This week, we held the first meeting of the Due Diligence Club, which I started to create a space where we could think collectively about responsibility, power and alternatives in the translation and interpreting industry. The Club is a social initiative aimed at finding collective solutions to deteriorating pay and working conditions across translation and interpreting, which have been documented in multiple academic studies, including my own research into public service interpreting. Among the ideas we discussed were better oversight and regulation, stronger auditing of public-service contracts, social enterprises, worker-owned companies, cooperatives and building wider societal support.

I am honestly fed up with responses from professional organisations and Translation Studies scholars that keep telling individual translators and interpreters to become more resilient, negotiate better, acquire new skills, adapt more quickly or assemble a livelihood from a patchwork of precarious and insecure work — and call it diversification!

As an equality researcher investigating the political economy of the translation and interpreting industry, I want us to think seriously about the institutions surrounding those professionals: how the industry could be organised and governed better, what professional organisations could do differently, what universities could contribute, and what responsibilities businesses and investors might carry. In short: what would a good society’s response to deteriorating pay, working conditions and economic security in translation and interpreting actually look like?

If we approached these challenges from the perspective of human flourishing rather than individual adaptation, what kinds of responses would become imaginable?

In my research, I draw on Joseph Stiglitz, who emphasises that markets do not exist independently of institutions; they are structured through rules and institutional arrangements. Our industry already operates through rules governing contracts, ownership, intellectual property, payment, competition, platforms, data, professional standards and the organisation of work. Those rules affect bargaining power, determine who carries different forms of risk and help shape who captures the economic rewards generated through the industry. Once we recognise this, we can start analysing why particular conditions exist and how they could be organised differently.

What I am calling for is simple: we should not wait until people become economically insecure and then concentrate primarily on teaching them how to cope more effectively with that insecurity. We should investigate and change the arrangements producing it.

What might we do differently?

Stiglitz’s vision of a good society includes checks and balances capable of holding those with political and economic power accountable. For the Due Diligence Club, this raises a practical question: what forms of collective action and institutional experimentation could help build a fairer translation and interpreting industry?

We can bring together translators and interpreters, researchers, professional organisations, responsible businesses, trade unions, civil society, investors and others who care about good work and human flourishing. We can investigate how to improve remuneration, bargaining power and job quality collectively; examine alternative contractual arrangements and forms of ownership; learn from cooperatives, worker-owned businesses and companies already offering better conditions; and explore how universities, investors and other institutions could use their resources and influence to support alternatives. We can also ask how translators and interpreters could gain a stronger voice within the ecosystem, rather than simply a seat at the table.

Technological change is an urgent part of that conversation. At a recent industry–academia symposium, a company CEO told university educators to focus on teaching future translators to work with AI, adding that AI agents are continually learning as translators use them. That formulation stayed with me. If translators’ linguistic judgement, corrections and accumulated expertise contribute to technologies owned by somebody else, this is not simply a question of acquiring new skills. It is also an economic relationship, and we should ask who captures the value generated through it.

Who owns the resulting productive assets? Who receives the productivity gains? Who bears the risk of displacement? Stiglitz reminds us that technological change does not occur outside institutions. When technology changes concentrations of power and the distribution of risks and rewards, institutions need to adapt too. So rather than repeatedly asking how translators and interpreters should adapt to AI, we can ask a different question: how should our institutions, businesses and economic arrangements adapt to ensure that technological progress contributes to human flourishing?

This is the kind of serious intellectual inquiry and societal engagement I want the Due Diligence Club to encourage. Perhaps some answers lie in cooperatives, worker-owned or employee-owned businesses. Perhaps publicly owned commercial companies can teach us something. Perhaps we need different forms of collective representation, alternative remuneration arrangements, worker-owned technological infrastructure or business models we have not yet imagined. Some existing companies may already demonstrate that better working conditions and successful businesses can coexist, and we should investigate what makes that possible.

There are also possibilities in places we may not usually think to look. Publicly listed translation companies have shareholders, including institutional investors. Some may be pension funds or investment managers with commitments to responsible investment, human capital, social sustainability or stewardship. We can investigate whether those commitments extend to the working conditions of the freelance workforces upon which their investee companies depend. Investors with significant ownership positions have institutional power too. A good society might reasonably ask what they do with it.

The purpose is to research alternatives, build alliances and organise for change: to identify different models, compare them, examine their outcomes, ask what works, for whom and under what conditions, and use that knowledge to help build a fairer translation and interpreting industry. Universities could make an important contribution to this work. They do not merely have to prepare people for the world as it currently exists. They can help us investigate worlds that do not exist yet.

We also need a richer conception of what a flourishing translation and interpreting industry would look like. Can people build sustainable careers? Does remuneration enable a decent life? Do workers have meaningful bargaining power? Can they take time off and withstand periods of illness or low demand? Do they have meaningful influence over technological changes affecting their livelihoods? And are productivity gains shared among those who contribute to creating them?

There is one final thought experiment that I find particularly useful. Stiglitz draws on John Rawls’s veil of ignorance: the idea of choosing the rules governing society without knowing in advance which position within that society we ourselves will occupy.

Imagine, then, that we were designing the translation and interpreting industry without knowing where we would eventually end up within it. We might become the CEO of a multinational company, an investor, an academic, the head of a professional organisation, a client, a successful specialist translator or a freelancer struggling to secure sufficient work at rates we have little power to negotiate.

If we did not know which of those positions would eventually be ours, what rules would we choose? How would we distribute economic risk? What forms of bargaining power would we consider reasonable? How would the gains from technological progress be shared? What protections would exist against concentrations of economic power? How much insecurity would we expect any one group to absorb? And how much influence would the people affected by those rules have over changing them?

For me, that gets much closer to the question of what a good society might require.

So, together, we need to think about what kind of translation and interpreting industry a good society would choose to build. We already devote an extraordinary amount of imagination to predicting the future of translation and interpreting. Perhaps we should devote more of that imagination to deciding what kind of future is worth building, and what institutions we need to build it.

And this is an invitation. I would love to hear your ideas. What alternatives should we be researching? What models already exist that we could learn from? What alliances should we be building? And what have we not yet imagined? The Due Diligence Club is intended to be a space for exactly these conversations. If you have ideas, evidence, examples or simply a different way of thinking about the problem, please contribute. This is something we need to think about together.

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.