Introduction

Introducing labour (and work) in translation and interpreting

In spite of Translation Studies’ growing interest in the rapidly evolving socio-economic and socio-technical conditions of the translation and interpreting professions, systematic investigations of the concept of labour in relation to translation and interpreting remain relatively scant. In our paper “Translaboration: Translation and Labour” (Zwischenberger and Alfer 2022Zwischenberger, Cornelia, and Alexa Alfer 2022 “Translaboration: Translation and Labour.” Translation in Society 1 (2): 200–223. Zwischenberger, Cornelia, and Alexa Alfer 2022 “Translaboration: Translation and Labour.” Translation in Society 1 (2): 200–223. ), we offered a first conceptual differentiation between translational labour and translational work, arguing that, while work is, in professional discourses at least, more readily associated with translation, translation as labour (i.e., as an activity structurally embedded in capitalist chains of surplus-value production) has so far featured far less prominently in Translation Studies debates. This has resulted in the perpetuation of the positivist and neoliberal orders of discourse (Baumgarten 2017Baumgarten, Stefan 2017 “Translation and Hegemonic Knowledge Under Advanced Capitalism.” Target 29 (2): 244–263. Baumgarten, Stefan 2017 “Translation and Hegemonic Knowledge Under Advanced Capitalism.” Target 29 (2): 244–263. ) that govern the translation industry and academia alike and further consolidate

idealised narratives of [translation and interpreting] that foreground the processes of work while masking the labour involved in producing outputs whose value is, quietly or overtly, appropriated by those with a stake in the means of their production.(Zwischenberger and Alfer 2022Zwischenberger, Cornelia, and Alexa Alfer 2022 “Translaboration: Translation and Labour.” Translation in Society 1 (2): 200–223. Zwischenberger, Cornelia, and Alexa Alfer 2022 “Translaboration: Translation and Labour.” Translation in Society 1 (2): 200–223. , 211)

Translational labour, we argue, is also at the core of the blended concept of translaboration (Alfer and Zwischenberger 2020Alfer, Alexa, and Cornelia Zwischenberger eds. 2020 Translaboration: Exploring Collaboration in Translation and Translation in Collaboration. Special issue of Target 32 (2). Alfer, Alexa, and Cornelia Zwischenberger eds. 2020 Translaboration: Exploring Collaboration in Translation and Translation in Collaboration. Special issue of Target 32 (2). ), which brings the two concepts of translation and collaboration into play with one another. Both of these concepts are already used in combination in Translation Studies in the concept of online collaborative translation, which denotes solicited types of translation that usually involve a call to translate and an organization steering the translation process top-down, and encompasses crowdsourced translational labour that is performed either on a voluntary basis or remunerated below market rates in both non-profit and for-profit environments. In broader usage, the term is also applied to various types of unsolicited online collaborative translation, such as Wikipedia translation or fan translation activities such as fansubbing and fandubbing, which are performed voluntarily, are community-based and, thus, bottom-up. In either case, performing translation work or labour on a voluntary basis or being paid below market rates, especially for profit-oriented companies, necessarily raises ethical questions around exploitation and thus calls for a closer examination of the concept of labour in relation to translation, and of translation and interpreting’s structural relationship with the Marxist labour theory of value in particular (see Zwischenberger and Alfer 2022Zwischenberger, Cornelia, and Alexa Alfer 2022 “Translaboration: Translation and Labour.” Translation in Society 1 (2): 200–223. Zwischenberger, Cornelia, and Alexa Alfer 2022 “Translaboration: Translation and Labour.” Translation in Society 1 (2): 200–223. ; Zwischenberger, in this issue).

It is not least in this sense, then, that the question of labour is already (and quite literally) inscribed in the concept of translaboration. Translaboration, we argue, allows us to capture the new working and labouring scenarios that have been fundamentally reconfiguring the language professions, where translational value generation is either based on (massive) human collaborations in the various types of online collaborative translation environments, or on myriad types of human–machine collaborations, including the post-editing of machine translated output, the integration of computer assisted translation (CAT) or computer assisted interpreting (CAI) tools into translation and interpreting workflows, translational labour performed in cloud-based environments or platforms, or the use of multipurpose dialogic AI-powered chatbots, all of which are also part of an extended definition of online collaborative translation (Zwischenberger 2024Zwischenberger, Cornelia 2024 “On Categorising Online Collaborative Translation and the Consequences for the Field of Research.” The Translator 30 (1): 13–28. Zwischenberger, Cornelia 2024 “On Categorising Online Collaborative Translation and the Consequences for the Field of Research.” The Translator 30 (1): 13–28. ). In human–machine collaborations in particular, technology is no longer simply used by human translators but increasingly becomes a collaborator in its own right, albeit ultimately by the grace of the human. These new technology-centred and technology-facilitated collaborations are not only captured by the blended concept of translaboration but also call for it, both from a labour value theory perspective and in the sense that Translation Studies urgently needs to reach out to, and indeed translaborate with, other disciplines such as the computer sciences and computational linguistics in order to make sense and keep track of these new developments. However, a translaboration in its true sense would also mean that other disciplines turn to Translation Studies for its translation-related input when it comes to the limitations of large language models (LLMs) and the (ab)uses of generative AI. Without the intellectual and ethical assessment and classification of human–machine collaboration from the perspective of Translation Studies, disciplines and businesses steering the development of artificial intelligence run the risk of remaining “solutionist” (Morozov 2013Morozov, Evgeny 2013 To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist. London: Penguin Books.Morozov, Evgeny 2013 To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist. London: Penguin Books., 9),

recasting all complex social situations either as neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized — if only the right algorithms are in place! [T]his quest is likely to have unexpected consequences that could eventually cause more damage than the problems they seek to address.(Morozov 2013Morozov, Evgeny 2013 To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist. London: Penguin Books.Morozov, Evgeny 2013 To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist. London: Penguin Books., 9)

Solutionists, in other words, have little knowledge about the activities they want to improve via technology and are only perfunctorily interested in the activity for which improvement is sought. This, however, may have unforeseeable and highly undesirable consequences, and runs the risk of consolidating a consequentialist ethics (Zwischenberger 2016Zwischenberger, Cornelia 2016 “Translationsethiken und ihre Auswirkungen auf die Zukunft der translatorischen Berufe [Translational ethics and their implications for the future of the translation professions].” In (Neu-)Kompositionen. Aspekte transkultureller Translationswissenschaft: Liber amicorum für Larisa Schippel [(New) Compositions. Aspects of transcultural Translation Studies: Liber amicorum for Laris Schippel], edited by Julia Richter, Cornelia Zwischenberger, Stefanie Kremmel, and Karlheinz Spitzl, 37–57. Berlin: Frank & Timme.Zwischenberger, Cornelia 2016 “Translationsethiken und ihre Auswirkungen auf die Zukunft der translatorischen Berufe [Translational ethics and their implications for the future of the translation professions].” In (Neu-)Kompositionen. Aspekte transkultureller Translationswissenschaft: Liber amicorum für Larisa Schippel [(New) Compositions. Aspects of transcultural Translation Studies: Liber amicorum for Laris Schippel], edited by Julia Richter, Cornelia Zwischenberger, Stefanie Kremmel, and Karlheinz Spitzl, 37–57. Berlin: Frank & Timme.) that is directly detrimental to the labour conditions of the translation and interpreting professions.

For interpreting, labour has been investigated from a labour process theory perspective (Braverman [1974] 1998Braverman, Harry [1974] 1998 Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press. Braverman, Harry [1974] 1998 Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.) applied specifically to the field’s increasing platformisation (Giustini 2024Giustini, Deborah 2024 “ ‘You Can Book an Interpreter the Same Way You Order Your Uber’: (Re)Interpreting Work and Digital Labour Platforms.” Perspectives 32 (3): 441–459. Giustini, Deborah 2024 “ ‘You Can Book an Interpreter the Same Way You Order Your Uber’: (Re)Interpreting Work and Digital Labour Platforms.” Perspectives 32 (3): 441–459. ). Ayan (2020)Ayan, Irem 2020 “Re-Thinking Neutrality through Emotional Labour: The (In)visible Work of Conference Interpreters.” TTR 33 (2): 125–146. Ayan, Irem 2020 “Re-Thinking Neutrality through Emotional Labour: The (In)visible Work of Conference Interpreters.” TTR 33 (2): 125–146. , meanwhile, frames the tenet of neutrality in conference interpreting as a form of “emotional labour” (Hochschild [1983] 2003Hochschild, Arlie [1983] 2003 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.Hochschild, Arlie [1983] 2003 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.) in the sense of the associated and required feeling management. In a similar vein, Tekgül (2020)Tekgül, Duygu 2020 “Faith-Related Interpreting as Emotional Labour: A Case Study at a Protestant Armenian Church in Istanbul.” Perspectives 28 (1): 43–57. Tekgül, Duygu 2020 “Faith-Related Interpreting as Emotional Labour: A Case Study at a Protestant Armenian Church in Istanbul.” Perspectives 28 (1): 43–57. explores church interpreting as a form of emotional labour, emphasising the interpreter’s active emotional involvement. Both of these studies have shown that the expectation of interpreting service providers to manage and control the expression of their emotions to create a specific outward appearance and impression constitutes emotional labour; that is, the act of hiding or suppressing one’s emotions or displaying emotions one does not have in order to create a desired effect on clients and meet their expectations. Just like workers in traditional service jobs such as flight attendants, hairdressers, or salespeople, interpreters are not only exposed to the demands of emotional labour while performing their jobs but are also effectively expected to sell their emotions as an integral part of their service.

For translation, the socio-economic dimension of translation and specifically investigations into translators’ working conditions are attracting increasing attention in the academy and beyond (see, for example, Fırat 2021Fırat, Gökhan 2021 “Uberization of Translation — Impacts on Working Conditions.” The Journal of Internationalization and Localization 8 (1): 48–75. Fırat, Gökhan 2021 “Uberization of Translation — Impacts on Working Conditions.” The Journal of Internationalization and Localization 8 (1): 48–75. ; Carreira 2024Carreira, Oliver 2024 “Market Concentration in the Language Services Industry and Working Conditions for Translators.” Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 32 (5): 889–904. Carreira, Oliver 2024 “Market Concentration in the Language Services Industry and Working Conditions for Translators.” Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 32 (5): 889–904. ; Fırat, Gough, and Moorkens 2024Fırat, Gökhan, Joanna Gough, and Joss Moorkens 2024 “Translators in the Platform Economy: A Decent Work Perspective.” Perspectives 32 (3): 422–440. Fırat, Gökhan, Joanna Gough, and Joss Moorkens 2024 “Translators in the Platform Economy: A Decent Work Perspective.” Perspectives 32 (3): 422–440. ; Fırat, in this issue), as are the socio-technical conditions of translational labour (Baumgarten and Cornellà-Detrell 2017Baumgarten, Stefan, and Jordi Cornellà-Detrell 2017 “Introduction.” In Translation in Times of Technocapitalism, edited by Stefan Baumgarten and Jordi Cornellà-Detrell, special issue of Target 29 (2): 193–200. Baumgarten, Stefan, and Jordi Cornellà-Detrell 2017 “Introduction.” In Translation in Times of Technocapitalism, edited by Stefan Baumgarten and Jordi Cornellà-Detrell, special issue of Target 29 (2): 193–200. ) as well as what Tieber and Baumgarten (2024Tieber, Michael, and Stefan Baumgarten 2024 “Introduction.” In Mean Machines? Sociotechnical (R)evolution and Human Labour in the Translation and Interpreting Industry, edited by Michael Tieber and Stefan Baumgarten, special issue of Perspectives 32 (3): 379–390. Tieber, Michael, and Stefan Baumgarten 2024 “Introduction.” In Mean Machines? Sociotechnical (R)evolution and Human Labour in the Translation and Interpreting Industry, edited by Michael Tieber and Stefan Baumgarten, special issue of Perspectives 32 (3): 379–390. , 380) call Translation Studies’ failure to incorporate “‘the machinic other’ into its theoretical and conceptual repertoire.” Similarly, a fast-evolving language services market increasingly characterised by digital (neo-)Taylorism has been lucidly analysed by both Moorkens (2020)Moorkens, Joss 2020 “ ‘A Tiny Cog in a Large Machine’: Digital Taylorism in the Translation Industry.” In Fair MT: Towards Ethical, Sustainable Machine Translation, edited by Joss Moorkens, Dorothy Kenny, and Félix do Carmo, special issue of Translation Spaces 9 (1): 12–34. Moorkens, Joss 2020 “ ‘A Tiny Cog in a Large Machine’: Digital Taylorism in the Translation Industry.” In Fair MT: Towards Ethical, Sustainable Machine Translation, edited by Joss Moorkens, Dorothy Kenny, and Félix do Carmo, special issue of Translation Spaces 9 (1): 12–34. and Baumgarten and Bourgadel (2024)Baumgarten, Stefan, and Carole Bourgadel 2024 “Digitalisation, Neo-Taylorism and Translation in the 2020s.” Perspectives 32 (3): 508–523. Baumgarten, Stefan, and Carole Bourgadel 2024 “Digitalisation, Neo-Taylorism and Translation in the 2020s.” Perspectives 32 (3): 508–523. . More broadly, the publication of several Routledge handbooks, notably Baumgarten and Tieber (2025)Baumgarten, Stefan, and Michael Tieber eds. 2025 The Routledge Handbook of Translation Technology and Society. Abingdon: Routledge. Baumgarten, Stefan, and Michael Tieber eds. 2025 The Routledge Handbook of Translation Technology and Society. Abingdon: Routledge. and Walker and Lambert (2026)Walker, Callum, and Joseph Lambert eds. 2026 The Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry. Abingdon: Routledge.Walker, Callum, and Joseph Lambert eds. 2026 The Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry. Abingdon: Routledge., attests to growing interest in investigating translation and the structural conditions in which it both operates and is operative more closely from both socio-economic and socio-technical perspectives.

Apart from these direct, focused, and systematic engagements with translational labour and work, many of which also explicitly question the specifically capitalist conditions under which translators and interpreters perform their tasks and earn their livelihoods, the majority of research in Translation Studies has so far not taken these conditions as their primary or exclusive research focus. Labour and work are often mentioned in passing and are often taken for granted both as concepts and as analytical categories to describe and assess translators’ and interpreters’ professional realities. This special issue of Target attempts to fill this research lacuna. It invites readers to probe the (im)material and discursive conditions of translational labour, interrogate the spaces in which the labour of translation and interpreting is performed, and explore the various types of labour and value generation that apply to translation and interpreting.

To set the scene, it is worth pausing for a moment to probe some of the underlying causes for Translation Studies’ rather unfocussed and unsystematic engagement with labour and work-related issues to date. This can be traced back to the fact that interpreting, even more so translation, and especially literary translation, which had frequently been the object of study in canonical Translation Studies (e.g., Toury 1995Toury, Gideon 1995 Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Toury, Gideon 1995 Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ; Venuti 1995Venuti, Lawrence 1995 The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge.Venuti, Lawrence 1995 The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge.), were traditionally presented as artistic, or at least artisan, activities involving creativity and personal passion and were often equated with innate talent on the part of the individual translator. Translation as a profession, in this scheme of things, represented a calling individuals needed to follow. Habitually foregrounding this kind of narrative, however, necessarily precluded the systematic investigation of the embeddedness of translation and interpreting in capitalist agendas and their intimate relationship with questions of exploitation, coercion, and alienation. Similarly, it has clouded investigations into how translators and interpreters themselves perceive and assess their working conditions and how they feel about, and are aware of, their embeddedness in capitalist hierarchies and relationships. Indeed, research on translators’ self-perception and self-conceptualisations (for example, Dam and Korning Zethsen 2010Dam, Helle V., and Karen Korning Zethsen 2010 “Translator Status: Helpers and Opponents in the Ongoing Battle of an Emerging Profession.” Target 22 (2): 194–211. Dam, Helle V., and Karen Korning Zethsen 2010 “Translator Status: Helpers and Opponents in the Ongoing Battle of an Emerging Profession.” Target 22 (2): 194–211. ; Katan 2011Katan, David 2011 “Occupation or Profession: A Survey of the Translators’ World.” In Identity and Status in the Translational Professions, edited by Rakefet Sela-Sheffy and Miriam Shlesinger, 65–87. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Katan, David 2011 “Occupation or Profession: A Survey of the Translators’ World.” In Identity and Status in the Translational Professions, edited by Rakefet Sela-Sheffy and Miriam Shlesinger, 65–87. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ) shows a worrying, if not wholly surprising, internalisation on translators’ part of a narrative that foregrounds the emotional and social rewards derived from their work while, as we have argued elsewhere (see Zwischenberger and Alfer 2022Zwischenberger, Cornelia, and Alexa Alfer 2022 “Translaboration: Translation and Labour.” Translation in Society 1 (2): 200–223. Zwischenberger, Cornelia, and Alexa Alfer 2022 “Translaboration: Translation and Labour.” Translation in Society 1 (2): 200–223. , 212–214), strategically masking the labour involved in producing the surplus-value inherent in translation as the commodifiable expansion of a source text.

Challenges to this kind of narrative are, however, now coming to the fore and are imposing themselves on Translation Studies with some urgency due to the profound redefinition of translational labour and work scenarios occasioned by the increasing relegation of translation and interpreting work to the digital realm and onto platforms, where translation and interpreting are steered not by human project managers but by algorithms, neural machine translation tools, and the deployment of dialogic generative AI chatbots for any kind of text production, including translations and interpreting output. Indeed, these chatbots now purport to offer a wide range of linguistic services such as translation (plus post-editing), transcription, subtitling, and dubbing, all of which used to be offered by professionally trained humans. The same pull towards technology increasingly applies to the operations of language service providers (LSPs) and the rapidly shrinking number of smaller translation agencies, where freelancers are routinely expected to work within prescribed (and often cloud-based) CAT tools, including project- or client-specific translation memories (TMs). Similarly, the use of machine translation has become a must and is often a precondition for obtaining work and remaining competitive. As a consequence, the present and future training of translators and interpreters is increasingly required to place its focus firmly on human–machine collaborations instead of concentrating on honing from-scratch translation skills and human revision, editing, and copy-writing training. Thus, it is primarily the digital that is steadily shifting our discipline’s focus to questions of labour and work, as well as, perhaps, to its own complicity in the seemingly unremitting digital reshaping of the conditions translators and interpreters operate under. Both are intimately intertwined with questions of the future relevance of human translators and interpreters, their increasing precarisation in uncontrollable digital spaces and cloud environments, and the emergence of a new kind of proletariat or cognitariat (Berardi 2005Berardi, Franco 2005 “What does Cognitariat Mean? Work, Desire and Depression.” Cultural Studies Review 11 (2): 57–63. Berardi, Franco 2005 “What does Cognitariat Mean? Work, Desire and Depression.” Cultural Studies Review 11 (2): 57–63. ) within the hierarchical order of capitalism. Algorithms, rather than human (project/process) managers, now function as the new intermediaries through which capitalism speaks to this new proletariat or cognitariat, whose function in the digital labour market (Fuchs 2014Fuchs, Christian 2014 Digital Labour and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge. Fuchs, Christian 2014 Digital Labour and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge. ) is to deliver intellectual or linguistic products (such as ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images, etc.) for the new virtual, digital-capitalist economies (Hardt and Negri 2004Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri 2004 Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press.Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri 2004 Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press., 103–116; Harding 2013Harding, Nancy 2013 On Being at Work: The Social Construction of the Employee. New York: Routledge. Harding, Nancy 2013 On Being at Work: The Social Construction of the Employee. New York: Routledge. , 38–40). What is more, these products, in turn, increasingly compete with the data they generate for primacy as sites of value generation (see Larsonneur, in this issue).

By matching translators with their clients (or vice versa) on digital translation crowdsourcing platforms, conducting quality evaluations, scoring platformised translators and automatically removing underperforming translators from these platforms, algorithmic managers have truly become the “zombie-machines” (Harding 2013Harding, Nancy 2013 On Being at Work: The Social Construction of the Employee. New York: Routledge. Harding, Nancy 2013 On Being at Work: The Social Construction of the Employee. New York: Routledge. , 5) capitalist organisations want all of their employees to be: emotionless subjects, or rather objects, that “are devoted to their work, devoid of any objectives or pleasures save those which relate to the organization’s purpose and little more than extensions of organizational technologies — that is, computerized machines” (Harding 2013Harding, Nancy 2013 On Being at Work: The Social Construction of the Employee. New York: Routledge. Harding, Nancy 2013 On Being at Work: The Social Construction of the Employee. New York: Routledge. , 5–6).

What is more, a key feature of digital labour platforms is that they usually operate outside national labour laws and actively seek to minimise external regulation of the employer–employee relationship. Since the vast majority of translators work on these platforms as independent and anonymous contractors, they have no collective bargaining power, allowing platforms to pay below-market rates. At the same time, the translations undertaken on these platforms are based on often highly fragmented — or, as Moorkens (2020Moorkens, Joss 2020 “ ‘A Tiny Cog in a Large Machine’: Digital Taylorism in the Translation Industry.” In Fair MT: Towards Ethical, Sustainable Machine Translation, edited by Joss Moorkens, Dorothy Kenny, and Félix do Carmo, special issue of Translation Spaces 9 (1): 12–34. Moorkens, Joss 2020 “ ‘A Tiny Cog in a Large Machine’: Digital Taylorism in the Translation Industry.” In Fair MT: Towards Ethical, Sustainable Machine Translation, edited by Joss Moorkens, Dorothy Kenny, and Félix do Carmo, special issue of Translation Spaces 9 (1): 12–34. , 12) aptly puts it, “decomposed” — source texts so as to enable deployment of vast pools of often tens of thousands of translators to guarantee faster turnaround times (Graham, Hjorth, and Lehdonvirta 2017Graham, Mark, Isis Hjorth, and Vili Lehdonvirta 2017 “Digital Labour and Development: Impacts of Global Digital Labour Platforms and the Gig Economy on Worker Livelihoods.” Transfer 3 (2): 135–162. Graham, Mark, Isis Hjorth, and Vili Lehdonvirta 2017 “Digital Labour and Development: Impacts of Global Digital Labour Platforms and the Gig Economy on Worker Livelihoods.” Transfer 3 (2): 135–162. ; Gough et al. 2023Gough, Joanna, Özlem Temizöz, Graham Hieke, and Leonardo Zilio 2023 “Concurrent Translation on Collaborative Platforms.” Translation Spaces 12 (1): 45–73. Gough, Joanna, Özlem Temizöz, Graham Hieke, and Leonardo Zilio 2023 “Concurrent Translation on Collaborative Platforms.” Translation Spaces 12 (1): 45–73. ; Cukur 2025Cukur, Leandra 2025 Auswirkungen des bezahlten Crowdsourcings auf den Translationsberuf: Eine konsequentialistische Analyse von Übersetzungsplattformen [Effects of paid crowdsourcing on the translation profession: A consequentialist analysis of translation platforms]. PhD diss. University of Vienna.Cukur, Leandra 2025 Auswirkungen des bezahlten Crowdsourcings auf den Translationsberuf: Eine konsequentialistische Analyse von Übersetzungsplattformen [Effects of paid crowdsourcing on the translation profession: A consequentialist analysis of translation platforms]. PhD diss. University of Vienna.).

All of this not least undermines the visibility and thus also recognition of translators’ and interpreters’ work and labour. This is also highlighted by this special issue’s first contribution, “Visibility as Value: The Changing Economics of Translation,” where Claire Larsonneur shows how translation, through the introduction of (free) machine translation and multipurpose AI-steered dialogic chatbots, has become an additional technological feature embedded into websites, rather than the transactional service it used to be. Translation in the new business models of the digital economy is, as noted above, also no longer the main source of value generation. Instead, it is the data that can be harvested from text generation activities such as translation that has become the primary site of value generation. This shift from content to data in the generation of value marks perhaps the most profound disruption of translation’s erstwhile business model. Analysing the role human labour plays within and for large generative AI corporations, Larsonneur demonstrates that these corporations’ value extraction processes, and thus the labour they are based on, remain completely opaque to the general public. Investigating, in a second step, a wider range of language-specific jobs like data annotation or the training of LLMs, all of which do not require a university degree or other forms of sustained specialist training, Larsonneur not only highlights the worryingly accelerated risk of a wholesale deskilling of the language-related professions more generally, but also emphasises the increasing isolation and invisibility of language professionals that result from working remotely within structurally obfuscated digital environments: “However, in matters of labour, visibility is a key issue: The workers who, because of crowdsourcing and outsourcing, remain out of sight for end-users and management, are subjected to the worst conditions” (Larsonneur, in this issue). AI-powered text production, including translation, does indeed obscure the amount and conditions of human labour needed in order to make the systems work. The humans behind this labour remain invisible, are increasingly disenfranchised, and less recognised for the labour they perform than ever.

Larsonneur’s broad look at the digital language industry is complemented by JC Penet, Callum Walker, and Joseph Lambert’s narrower focus on translators’ job quality and job satisfaction in “Love’s Labour Found? A Data-Driven Exploration of Job Quality Among UK-based Freelance Translators.” Data elicited from 216 UK-based freelancers forms the basis of the authors’ exploration of the degree to which translators perceive their work as meaningful, with meaningfulness posited as an important factor in perceived job quality, a category the authors derive from the indicators developed by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound 2012Eurofound 2012 Trends in Job Quality in Europe. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.Eurofound 2012 Trends in Job Quality in Europe. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.). The qualitative data from their questionnaire was subjected to a sentiment analysis, with the ultimate aim of making inferences about the longer-term sustainability of the profession. Penet, Walker, and Lambert’s sentiment analysis shows that the categories of ‘earnings’ and ‘prospects’, with the latter focussing particularly on technology-induced changes, were rated overwhelmingly negative by their respondents, revealing a looming fear of being turned into post-editors exclusively. Limitations on a translator’s agency were also generally associated with the rapidly increasing technologisation and automation of translation workflows. However, respondents also indicated positive sentiments, or rather job-quality factors, such as creativity and variety of work, which contribute to a continued positive perception of the translation profession. Thus, UK-based freelance translators still feel a “love of their job [which, however,] may be turning into a labour of love” (Penet, Walker, and Lambert, in this issue). A similar finding is presented by Cornelia Zwischenberger (in this issue), who focuses specifically on freelance translators on paid translation crowdsourcing platforms.

Both Zwischenberger’s and Gökhan Fırat’s contributions to this special issue take a closer look at the gig economy (Gandini 2019Gandini, Alessandro 2019 “Labour Process Theory and the Gig Economy.” Human Relations 72 (6): 1039–1056. Gandini, Alessandro 2019 “Labour Process Theory and the Gig Economy.” Human Relations 72 (6): 1039–1056. ), where the gig is either performed the minute the worker receives it, or at a later time. Gig work or labour can be either digital-based or an actual, physical activity. The common denominator, however, is the involvement of a platform as a mediator — albeit one that by no means represents neutral ground but rather “operates at once as a market intermediary and a ‘shadow employer’” (Gandini 2019Gandini, Alessandro 2019 “Labour Process Theory and the Gig Economy.” Human Relations 72 (6): 1039–1056. Gandini, Alessandro 2019 “Labour Process Theory and the Gig Economy.” Human Relations 72 (6): 1039–1056. , 1040).

Fırat, for his contribution entitled “Governing Linguistic Labour: Platform Capitalism, Cooperative Ownership, and the Structural Conditions of Decent and Fair Work in Translation,” conducted a worldwide survey of 454 freelance translators either ‘gigging’ on privately-owned platforms or as part of worker-owned translation cooperatives. Specifically, he homes in on a comparison of the two ownership types and their respective labour conditions, drawing illuminating links between ownership and governance arrangements and translators’ experiences of navigating the freelance space. Fırat follows a mixed-methods design, drawing data from both a quantitative survey and ten qualitative follow-up interviews, and analyses the data elicited against the backdrop of the ILO Decent Work Agenda (ILO 2013ILO (International Labour Office) 2013 Decent Work Indicators: Guidelines for Producers and Users of Statistical and Legal Framework Indicators (Vol. 2). https://​www​.ilo​.org​/wcmsp5​/groups​/public​/-​--dgreports​/-​--integration​/documents​/publication​/wcms​_229374​.pdfILO (International Labour Office) 2013 Decent Work Indicators: Guidelines for Producers and Users of Statistical and Legal Framework Indicators (Vol. 2). https://​www​.ilo​.org​/wcmsp5​/groups​/public​/-​--dgreports​/-​--integration​/documents​/publication​/wcms​_229374​.pdf) as well as the Fairwork Framework for Cloudwork (Fairwork 2024Fairwork 2024 Cloudwork (Online Work) Principles. Fairwork. https://​fair​.work​/en​/fw​/principles​/cloudwork​-principles/Fairwork 2024 Cloudwork (Online Work) Principles. Fairwork. https://​fair​.work​/en​/fw​/principles​/cloudwork​-principles/). In terms of structural working conditions, Fırat concludes that the rhetoric of flexibility and autonomy prevalent in the platformised marketplace masks dependence and subordination:

The promise of flexible work externalises risk onto workers who have no leverage to refuse it; the accumulation of professional reputation generates value that vests entirely in the platform. These are not incidental features of the model but structural necessities of its accumulation logic.(Fırat, in this issue)

By contrast, translator-owned platforms operating, notably, within the same socio-technological environments and frameworks, “reconfigure this logic by collectivising ownership, institutionalising voice and redirecting surplus toward members” (Fırat, in this issue). Thus, translator-owned, cooperative translation platforms could represent a viable solution in terms of a sustainable future for the translation profession in times of techno-capitalism.

Cornelia Zwischenberger further narrows the focus of the array of contributions engaging with the techno-capitalist context by examining translators’ perceptions and experiences on industry platforms offering paid translation crowdsourcing. In her article “Defining ‘Labour’ and ‘Work’ on Translation Crowdsourcing Platforms via Motivational and Affective Theory: A Theoretical-Conceptual Framework,” she develops her own theoretical-conceptual framework for analysing, from the insiders’ or etic perspective, how freelance translators define and perceive their translation work or labour on translation crowdsourcing platforms. The framework proposes a differentiated classification of labour and work by blending, or rather complementing, a Marxist perspective (Marx 1867Marx, Karl 1867  Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie [Capital: A critique of political economy]. Band 1: Der Produktionsprozess des Kapitalismus [Volume 1: The process of capitalist production]. Hamburg: Otto Meissner.Marx, Karl 1867 Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie [Capital: A critique of political economy]. Band 1: Der Produktionsprozess des Kapitalismus [Volume 1: The process of capitalist production]. Hamburg: Otto Meissner.; Fuchs 2014Fuchs, Christian 2014 Digital Labour and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge. Fuchs, Christian 2014 Digital Labour and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge. ) with a more philosophical perspective (Arendt [1958] 1998Arendt, Hannah [1958] 1998 The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Arendt, Hannah [1958] 1998 The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.; Harding 2013Harding, Nancy 2013 On Being at Work: The Social Construction of the Employee. New York: Routledge. Harding, Nancy 2013 On Being at Work: The Social Construction of the Employee. New York: Routledge. ). These two approaches are then brought into dialogue with motivational theory (Deci and Ryan 1985Deci, Edward L., and Richard M. Ryan 1985 Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. New York: Plenum Press. Deci, Edward L., and Richard M. Ryan 1985 Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. New York: Plenum Press. , 2000Deci, Edward L., and Richard M. Ryan 2000 “The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior.” Psychological Inquiry 11 (4): 227–268. Deci, Edward L., and Richard M. Ryan 2000 “The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior.” Psychological Inquiry 11 (4): 227–268. ) and affective theoretical approaches (Massumi 2002Massumi, Brian 2002 Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Massumi, Brian 2002 Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. ; Ahmed 2004Ahmed, Sara 2004 “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22 (2): 117–139. Ahmed, Sara 2004 “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22 (2): 117–139. ). Zwischenberger’s differentiation between labour and work takes motivation as its point of departure, while affects serve as the glue between the constructs of motivation on the one hand, and labour and work on the other. Ultimately, this newly developed theoretical-conceptual framework is conceived to be applicable not only to investigations of paid translation crowdsourcing platforms, but also to any translation- or interpreting-related context, and indeed to a range of research objects beyond Translation Studies.

In her contribution to this special issue, Zwischenberger applies her framework to existing empirical data and shows that, while translation crowdsourcing platforms undoubtedly intensify the precarisation of translators by reshaping their professional conditions through automation, fragmentation, and algorithmic control, translators working for platforms offering paid translation crowdsourcing are neither clearly intrinsically nor extrinsically motivated, nor do they distinctly perceive their translation activities as either work or labour. Such a blurring of the boundaries between labour and work in translators’ own minds may, it could be argued, itself be structurally conditioned by the platform model and the environment it creates. This, on the one hand, reduces translators to easily substitutable crowd workers and erodes their autonomy, stability, and professional identity, while, on the other hand, making sure that translators have just enough reason to stay on the platform.

Susan Pickford, in “The Labour of Academic Translation: Who Generates Value in the Agency Model?,” picks up the theme of value generation explored in earlier contributions and scrutinises how academic translation agencies generate value, applying Porter’s (1985)Porter, Michael 1985 Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. New York: Free Press.Porter, Michael 1985 Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. New York: Free Press. value chain model to a case study of two UK-based firms, Cadenza Academic and Lex Academic. By analysing these agencies’ business models alongside their public-facing narratives and publicly available productivity and remuneration data, Pickford explores how Cadenza Academic and Lex Academic structure their operations, differentiate themselves, and determine which parts of the translation workflow create the most value and are therefore prioritised.

Retracing the emergence of a specialist academic translation market driven by increased internationalisation of research and pressure on scholars to publish in English, Pickford shows that, although translation appears to be the core service of these boutique agencies, it is, in fact, not their primary value generating activity. Instead, value is generated through management, editing, workflow coordination, and platform based labour organisation, all of which allow these agencies to scale flexibly while keeping translation costs low. Their competitive advantage thus derives from scope and differentiation strategies, not cost leadership.

What is more, their reliance on low-cost, externalised labour is rather at odds with their marketing claims about elite expertise. Both agencies project themselves as premium providers, though their recruitment of freelance translators — often at MA, sometimes even merely at BA level, rather than consistently at PhD level as advertised — points at a mismatch between signalling and actual screening practices, suggesting that “procurement and HR functions (i.e., keeping translator costs down by hiring at a relatively low level of experience) are a key element of the agency value chain” (Pickford, in this issue). If, as Pickford concludes, these agencies function primarily as labour hubs rather than as translation producers, with pre and post translation activities generating the most value, this also has implications for translator training. In order to equip students to “maximise their own long-term financial stability,” entrepreneurship and, specifically, “value chain analyses of various translatorial labour models” (Pickford, in this issue) may well need to become central to the translation classroom.

As we have noted above, this, however, should also raise questions of Translation Studies’ potential complicity with industry practices that clearly do not see the translators and interpreters we train as valuable assets in their business models. As the traditional site not only for translation and interpreting research (including translation pedagogy research), but also for translator and interpreter training, Translation Studies has been slow, perhaps even reluctant, to address its own mismatch between critical examinations and probings of the translation industry from a research perspective and the curricular chasing of industry norms and expectations (see Bahbouh [2026]Bahbouh, Fardous 2026 “Collaboration or Exclusion? Why is Translation Studies Still Ignoring Power and Legitimacy?” Lingua Media Connect (blog), June 25, 2026. https://​linguamediaconnect​.com​/2026​/06​/25​/collaboration​-or​-exclusion​-why​-is​-translation​-studies​-still​-ignoring​-power​-and​-legitimacy/Bahbouh, Fardous 2026 “Collaboration or Exclusion? Why is Translation Studies Still Ignoring Power and Legitimacy?” Lingua Media Connect (blog), June 25, 2026. https://​linguamediaconnect​.com​/2026​/06​/25​/collaboration​-or​-exclusion​-why​-is​-translation​-studies​-still​-ignoring​-power​-and​-legitimacy/ for a number of notable interventions in this emerging debate).

Industry norms and expectations are also the focus of Irem Ayan’s “Aesthetic Labor: The Interpreter’s Burden of ‘Looking Good’ and ‘Sounding Right’,” the final contribution to this special issue. Ayan investigates how aesthetic labour — the requirement for workers to look good and sound right — shapes the professional experiences of interpreters, particularly women and racialised individuals. Drawing on two sets of interviews with conference and community interpreters across North America and Europe, Ayan demonstrates how deeply interpreting is entangled with body politics, where appearance, voice, race, and gender become commodified aspects of the job.

Ayan shows that interpreters frequently encounter both explicit and implicit expectations about their physical presentation. Female interpreters describe pressure to appear “lean, fit, active, [and] agile,” and “have appropriate height and weight measurements to sit on a bar stool” (Ayan, in this issue), or being asked to adopt markers of professional femininity through makeup, business suits, high heels, or even fake wedding rings to seem older and more credible. Interpreters’ bodies thus become “part of what is being sold” (Ayan, in this issue), echoing broader patterns of commodification in service work. Voice is similarly commodified: interpreters report pressure to adopt “news anchor” voices or “soft and smooth” tones, and racialised interpreters describe pressure to ‘self whiten’ linguistically (Ayan, in this issue).

Both appearance and voice expectations on the part of clients thus position interpreters as sexualised and racialised display objects. As Ayan shows, such aesthetic scrutiny not only marginalises interpreters and devalues their expertise, but also reproduces structural inequalities and constitutes aesthetic labour, which, in turn, intersects with emotional labour, producing vulnerability, insecurity, and moral tension. In a profession that idealises neutrality, the fact that interpreters’ bodies and voices are continually judged, commodified, and regulated exposes how embodied expectations distort the profession’s dearly held and tenaciously defended norms of neutrality and expertise.

Taken together, the contributions to this special issue demonstrate that labour — in all its material, immaterial, affective, embodied, and increasingly datafied forms — is not an adjacent concern for Translation Studies but one of its fundamental analytic categories. If both the discipline and the profession have historically obscured labour behind narratives of vocation, creativity, and identity, the articles assembled here dismantle that obscurity. They demonstrate how attending to labour unsettles long standing assumptions about translatorial agency, professionalism, and value by probing the complex infrastructures, hierarchies, and power relations that shape how translations are produced, distributed, and consumed. Ultimately, they show that the conditions under which translational labour is organised today demand urgent, systematic, and theoretically robust scrutiny.

A central thread running through this special issue is the recognition that translational labour is profoundly uneven. Whether through the algorithmic management of platform translators, the aesthetic disciplining of interpreters’ bodies, or the outsourcing practices of LSPs, translators and interpreters are positioned within systems that reward certain forms of labour while obscuring or devaluing others. These dynamics are not incidental but structural. They reflect broader transformations in global labour markets, from the rise of gig work to the intensification of surveillance, precarity, and competition. Translation, often idealised as a specialised intellectual craft, is instead shown to be a site where neoliberal labour regimes are acutely felt.

At the same time, the contributions highlight how translational labour is never merely economic. It is also social, cultural, and political. The embodied experiences of interpreters navigating gendered and racialised expectations, the affective labour shouldered by an increasingly precaritised cognitariat, and the identity work involved in performing linguistic authority all point to the ways translation is lived. These accounts challenge the discipline to expand its analytic vocabulary and remind us that translational labour is not neutral but shaped by histories of colonialism, migration, and intersectional inequality that continue to structure who translates and interprets, under what conditions, and for whose benefit.

Another key insight emerging from this special issue is the need to rethink the notion of value in translation. The activities generating economic value are, as we have seen, not always the same activities that generate linguistic or cultural value. This disjuncture raises pressing questions about how translation is priced, who profits from translatorial expertise, and how translators can reclaim value from systems designed to minimise their autonomy. It also invites us to consider alternative models of organising translation labour, including cooperative structures, community based practices, and forms of collective bargaining that challenge the atomisation of the profession.

Several avenues for future research suggest themselves from our collective work on this special issue. Translation Studies must undoubtedly intensify its engagement with labour theory, drawing on sociology, feminist economics, critical race studies, and political economy to analyse translation’s embeddedness in broader systems of production and ownership. These theoretical explorations should advance in tandem with further empirical research. Ethnographies of workplaces, interviews with a new generation of translators and interpreters, and further analyses of platform infrastructures will not only illuminate the lived realities behind abstract models but also furnish Translation Studies with deeper insights into how evolving technologies reshape labour conditions not only through automation but through new forms of surveillance, deskilling, and value extraction. In this context, the discipline would also do well to be alert to and indeed champion emerging normative and activist scholarship that asks how translation labour should be organised, and what forms of justice, dignity, and sustainability might be possible. Finally, a pressing avenue for future research concerns Translation Studies’ own positionality within the labour regimes it critiques. The discipline needs to interrogate the extent to which its pedagogical practices, curricular design, and professional narratives reproduce industry logics that too often treat translators’ and interpreters’ labour as expendable. Future work is therefore needed to examine how Translation Studies may be complicit in sustaining neoliberal norms — whether through uncritical adoption of platform-driven competencies, the privileging of technological efficiency over labour rights, or the curricular marginalisation of labour centred perspectives. Such research should explore how the discipline might reconfigure its pedagogical and institutional practices to resist these pressures, foreground labour justice, and cultivate forms of training that empower translators and interpreters rather than assimilate them into exploitative business models.

What this special issue ultimately reveals, then, is that Translation Studies stands at a critical juncture. The digital transformation of translational labour, the rise of generative AI, and the intensification of platformisation are not temporary disruptions but structural shifts that redefine what translation is, how it is valued, and who is permitted to perform it. To remain intellectually and ethically relevant, the discipline must continue to translaborate across fields and disciplines while also asserting its own expertise in shaping debates about human–machine collaboration and the future of linguistic labour.