Industry vs. Profession: Defining the Translation Industry Today and Tomorrow
22 January 2026
Author: Anna Wright
In January’s event jointly hosted by the LRG and London Metropolitan University, Dr Callum Walker and Dr Joseph Lambert took an audience of professional linguists and students of Translation on a content-packed and thought-provoking tour of key insights from their recently published, co-edited Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry (2025). This engaging talk previewed their chapter ‘What’s in a name? Mapping the Translation Industry’* (ibid. pp. 3–25) in a topical, at times provocative manner, drawing together themes from academic literature, industry reports and their own research.
Turns of Translation (Studies)
Joseph Lambert opened with a Mentimeter question inviting the audience to share our impressions of Translation Studies (TS) as a discipline. This triggered flashbacks to Gideon Toury’s Norms (1978;1995), Andrew Chesterman’s Memes (1997;2016) and Mary Snell-Hornby’s multi-disciplinary Turns (2006) of Translation (Studies) in my mind. The soon-evident consensus was that TS is heavy on theory and strong on applied practice, but a little light on business training.
Callum Walker asked the non-students among us to identify a stylish-looking chap pictured in some 1970s’ snaps.
(Orrego-Carmona on X, 6 April 2022; Walker and Lambert presentation, Jan. 2026)
Someone guessed the right era by suggesting Gideon Toury, but this figure was none other than the original codifier and “poster boy of the discipline”, James Holmes (1972;1988). Which led neatly on to Walker’s reflection that TS has a long and rich heritage of linguistic and textual analysis, but a relatively short tradition of looking at the people who translate, and the actors and agents involved in translation in a broader sense, namely the profession and the industry.
Walker and Lambert have expanded Chesterman’s Sociological branch of translating, translators and translations (2009) into new territory by adding the somewhat overlooked Economic dimension to Chesterman’s division of Translator Studies into Cultural, Cognitive and Sociological domains, and applying the same framework to Translation Industry studies.
(Walker and Lambert presentation Jan 2026; 2025, p. 7)
Nomenclature, Group Identity and Professional Status
Having observed the usage of various, but far from interchangeable, labels like Language industry, Language (Services) sector and Localisation industry, Walker and Lambert established that ‘Translation industry’ has appeared most consistently in the literature since the 1980s. They also choose to focus on the Translation industry as opposed to the broader and hugely diverse Language and Language Technology Services sector.
Walker discussed focus group findings that freelance translators take their frequent mislabelling and misrepresentation in the media, e.g. the casual confusion of interpreters with translators, as personal slights and even attacks on the profession because “being a translator is part of who I am.” One LRG member commented that the BBC was one of the worst offenders in this regard.
This correlates with Rakefet Sela-Sheffy’s and Miriam Shlesinger’s sociological work on translators’ and interpreters’ collectively constructed cultural identities bound up with status and self-esteem, and perceptions of self that are built in occupational spaces (2008).
Industry and Profession as Worlds Apart?
Unsurprisingly, comments captured in Walker and Lambert’s focus groups and another live Mentimeter poll confirmed that translators have largely negative perceptions of the translation industry versus positive opinions of the profession. Translators are surely justified in feeling some level of antagonism towards an industry which, they perceive, is commoditising their highly skilled labour, driving down pay rates and imposing automation, platform-based technologies, unfavourable payment terms and non-negotiable deadlines on them, in contrast to a profession whose membership associations not only validate their credentials and recognise their expertise, but actively create social spaces for ongoing professional development and collegial networking.
That said, Walker and Lambert argue, it’s important to grasp that the two are not strictly comparable fields, but rather comprise different entities, functional roles and stakeholders serving distinct interest groups. Tensions between professional translators and the industry are perhaps inevitable: what benefits the industry is often in opposition to translators’ interests, and the asymmetry of power relations is undeniable. The unremitting technologisation of the industry, with some implementations arguably reducing human experts to Cory Doctorow’s ‘reverse centaur’ (2021) role of mopping up (Deborah do Carmo 2025) so much ‘AI slop’, is cited as a key stress factor.
Mapping the Industry
Mapping the size, shape and boundaries of the rapidly evolving industry and its myriad constituent parts is no simple exercise. Walker and Lambert elegantly depict the Language (Services) Sector as a spherical universe containing nested, intersecting inner spheres of the translation and interpreting industries, language technology providers and the professions:
(Walker and Lambert presentation, Jan 2026; 2025, p. 4)
Indeed, as Lambert discussed, the industry’s leading research and advisory organisations – Slator, Nimdzi and CSA Research – all employ differing terminology and methodologies tailored to their respective client audiences and accordingly reach somewhat different conclusions in their market reports.
Nimdzi’s flagship annual industry report charts the fortunes of large global Language Service Providers (LSPs) with revenue of USD 1 million or more. It compiles a ranking of the Top 100 providers, segments revenue by services and so-called client verticals, surveys CEO confidence levels, and comments on industry trends, challenges and outlook. Nimdzi’s 2025 100 report remained largely optimistic, estimating that the language industry’s market size had reached USD 71.7 billion in 2024 and was projected to grow by 5.6% to USD 75.7 billion in 2025. It did concede that only the top 50 providers enjoyed the highest growth rate, and that “[n]ot all boats are lifted by the tide.”
Meanwhile, CSA Research aims to cover far more of the market, pointing out the obvious limitations of surveying only the top 100 LSPs, when the rest collectively accounted for 85.7% of the market in 2022-23. Moreover, medium and smaller-sized providers’ experiences are completely different from those of the major players.
(CSA Research, Why Do Market Sizing Numbers Differ? 24 May 2024 article on LinkedIn)
CSA concluded that the language industry’s growth peaked in 2019 before entering the current ‘post-localization era’, in which revenues have remained largely flat or even declined when adjusted for inflation and other factors.
(CSA Research, Is the Market Growing or Shrinking? What the Data Really Says, webinar on LinkedIn, 15 May 2025)
CSA’s Senior Analyst Arle Lommel acknowledges that freelance translators likely felt the downturn period even more keenly than LSPs, who managed to cover their translation and localisation requirements in-house.
Sustainability of Profession and Industry
Joseph Lambert highlighted that even if translation and localisation remain the core ‘bread-and-butter’ service segment for many LSPs, downward price pressures, rising demand for [post-]edited machine-translated content and automated integrations at the enterprise client-level are feeding into falling demand for human translation services. All the research companies agree about this trend.
(CSA Research webinar, May 2025)
Challenges in Common or Contention?
In many respects, LSPs and freelance translators face similar economic challenges like being hitched to historic per-word pricing, as well as pressures to innovate rapidly and explain and differentiate their value propositions to buyers who don’t understand translation as a service (see Battacharya & Singh 2019 on agency problems in service outsourcing). The rub is that the range of adaptations and mitigations available to LSPs, such as offsetting less profitable services with efficiencies in other areas, implementing automated tech solutions to scale up and accelerate production, and diversifying into translation-adjacent ‘data-for-AI’-related services, are less accessible to freelance translators, and may reinforce the headwinds and frustrations they experience downstream.
Chris Durban (2022) encourages professional translators to invest in defining and marketing their linguistic expertise and specialist value-added services in their chosen market segment, and to consider focusing on smaller and niche client-types, closer to the premium end of the market – i.e. clients who are not well served by enterprise-scale LSP solutions.
(Chris Durban, How to stake out your place in the industry and build a (sustainable) career, #2024TEF)
New entrants to the profession need to start out somewhere. Translation Master’s degree programmes deliver advanced training in the latest technologies, and course leaders foster fruitful links with industry and professional association partners, but if the agency landscape no longer provides enough early-career opportunities and the work becomes less attractive, the implications for the sustainability of the industry’s human talent pipeline are worrying. Drawing on John Elkington’s triple bottom-line concept (1997), Lambert is critical of some LSPs’ and leading industry organisations’ primary focus on profitability, while neglecting the ‘people’ and ‘planet’ pillars of the business.
It’s important to stress that not all LSPs adopt the kind of bad business practices Oliver Carreira (2024) identifies as prevalent – there are excellent corporate members of the ITI and ATC. For their part, translators are ever-adaptable, solutions-oriented individuals, adept at leveraging the latest translation technology and -adjacent tools in their work. Arle Lommel is careful to say that CSA Research support a model in which human translators remain ‘at the core’ of tech-augmented translation systems, rather than being confined to a ‘human-in-the-loop’ setup (Vashee 2021; Doctorow 2024). It’s a crucial distinction, but translators are keen to see what this transformed human-at-the-core role looks like, and to have some assurance the tech augmentation will not encroach too heavily on the creative linguistic work they so enjoy and excel at.
The lively post-talk Q&A closed on a positive note with one translator extolling the benefits of joining a professional association, and some of the audience continuing the constructive conversation in the nearby Horatia pub.
* Walker, C., & Lambert, J. (2025) ‘What’s in a Name? Mapping the Translation Industry’ in Walker, C., & Lambert, J. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of the Translation Industry (1st ed.), pp. 3–25 is available for download under ‘Support Material’ at: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-the-Translation-Industry/Walker-Lambert/p/book/9781032446790
