Dear Translation Studies,

I don’t want you to only prepare translators and interpreters for the future. I want you to help interrogate the present and invite our collective scholarly genius to make the present liveable as we continue to envision the future.

My previous love letter borrowed a simple proposition from Joseph Stiglitz: creating a good and decent society requires us to rebalance power. I still mean it. But rebalancing power cannot remain an aspiration. If we are serious about changing the distribution of power in translation and interpreting, then we also have to ask what alternative institutional arrangements could actually redistribute power, risk and economic value.

As a field, we now know considerably more about the economic realities of translators’ and interpreters’ working lives. We must address that knowledge with the solemnity required when a highly skilled and experienced workforce is struggling with increasing financial insecurity.

Our research has documented low or declining remuneration, financial insecurity, unpaid work, limited bargaining power over rates, dependence on commercial intermediaries, uneven access to social and employment protections, long and irregular working hours, occupational risks, concerns about career progression and increasing technological pressures.

But I don’t think our intellectual task can stop at documenting the problem. Nor should our response be confined to preparing translators and interpreters to become ever more adaptable to it. I want us to talk seriously about alternatives.

If translators cannot negotiate their rates, what alternative mechanisms for setting remuneration could we study? If translators and interpreters are being forced to shoulder the cost of unpredictable demand, to remain available while being paid only when that availability happens to be used, why aren’t we studying alternative ways of distributing the cost of that uncertainty? And if outsourcing transfers economic risk from institutions to individual workers, what would arrangements that redistribute that risk look like?

Why are we not conducting more serious research into alternative employment arrangements, including salaried translation and interpreting positions, guaranteed hours, minimum booking periods, retainers, paid availability, worker cooperatives, collective bargaining, income floors, hybrid public-service workforces and procurement systems that make job quality a condition of public contracting?

Which alternatives already exist? Where have they been tried? What can we learn from them? What can we learn from other professions, disciplines and countries? And where alternatives do not yet exist, why shouldn’t we help imagine them?

This is what universities are for.

We have economists, sociologists, political economists, labour scholars, legal scholars, public-policy researchers, technology researchers and scholars of organisation and management all around us. Translation and Interpreting Studies does not have to solve these questions alone. But we do have to foreground them.

There is enormous intellectual energy currently devoted to predicting the future of translation: AI, automation, changing skill requirements, new professional roles, new business models and whatever technological disruption might arrive next. Fine.

But there are translators and interpreters trying to make a living now. Before asking endlessly how they should adapt to the next transformation, I want us to devote some of that scholarly imagination to a more immediate question:

How could translation and interpreting work be organised differently so that the people performing it can build economically secure and dignified lives?

This is an invitation to intellectual ambition. We have spent years studying what is changing. We have accumulated evidence about what is going wrong. Now show me the alternatives.

And there is something else I want from you. I want you to remain vigilant about reproducing corporate narratives as academic knowledge and about celebrating collaboration with industry without serious ethical and critical scrutiny. We should be asking: with whom are we collaborating, on what terms, whose interests are being served, whose knowledge is being privileged, what assumptions are entering our research and teaching, and whose material realities might disappear from view?

And while we are doing that, we also need to study something closer to home: our own institutional incentives. Universities need students. Professional organisations need members. Translation programmes need enrolments. Professional bodies depend, to varying degrees, on registration and membership income. These institutional interests are real, and precisely because they are real, they should be open to scholarly scrutiny.

What incentives do universities and professional organisations have to foreground the opportunities of translation and interpreting while giving less prominence to evidence about financial insecurity, declining remuneration, weak bargaining power and precarious working conditions? Shouldn’t we also examine how course recruitment materials, programme descriptions, careers guidance and professional communications present translation and interpreting work to current and prospective students? Do they adequately reflect the economic realities documented by our own research before students invest substantial amounts of money, time and hope in entering the profession? And who has responsibility for ensuring that they do?

We cannot produce evidence about financial insecurity with one hand while presenting an uncomplicated promise of professional opportunity and future careers with the other. If there are conflicting institutional incentives, let us study them too. That is part of the intellectual honesty I am asking for.

With love

Fardous

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.