The (de-)professionalisation of translation: an exploration of the impact of contemporary industry practices and attitudes on translation’s status as a profession.

From the academisation of Translation Studies to the establishment of professional bodies and their creating of codes of conduct, for example, the translation industry has witnessed a series of measures over time that aimed to promote translation as a specialised activity and translators as professional experts. Despite such efforts, the translation profession is typically associated with low to middling status and poor public perceptions (see Ruokonen and Mäkisalo, 2018; Dam and Zethsen, 2011; 2013; Katan, 2009; Liu, 2022; Svahn, 2016), and has also previously been categorised as a practice rather than a true profession (Chesterman, 2001), as a semi-profession (Sela-Sheffy, 2008; Gümüş, 2024), and as under-professionalised (Sela-Sheffy, 2023). Additionally, the impact of machine learning technologies on the socio-professional role and value of the professional human translator cannot be understated. With these ideas in mind, my PhD seeks to clarify, from a sociological standpoint, the implications of the growing tendencies towards automating translation processes on the professional status of translation as well as the extent to which translation is professionalised and whether it is at risk of regressing into a less professionalised state.

In order to achieve the above-mentioned objectives, this research draws on the sociological
concepts of professionalisation (i.e. the process of an occupation becoming a respected, fully-fledged profession) and de-professionalisation (i.e. the breaking down of established professions). These concepts enable explorations of how a service’s occupational dynamics shift in accordance with the evolution of technology and of society. Against this backdrop, my PhD employed surveys and focus groups, with survey questions and focus group themes framed around (de-)professionalisation criteria that were established as part of this study’s bespoke framework on (de-)professionalisation, to gather practitioners’ and non practitioners’ perceptions of the contemporary translation industry. Data was gathered on a variety of themes including, amongst others, translators’ agency, societal recognition, translators’ skillsets, the socio-professional, financial and practical impacts of the deployment of machine translation and artificial intelligence, and professional sustainability (i.e. the maintenance of a long-term and fulfilling career). The collected data reveals practitioners’ first-hand experiences of navigating a translation career in the current climate, in addition to non-practitioners’ perceptions of machine translation and of the value, necessity, prestige and complexity of human translation services.

By channelling perspectives drawn from the sociology of professions (professionalisation and de-professionalisation) and aligning them against contemporary data on the modern translation industry, my PhD evaluates the extent to which translation is professionalised and whether the growing deployment of general and translation-specific technologies and their influences on agency, security and recognition render translation susceptible to a de-
professionalising effect.