Category: Uncategorized
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Who the Hell Is Checking the NHS Bills?
Remember back in 2013, the UK government uncovered a major scandal involving two private security companies, G4S and Serco, which had been contracted to provide electronic monitoring services? Investigations revealed that the companies had charged the Ministry of Justice for monitoring people who were no longer subject to electronic tagging, including individuals who had returned…
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What Would a Good Society’s Response to the Challenges Facing Translation and Interpreting Look Like?
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…
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We Seriously Need to Talk About Alternatives: Continuing My Ethical Plea to Translation Studies
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…
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Celebrating International Translation Day with a Candid (Imagined) Conversation with ITI CEO Sara Robertson and Dr. Joseph Lambert
After multiple events in the UK on academia–industry collaboration, ITI CEO Sara Robertson and Dr Joseph Lambert are taking that conversation internationally to the St Jerome’s Symposium, organised by the Consortium for Translation Education Research (CTER). If I were hosting the event, these are the questions I would ask. 1. Let’s start with the evidence.…
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Breaking the Vicious Circle of Normalising Exploitation
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…
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Phantoms in the Governance: 11 UK Universities, an Interest Group, and the Mystery of Formal–Informal Partnerships
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…
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What Would a Good Translation Industry Look Like?
In a previous article, I explored a deceptively simple lesson from Joseph Stiglitz: markets are not natural phenomena. They are shaped by institutions, laws, policies, regulations, norms and power. But that insight raises another question. If markets are shaped by us, how should we shape them? Stiglitz’s work offers valuable normative insights for thinking about…
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Can you imagine what it feels like to be a translation academic in the era of mega commercial intermediaries?
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…
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Tackling “One-Sided Flexibility”: The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Responds to My Concerns
Last month, my MP, Wes Streeting, wrote to the Government on my behalf after I raised concerns about the working conditions experienced by agency workers, including workers who may technically be free to reject assignments but operate in circumstances where exercising that freedom can have consequences. I have now received a response from the Department…
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What does Translation and Interpreting Studies know about the economic lived realities of translators and interpreters?
I am a PhD researcher investigating inequality in outsourced public service interpreting in the United Kingdom. My research has documented low remuneration, economic insecurity, weak employment protections, diminishing bargaining capacity and inadequate health and safety protections among public service interpreters. It also examines the outsourcing arrangements within which these inequalities occur, and how those arrangements…
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Write to Your MP: Fair Work and Equality in Public Supply Chains
In collaboration with the NUPIT-National Union of Professional Interpreters and Translators, I have prepared this letter for translators and interpreters who want to ask their MPs to take action on fair work and equality in publicly funded supply chains. Public money should not fund exploitation. Translators and interpreters working across the NHS, courts, police, local…
