those conditions are understood, exploitation can begin to appear compatible with a successful professional life. It can become normalised.
This led me to another question. What does it mean for a professional organisation such as the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) to encompass both professionals who produce linguistic labour and commercial intermediaries whose businesses include buying that labour and selling language services onwards?
The question is particularly important to my investigation of governance in industry–academia collaborations. When ITI participates in such relationships, what exactly does it represent: the industry, the profession, or something more complicated? Could an organisation encompassing actors on different sides of an economic relationship function, intentionally or otherwise, as a filter, through which the interests most easily represented are those on which its constituencies converge? If so, what happens where their interests diverge — over remuneration, bargaining power, commercial margins, outsourcing, the distribution of value, responsibility for poor working conditions or exploitation? Whose voice carries those questions into the institutions with which ITI collaborates?
In June 2025, ITI Chief Executive Sara Robertson published Research and Practice, describing the Institute’s growing collaboration with academics and universities. She wrote that academia provides ITI with “evidence and insight to inform our decision-making” and described ITI’s role in supporting research, facilitating access to participants, disseminating findings and connecting academia with professional practice. Robertson concluded:
It is a virtuous circle that will ultimately benefit our profession and our members. I find the metaphor fascinating. Circles reproduce things. The important question is what circulates through them. Robertson herself provides an example. She identifies research by Callum Walker and Joseph Lambert among projects supported by ITI, refers to their receipt of the 2024 John Sykes Memorial Prize, and describes ITI’s role in disseminating academic research to the wider professional community. That makes institutional amplification worth examining.
In Thriving or Surviving, Lambert and Walker document serious deficiencies in translators’ material and economic security. Yet their analysis also emphasises translators’ satisfaction and meaningful engagement with their work and brings these findings into a framework of self-actualisation. It is the analytical movement between material insecurity and self-actualisation that troubles me. What happens when evidence of economic insecurity travels through the “virtuous circle” accompanied by a narrative of professional fulfilment and self-actualisation?
Wolff’s third worker gives us a reason to be cautious. Finding meaning or self-affirmation within an arrangement does not establish that the arrangement itself is fair.
What else could circulate through the circle?
Consider a counterfactual. Imagine ITI had chosen to recognise and amplify a very different strand of Translation Studies. I recently encountered Stefan Baumgarten’s work on translation and digital capitalism. His starting point could hardly be more explicit: “We live in an unequal corporate world troubled by endemic exploitation.” He situates translation within unequal relations of production, distribution and consumption and examines technological change through political economy, ideology, commodification, power and the exploitation of translation labour. Pasted markdown
A free, open-access copy of Baumgarten’s chapter, Translation and Digital Capitalism, is available here.
Imagine work like this travelling prominently through Robertson’s “virtuous circle”: entering professional publications, conferences and conversations about the future of translation. What might have happened? I can answer partly for myself. As both a professional and a researcher, I would have benefited immensely from encountering much earlier a critical tradition within Translation Studies that takes political economy, power, commodification and exploitation seriously.
I have spent years asking why highly skilled linguistic labour can be socially indispensable yet economically devalued; why technological change is so often presented as something professionals must adapt to rather than something whose ownership, purposes and distributional consequences can be questioned; and why responsibility for surviving adverse market conditions falls so readily upon individual translators and interpreters. Discovering this critical scholarship showed me that some of the questions I had struggled to make institutionally audible were already part of Translation Studies.
That matters. If professional organisations act as bridges between research and practice, they do more than transmit knowledge. They help shape which parts of an academic field become visible to the profession.
A practitioner repeatedly invited to ask how professionals can adapt, remain resilient, develop new skills and sustain their careers is given one set of questions through which to understand their circumstances. A practitioner also invited to ask who holds power, who captures value, who bears risk and whether existing relations of production are fair is given another. Neither determines what that practitioner will think. But they make different questions available. That is why institutional amplification matters.
Breaking the circle
There is an immediate opportunity to put some of these questions into circulation. On 30 September, the St Jerome’s Symposium 2026 will bring together academics and industry representatives to discuss academia–industry collaboration. Joseph Lambert and ITI Chief Executive Sara Robertson will contribute Reflections on the potential of collaboration: ITI, APTIS, and the UK context as a case study.
I hope the symposium makes space not only to discuss the potential of collaboration, but to ask difficult questions about it. Potential for whom? Who participates in defining the problems collaboration seeks to address? Whose knowledge and interests enter these relationships? How are conflicting interests governed? What safeguards protect critical distance? And how can collaboration avoid reproducing or normalising the inequalities research should help us understand?
I also hope translators and interpreters who have the time will participate, particularly as the event is free. If academia and industry are discussing collaboration and the future of translation and interpreting, the people whose labour, livelihoods and professional futures are affected have every reason to be part of that conversation.
Participation can itself be a form of collective action. Asking questions, sharing lived experience, challenging assumptions and bringing otherwise absent perspectives into institutional conversations are ways of making professional voices heard.
I am not calling for less dialogue between academia and industry. Quite the opposite. I am calling for wider and more critical dialogue — one in which collaboration remains open to scrutiny, disagreement is not treated as its failure, and those experiencing the material consequences of the arrangements being discussed have meaningful opportunities to speak.
A virtuous circle should accommodate critical voices. Perhaps that is one of the conditions that makes it virtuous.
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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