CTIS Research Seminar - Is Everything Well? Assessing Translator Wellbeing via Self-reported Narratives of Belonging, Esteem and Self-actualisation
| Dates: | 23 October 2025 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 15:30 |
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| What is it: | Talk |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Dr JC Penet |
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Most freelance translators get satisfaction from their work. In a survey conducted as part of the BA-funded “Chasing Status” project (2023-24), for instance, 69% of UK freelance translators said they found their job fulfilling (Penet et al. forthcoming). Undoubtedly, the fact that freelance translators continue to find their work fulfilling despite the many, well-documented challenges they currently face is encouraging (Lambert and Walker 2024; Rodríguez-Castro 2024). However, this doesn’t take away from the fact that current challenges of pay, status and working conditions have the potential to seriously affect their wellbeing and job satisfaction (Hubscher-Davidson and Panichelli-Batalla 2025). As a result of this, a growing number of translation studies scholars have recently turned their attention to translator wellbeing (see Chen 2023, Hubscher-Davidson 2018, 2020; Hubscher-Davidson and Lehr 2022; Penet 2024). In a similar way, UK professional associations have also started engaging more actively with wellbeing as a concept as they aim to better support their members through challenging times. Both the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) and the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL), for instance, have recently published new resources on health, wellbeing, stress management and resilience. Despite this growing interest, however, the concept of translator wellbeing has still not been clearly defined in and for our field, even in publications dealing specifically with it (cf. Bednárová-Gibová and Majherová 2021, Mahadin and Naser Olimat, 2022, Chen 2023). Perhaps this is because wellbeing is notoriously challenging to define (Dodge et al. 2012). In this presentation, we will propose our own conceptualisation of translator wellbeing as a balance between social, physical and psychological resources and challenges. We will then use data from a UK-based survey of 209 freelance translators and three focus groups to empirically assess translator wellbeing via self-reported narratives of belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation. We will show that our findings reveal considerable professional pride and high intrinsic fulfilment alongside a fractured sense of community, low perceived public status, and restricted career progression. This exposes vulnerabilities in freelance translators’ social and psychological resource that need to be addressed to ensure their wellbeing. This will lead us to argue for a collective duty of care alongside individual practices of self-care to enshrine translator wellbeing as the ethical foundation of a more sustainable path not just for translators themselves, but for the whole translation industry.
Speaker
Dr JC Penet
Role: Reader in Translation Industry Studies
Organisation: Newcastle University
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2.61
Simon Building
Manchester
