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Article In: Target: Online-First Articles

Governing language labour

Platform capitalism, cooperative ownership, and the structural conditions of decent and fair work in translation

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Abstract
Debates on translation in the digital economy frequently centre on technology and professional skills — machine-translation productivity, automation ethics, and post-editing demands — while under-examining the ownership and governance arrangements within which they operate. This article argues that translators’ working conditions are systematically associated with these institutional arrangements. Drawing on a mixed-methods doctoral study comprising a survey of 454 translators (422 platform-based across 85 countries and 32 cooperative across 11) and ten interviews, it compares both models against the International Labour Organization Decent Work Agenda and Fairwork framework for cloudwork. Platform governance is associated with lower income, labour intensification, precarity, weak representation, and uncompensated appropriation of labour and data; cooperative governance with more equitable earnings, standardised hours, stability, and democratic participation. The article develops transcooperation through four institutional specifications: democratic governance of labour and data, federated architecture, redistributive surplus logic, and active redistribution of governance labour along gender lines, while examining their empirical grounding and structural obstacles under the rapidly changing conditions of AI-integrated translation work.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework and literature
    • 2.1Cognitive capitalism and the doubled labour of translation
    • 2.2Platform governance and algorithmic management
    • 2.3Technology, data ownership, and the question of dispossession
    • 2.4Cooperative governance as an alternative logic
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Methodological approach and analytical instruments
    • 3.2Data collection
    • 3.3Limitations
  • 4.Findings and analysis
    • 4.1Who are platform and cooperative translators?
    • 4.2Earnings and governance-related distributional differences
    • 4.3Working time, stability, and well-being
    • 4.4Governance, ownership, and the structural case for transcooperation
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Ownership and governance as central conditions of distributional outcomes
    • 5.2Transcooperation: Institutional requirements and structural obstacles
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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