Translator status and identity: constructed and experienced boundaries of the translation profession

Translation as a profession manifests very few established boundaries: in most Western countries, anyone can start working as a translator, regardless of their qualifications. In consequence, agents in the field are constantly involved in boundary work: constructing, negotiating and maintaining – or critiquing and undermining – the boundaries of the profession (Grbić 2010, 2014). The experiences of such boundary work are likely to have a considerable impact on translator status, or the perceptions of prestige, value and respect attached to the profession, and on translators’ professional identities or self-perceptions. Moreover, the context in which translators’ professional boundaries, status and identities are negotiated has seen considerable changes in recent years. Technological developments increasingly facilitate both crowdsourced translation and fit-for-purpose machine translations, and translation technology has become indispensable to business translators’ work. At the same time, the growing number of multilingual communities – which can exist either globally or locally, virtually or in real life – means that professional translators have to negotiate a niche for their work among communicators who are used to getting by with the help of non-professional translation or English as a lingua franca.