Tag: education
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Language Justice Reading List
The list includes articles I have written on the topics of equality and labour rights for interpreters and translators, including empirical research, policy analysis, and critical commentary. They are grouped by theme rather than method, and some contributions appear in multiple categories. The importance of justice and fairness extends beyond the translation industry. As economist…
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Three Simple Ways Translators Can Reclaim Agenda-Setting Power
Many translators and interpreters are facing growing challenges. Rates continue to fall, financial insecurity is intensifying, and stories of unfair treatment circulate widely across professional networks. Yet translators are often excluded from shaping the conversations about the profession. At conferences, within professional organisations, and in some academic and industry discussions, narratives that align closely with…
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Collaboration Everywhere: Is There Still Space to Critically Examine the Role of Intermediaries in Shaping Translators’ Pay and Working Conditions?
Collaboration between academia and industry is increasingly presented as an unqualified good in Translation Studies. It is associated with relevance, impact, employability, and practice-oriented scholarship. Yet collaboration is not neutral. In fields shaped by precarious labour markets, outsourcing regimes, and concentrated commercial power, it can also provide certain actors with privileged access to knowledge production,…
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After the BBC Investigation into Death, Bodily Harm, and Exploitation: What Translator Organisations’ Responses Reveal About Representation Failures in Public Service Interpreting
This article offers a chronological review of professional representation in UK public service interpreting over the past three years. It raises questions about whether professional organisations are adequately representing practitioners’ interests or have become increasingly aligned with commercial interests. In 2023, the BBC published an investigation linking interpreting failures in healthcare settings to cases of…
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Educating End Clients About the Economic Conditions of the Translation Industry is Part of Change-Making: It Must Begin with Holding Professional Organisations Accountable
End clients—whether production companies, public institutions, agencies, or private service users—play a decisive role in shaping the economic conditions of translation and interpreting work. Through procurement choices, contracting models, and expectations around price and turnaround, they can influence how value and responsibility are distributed across translation supply chains. In this sense, end clients are not…
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Why Don’t Translators Just Get More Direct Clients?
One of the most common responses from professional organisations to concerns about declining rates and deteriorating working conditions is to advise translators to “get more direct clients.” But is this sound advice, and is it free from contradictory institutional incentives? As part of my ongoing work on re-politicising translation labour and developing a theory of…
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Should university translation departments belong to the same club as interest groups
This critique reflects the author’s independent analysis and should not be understood as representing any institutional position. It is not connected to, commissioned by, or endorsed by the University at which the author is currently completing doctoral studies. My interest in this question arises from a broader concern about knowledge creation, academic independence, and the…
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What hope is there for translators when their intensifying financial insecurity is often depoliticised, even in The Guardian’s coverage?
I read with interest the Guardian’s recent article on AI and translation labour titled “‘Being human helps’: despite rise of AI is there still hope for Europe’s translators?” While I am grateful for an article that acknowledges worsening precarity, declining rates, and reduced workflows, I believe it still reproduces a depoliticised and problematic framing, presenting…
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Is Professionalisation Rhetoric Contributing to a Precarity Trap for Translators and Interpreters?
There is a crisis across the translation and interpreting industry. An expanding body of academic research documents worsening working conditions across the profession: declining rates, fragmented work, weakening bargaining power, growing financial insecurity, and intensifying precarity. My own research shows that a large proportion of public service interpreters are struggling to earn enough to meet…
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Are translators really lacking entrepreneurship skills? What is the problem represented to be?
When we read reports about the profession, whether in academic studies or professional association publications, there are often lists of entrepreneurship skills translators supposedly need to acquire: better negotiation, improved business strategy, more active marketing, or greater adaptability in a changing market. But there is a useful question we should ask whenever we encounter this…
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Is the “Real Value” of ITI Membership Actually Negative? Professionalisation, Risk Transfer, and How Translation Labour Could Be Repoliticised
Like many questions that challenge established assumptions, I am aware this may be an uncomfortable one to ask. My aim in raising it is knowledge creation through a political economy analysis of membership organisations and translators’ labour. This article examines how institutional narratives, incentive structures, and representational arrangements shape what is made visible or invisible…
