Aesthetic labor: The interpreter’s burden of ‘looking good’ and ‘sounding right’

1.Introduction

As the meeting began, Fiona Hill leaned over and asked me if I had noticed Putin’s translator, who was a very attractive brunette woman with long hair, a pretty face, and a wonderful figure. She proceeded to tell me that she suspected the woman had been selected by Putin specifically to distract our president. I was fascinated and from then on couldn’t stop watching for any interactions between the interpreter and President Trump. Sure enough, he addressed her directly a couple of times, jokingly and casually, but it was certainly nothing I had seen him do before.(Grisham 2021Grisham, Stephanie 2021 I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House. New York: HarperCollins.Grisham, Stephanie 2021 I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House. New York: HarperCollins., 212)

Grisham (2021)Grisham, Stephanie 2021 I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House. New York: HarperCollins.Grisham, Stephanie 2021 I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House. New York: HarperCollins., a former White House press secretary and White House communications director, writes in her memoir that Russian President Vladimir Putin had subbed in, at the very last minute, an attractive female interpreter to distract Donald J. Trump during the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, in 2019. Fiona Hill, who served as senior director for European and Russian affairs on the US National Security Council during Trump’s first term as President, confirms Grisham’s account and states that this was indeed the case “because there had been somebody else on the list, a man, intended to translate for that particular session,” emphasizing that it was “clearly intended to draw attention” as “President Putin made a big point of basically introducing President Trump to the interpreter, which is something that he normally wouldn’t do” (Schwab et al. 2021Schwab, Nikki, Emily Goodin, Geoff Earle, and Morgan Phillips 2021 “Fiona Hill Says a Man Was Scheduled to Translate Putin and Trump’s Meeting — but the Kremlin Swapped in the Attractive Interpreter to Distract Donald at the Last Minute.” Daily Mail. Last modified October 4, 2021. Accessed January 29, 2026. https://​www​.dailymail​.co​.uk​/news​/article​-10057807​/Hill​-confirms​-Kremlin​-swapped​-attractive​-interpreter​-distract​-Trump​.htmlSchwab, Nikki, Emily Goodin, Geoff Earle, and Morgan Phillips 2021 “Fiona Hill Says a Man Was Scheduled to Translate Putin and Trump’s Meeting — but the Kremlin Swapped in the Attractive Interpreter to Distract Donald at the Last Minute.” Daily Mail. Last modified October 4, 2021. Accessed January 29, 2026. https://​www​.dailymail​.co​.uk​/news​/article​-10057807​/Hill​-confirms​-Kremlin​-swapped​-attractive​-interpreter​-distract​-Trump​.html).

The above epigraph has been selected to set the tone and establish the framework which this article seeks to investigate, namely how objectification of the body and interpreting intersect. Drawing on the concept of ‘aesthetic labor’ (Warhurst and Nickson 2020Warhurst, Chris, and Dennis Nickson 2020 Aesthetic Labor. London: SAGE. Warhurst, Chris, and Dennis Nickson 2020 Aesthetic Labor. London: SAGE. ), I examine the lived experiences of female interpreters to delve into their clients’ unreasonable requests, and argue that the latter’s expectations of “looking good” and “sounding right” (Williams and Connell 2010Williams, Christine L., and Catherine Connell 2010 “Looking Good and Sounding Right: Aesthetic Labor and Social Inequality in the Retail Industry.” Work and Occupations 37 (3): 349–377. Williams, Christine L., and Catherine Connell 2010 “Looking Good and Sounding Right: Aesthetic Labor and Social Inequality in the Retail Industry.” Work and Occupations 37 (3): 349–377. , 350) reinforce the image of female interpreters as sexualized “display objects” (Mears and Connell 2016Mears, Ashley, and Catherine Connell 2016 “The Paradoxical Vale of Deviant Cases: Towards a Gendered Theory of Display Work.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41 (2): 333–359. Mears, Ashley, and Catherine Connell 2016 “The Paradoxical Vale of Deviant Cases: Towards a Gendered Theory of Display Work.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41 (2): 333–359. , 336). The norms and expectations that interpreters confront at work are gendered, racialized, and reproduce gender and racial inequalities in several ways. This leads not only to devaluation of the interpreting profession, but also to the marginalization of interpreters as gendered and racialized individuals, affecting their rendering, performance, sense of self, and professional relations with clients.

Warhurst and Nickson (2020Warhurst, Chris, and Dennis Nickson 2020 Aesthetic Labor. London: SAGE. Warhurst, Chris, and Dennis Nickson 2020 Aesthetic Labor. London: SAGE. , 44) define aesthetic labor “as the supply of embodied capacities and attributes possessed by workers at the point of entry into employment.” Through institutionalized processes of recruitment, training, monitoring, and reward, employers appropriate and commodify workers’ embodied capacities, translating them into formally recognized skills that are aesthetically aligned with the desired form of the service encounter. These encounters, whether face-to-face or mediated through voice, rely on the management of workers’ corporeality so as to intentionally appeal to clients’ senses. In most cases of aesthetic labor, the way that the body is displayed is a crucial aspect of the job, “oftentimes explicitly so,” but it is “not the primary reason that the job exists” (Mears 2014Mears, Ashley 2014 “Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work, Gender, and Beauty.” Sociology Compass 8 (12): 1330–1343. Mears, Ashley 2014 “Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work, Gender, and Beauty.” Sociology Compass 8 (12): 1330–1343. , 1333).

Aesthetic labor offers a unique tool to analyze the embodied aspects of interpreting as well as its body politics. How interpreters navigate the gendered and racialized requests placed by clients provides a privileged insight into client–interpreter relations in complex structural power relations. In what follows, I outline my theoretical framework, which addresses both the gender dimensions of aesthetic labor and its racial embodiment. Drawing on relevant theoretical underpinnings from raciolinguistics, I also include the role of voice and accent in the aesthetics of interpreting. I then present the parameters of the study, followed by my analysis of interviews with conference and community interpreters. In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of the findings and directions for future research.

2.The ‘managed’ look and voice: A conceptual overview

Originating in the retail and hospitality industry in the UK (Nickson et al. 2001Nickson, Dennis, Chris Warhurst, Anne Witz, and Anne Marie Cullen 2001 “The Importance of Being Aesthetic: Work, Employment and Service Organization.” In Customer Service: Empowerment and Entrapment, edited by Andrew Sturdy, Irena Grugulis, and Hugh Willmott, 170–190. Basingstoke: Palgrave.Nickson, Dennis, Chris Warhurst, Anne Witz, and Anne Marie Cullen 2001 “The Importance of Being Aesthetic: Work, Employment and Service Organization.” In Customer Service: Empowerment and Entrapment, edited by Andrew Sturdy, Irena Grugulis, and Hugh Willmott, 170–190. Basingstoke: Palgrave.; Witz, Warhurst, and Nickson 2003Witz, Anne Marie, Chris Warhurst, and Dennis Nickson 2003 “The Labor of Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Organization.” Organization 10 (1): 33–54. Witz, Anne Marie, Chris Warhurst, and Dennis Nickson 2003 “The Labor of Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Organization.” Organization 10 (1): 33–54. ; Nickson, Warhurst, and Dutton 2005Nickson, Dennis, Chris Warhurst, and Eli Dutton 2005 “The Importance of Attitude and Appearance in the Service Encounter in Retail and Hospitality.” Managing Service Quality: An International Journal 15 (2): 195–208. Nickson, Dennis, Chris Warhurst, and Eli Dutton 2005 “The Importance of Attitude and Appearance in the Service Encounter in Retail and Hospitality.” Managing Service Quality: An International Journal 15 (2): 195–208. ), the concept of aesthetic labor focuses on how the value of certain looks is established for certain job positions. Closely linked to Hochschild’s (1983Hochschild, Arlie 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.Hochschild, Arlie 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press., 7) seminal concept of ‘emotional labor’, which requires employees to manage feelings to conform to work role requirements and “produce the proper state in others,” aesthetic labor seeks to develop a theory of the sociology of the body which explores the processes of the creation of an image of the ideal worker through the recruitment of potential employees who are compelled to achieve a corporate identity (Nickson et al. 2001Nickson, Dennis, Chris Warhurst, Anne Witz, and Anne Marie Cullen 2001 “The Importance of Being Aesthetic: Work, Employment and Service Organization.” In Customer Service: Empowerment and Entrapment, edited by Andrew Sturdy, Irena Grugulis, and Hugh Willmott, 170–190. Basingstoke: Palgrave.Nickson, Dennis, Chris Warhurst, Anne Witz, and Anne Marie Cullen 2001 “The Importance of Being Aesthetic: Work, Employment and Service Organization.” In Customer Service: Empowerment and Entrapment, edited by Andrew Sturdy, Irena Grugulis, and Hugh Willmott, 170–190. Basingstoke: Palgrave.; Witz, Warhurst, and Nickson 2003Witz, Anne Marie, Chris Warhurst, and Dennis Nickson 2003 “The Labor of Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Organization.” Organization 10 (1): 33–54. Witz, Anne Marie, Chris Warhurst, and Dennis Nickson 2003 “The Labor of Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Organization.” Organization 10 (1): 33–54. ).11.Hochschild (1983Hochschild, Arlie 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.Hochschild, Arlie 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press., 147) argues that in jobs involving “face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact” with the public, “the emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself” (5; emphasis in original). See Ayan (2020)Ayan, Irem 2020 “Re-Thinking Neutrality through Emotional Labor: The (In)visible Work of Conference Interpreters.” TTR 33 (2): 125–146. Ayan, Irem 2020 “Re-Thinking Neutrality through Emotional Labor: The (In)visible Work of Conference Interpreters.” TTR 33 (2): 125–146. for an analysis of the conference interpreter’s professional role as emotional labor. Centering on how employees’ looks and behaviors are shaped through components such as appearance standards and dress codes according to cultural and context-specific beauty norms, aesthetic labor moves beyond the mere analytic focus on feelings, affect, and emotions to disclose how employee corporeality is appropriated and regulated; it “involves management in attempting to appropriate [their] employees’ sexuality to develop and mobilize the sex appeal of these employees for commercial benefit” (Nickson and Warhurst 2009Nickson, Dennis, and Chris Warhurst 2009 “ ‘Who’s Got the Look?’ Emotional, Aesthetic and Sexualized Labor in Interactive Services.” Gender, Work, and Organization 16 (3): 385–404. Nickson, Dennis, and Chris Warhurst 2009 “ ‘Who’s Got the Look?’ Emotional, Aesthetic and Sexualized Labor in Interactive Services.” Gender, Work, and Organization 16 (3): 385–404. , 398) and “creating affective events that provoke sensory reactions from customers” (394).22.Although I acknowledge that emotional labor and aesthetic labor are deeply intertwined, and that individuals who engage in aesthetic labor also engage in emotional labor, the emotional implications of performing aesthetic labor are outside the scope of this article. Organizations or employers may communicate — either explicitly or implicitly — their particular image and appearance norms to impose various facets of aesthetic labor on employees as unpaid work, including weight management, weight maintenance, and also appropriate makeup, which is strongly associated with assumptions regarding health, heterosexuality, and credibility in the workplace (Dellinger and Williams 1997Dellinger, Kirsten, and Christine Williams 1997 “Makeup at Work: Negotiating Appearance Rules in the Workplace.” Gender & Society 11: 151–177. Dellinger, Kirsten, and Christine Williams 1997 “Makeup at Work: Negotiating Appearance Rules in the Workplace.” Gender & Society 11: 151–177. ). Such practices bring to the fore the work that employees do to their bodies to translate their looks into economic and symbolic rewards (Mears 2014Mears, Ashley 2014 “Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work, Gender, and Beauty.” Sociology Compass 8 (12): 1330–1343. Mears, Ashley 2014 “Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work, Gender, and Beauty.” Sociology Compass 8 (12): 1330–1343. ). As appearance matters not only on a personal, but also on an institutional level, the employee’s body thus becomes part of what is being sold (Hochschild 1983Hochschild, Arlie 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.Hochschild, Arlie 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.).

Because physical cues and bodily characteristics are quintessential elements in the construction of beauty (Walters 2018Walters, Kyla 2018 “They’ll Go with the Lighter: Tri-Racial Aesthetic Labor in Clothing Retail.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4 (1): 128–141. Walters, Kyla 2018 “They’ll Go with the Lighter: Tri-Racial Aesthetic Labor in Clothing Retail.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4 (1): 128–141. ), a significant conceptual tool underlying aesthetic labor is ‘symbolic’ and ‘embodied cultural capital’ (cf., Bourdieu 1986Bourdieu, Pierre 1986 “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John G. Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood Press.Bourdieu, Pierre 1986 “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John G. Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood Press.); that is, those corporeal markers of gender, race, ethnicity, and social class written onto the body and performed in various spheres of society. Gender structures the social world in ways that make appearance more central for women. With its symbolic status in the labor market as in society at large, the female body possesses “sign-bearing carriers of taste” (Skeggs 2004Skeggs, Beverley 2004 “Context and Background: Pierre Bourdieu’s Analysis of Class, Gender and Sexuality.” The Sociological Review 52 (s2): 19–33. Skeggs, Beverley 2004 “Context and Background: Pierre Bourdieu’s Analysis of Class, Gender and Sexuality.” The Sociological Review 52 (s2): 19–33. , 22), which grants institutions and customers — within the terms of hegemonic heteronormativity — a particular status in ways that male, non-binary, transgender, and other bodies do not. Tapping into patriarchal and hierarchical norms, much of the aesthetic labor research has documented how young female bodies are particularly hired to indicate and respond to gendered and classed expectations of care-giving and sexual attractiveness (Hanser 2009Hanser, Amy 2009 Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social Distinction in Urban China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Hanser, Amy 2009 Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social Distinction in Urban China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.; Otis 2011Otis, Eileen 2011 Markets and Bodies: Women, Service Work, and the Making of Inequality in China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Otis, Eileen 2011 Markets and Bodies: Women, Service Work, and the Making of Inequality in China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ), which illustrates the commodification of young female bodies in professional milieus.

As multiple social factors are entwined with each other, the explorations of these diverse intersections offer a nuanced understanding of how aesthetic labor is performed and experienced. In this regard, race, with its multiple dimensions, including “racial identity, self-classification, observed race, reflected race, phenotype, and racial ancestry” (Roth 2016Roth, Wendy 2016 “The Multiple Dimensions of Race.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39 (8): 1310–1338. Roth, Wendy 2016 “The Multiple Dimensions of Race.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39 (8): 1310–1338. , 1310), becomes inseparable from gender, adding a significant depth to appearance norms and aesthetic labor. From a feminist perspective, Collins (1990)Collins, Patricia Hill 1990 Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.Collins, Patricia Hill 1990 Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. and Young (1990)Young, Iris Marion 1990 Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Young, Iris Marion 1990 Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. contend that it is ‘otherness’ against which the norms of ideal beauty are defined and implemented.33. Collins (1990)Collins, Patricia Hill 1990 Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.Collins, Patricia Hill 1990 Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. and Young (1990)Young, Iris Marion 1990 Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Young, Iris Marion 1990 Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. draw on Fanon (1952)Fanon, Frantz 1952 Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.Fanon, Frantz 1952 Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press., who identifies ‘otherness’ as the process in which the black man has to exist and be defined in relation to the white man. Depictions of Eurocentric beauty lead to discrimination of non-White bodies, creating body dissatisfaction and low self-esteem for the Other.44.See, for example, Walters’s (2018)Walters, Kyla 2018 “They’ll Go with the Lighter: Tri-Racial Aesthetic Labor in Clothing Retail.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4 (1): 128–141. Walters, Kyla 2018 “They’ll Go with the Lighter: Tri-Racial Aesthetic Labor in Clothing Retail.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4 (1): 128–141. tri-racial approach to aesthetic labor, which examines how White-dominant beauty standards exoticize and exclude certain phenotypical forms of racial difference in clothing retail. A racial beauty hierarchy dictates who gets the best schedules and raises, putting White on top, ranking a blend of various racial groups including Asian, Latine, and Middle Eastern second; and placing Black people at the bottom (Misra and Walters 2022Misra, Joya, and Kyla Walters 2022 Walking Mannequins: How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work. Oakland: University of California Press.Misra, Joya, and Kyla Walters 2022 Walking Mannequins: How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work. Oakland: University of California Press.).55.I am using the commonly used term among Spanish speakers ‘Latine’ as a gender-inclusive alternative to otherwise linguistically gendered terms of ‘Latino/a’. At the intersection of the ‘White gaze’ and the ‘corporate gaze’ (Wissinger 2012Wissinger, Elizabeth 2012 “Managing the Semiotics of Skin Tone: Race and Aesthetic Labor in the Fashion Modeling Industry.” Economic and Industrial Democracy 33 (1): 125–143. Wissinger, Elizabeth 2012 “Managing the Semiotics of Skin Tone: Race and Aesthetic Labor in the Fashion Modeling Industry.” Economic and Industrial Democracy 33 (1): 125–143. ), ramping up or reducing one’s racial characteristics emerges as a unique quality of aesthetic labor, which becomes crucial for an understanding of the commodification of self, body, image, and embodiment.66.See Wissinger (2012)Wissinger, Elizabeth 2012 “Managing the Semiotics of Skin Tone: Race and Aesthetic Labor in the Fashion Modeling Industry.” Economic and Industrial Democracy 33 (1): 125–143. Wissinger, Elizabeth 2012 “Managing the Semiotics of Skin Tone: Race and Aesthetic Labor in the Fashion Modeling Industry.” Economic and Industrial Democracy 33 (1): 125–143. for an analysis of how fashion models in New York City manage and manipulate their racial appearances as aesthetic labor.

Besides ‘looking good’, ‘sounding nice’ also applies to aesthetic labor. Attributes such as gender, race, and ethnicity are salient in terms of sounding ‘right’ in certain job positions in which foreign-accented employees face discrimination. Drawing on raciolinguistics, Ramjattan (2019)Ramjattan, Vijay 2019 “Raciolinguistics and the Aesthetic Laborer.” Journal of Industrial Relations 61 (5): 726–738. Ramjattan, Vijay 2019 “Raciolinguistics and the Aesthetic Laborer.” Journal of Industrial Relations 61 (5): 726–738. criticizes the separation of body and voice in aesthetic labor research and contends that working on appearance and voice complement one another in language-focused aesthetic labor. Referring to Roth-Gordon’s (2016)Roth-Gordon, Jennifer 2016 “From Upstanding Citizen to North American Rapper and Back Again: The Racial Malleability of Poor Male Brazilian Youth.” In Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race, edited by H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball, 51–64. New York: Oxford University Press. Roth-Gordon, Jennifer 2016 “From Upstanding Citizen to North American Rapper and Back Again: The Racial Malleability of Poor Male Brazilian Youth.” In Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race, edited by H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball, 51–64. New York: Oxford University Press. use of the concept of ‘racial malleability’, that is “the adoption of so-called White linguistic/cultural practices to lessen the stigma of one’s racialized position in particular situations” (Ramjattan 2019Ramjattan, Vijay 2019 “Raciolinguistics and the Aesthetic Laborer.” Journal of Industrial Relations 61 (5): 726–738. Ramjattan, Vijay 2019 “Raciolinguistics and the Aesthetic Laborer.” Journal of Industrial Relations 61 (5): 726–738. , 729), he explores how racialized teaching assistants and call center workers engage in ‘self-whitening’ practices such as using standardized forms of English dialects, and mimicking Western accents to enhance their perceived credibility.

Against this backdrop, spoken-language interpreting — as a result of its face-to-face and voice-to-voice modality of practice — represents a desirable field to expand the investigations of aesthetic labor. The International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) has been functioning as a norm-setting authority for conference interpreting since its creation in 1953 (Zwischenberger 2015Zwischenberger, Cornelia 2015 “Simultaneous Conference Interpreting and a Supernorm that Governs It All.” Meta 60 (1): 90–111. Zwischenberger, Cornelia 2015 “Simultaneous Conference Interpreting and a Supernorm that Governs It All.” Meta 60 (1): 90–111. ); however, its standards were “blindly transferred to other forms of interpreting” (Angelelli 2000Angelelli, Claudia 2000 “Interpretation as a Communicative Event: A Look through Hymes’ Lenses.” Meta 45 (4): 580–592. Angelelli, Claudia 2000 “Interpretation as a Communicative Event: A Look through Hymes’ Lenses.” Meta 45 (4): 580–592. , 580) and mostly set by male interpreters at the time (see Susam-Saraeva et al. 2023Susam-Saraeva, Şebnem, Carmen Acosta Vicente, Luciana Carvalho Fonseca, Olga García-Caro, Begona Martínez-Pagán, Flor Montero, and Gabriela Yañez 2023 “Roundtable: Feminist Interpreting (Studies): The Story So Far.” Translation Studies 16 (1): 134–159. Susam-Saraeva, Şebnem, Carmen Acosta Vicente, Luciana Carvalho Fonseca, Olga García-Caro, Begona Martínez-Pagán, Flor Montero, and Gabriela Yañez 2023 “Roundtable: Feminist Interpreting (Studies): The Story So Far.” Translation Studies 16 (1): 134–159. ). Drawing on the norms of good quality interpreting, some scholars have focused on body-related aspects of the profession, including voice quality, intonation (Wang 2022Wang, Caiwen 2022 “A Theoretical Model to Elucidate the Elusive Concept ‘Voice’ for Interpreters.” Perspectives 30 (4): 569–584. Wang, Caiwen 2022 “A Theoretical Model to Elucidate the Elusive Concept ‘Voice’ for Interpreters.” Perspectives 30 (4): 569–584. ), and the importance of voice training (Horváth 2017Horváth, Ildikó 2017 “The Speech Behavior of Interpreters.” Across Languages and Cultures 18 (2): 219–236. Horváth, Ildikó 2017 “The Speech Behavior of Interpreters.” Across Languages and Cultures 18 (2): 219–236. ). Highlighting customer satisfaction, Kurz (2001Kurz, Ingrid 2001 “Conference Interpreting: Quality in the Ears of the User.” Meta 46 (2): 394–409. Kurz, Ingrid 2001 “Conference Interpreting: Quality in the Ears of the User.” Meta 46 (2): 394–409. , 394) claims that “there is no reason why this generally accepted marketing principle should not apply to conference interpreting as well” since the interpreter’s performance is “evaluated by customers in terms of what they actually receive in relation to what they expected.” Customer-centered perspectives on accuracy, fidelity, and in particular ‘pleasant voice’ and ‘native accent’ (cf., Kurz 2001Kurz, Ingrid 2001 “Conference Interpreting: Quality in the Ears of the User.” Meta 46 (2): 394–409. Kurz, Ingrid 2001 “Conference Interpreting: Quality in the Ears of the User.” Meta 46 (2): 394–409. ) overlook the real-world problems interpreters face within various social dynamics.

‘Looking good’ and ‘sounding nice’ intersect in a unique way in interpreting to a degree that responds to the gap engendered by the separation of body and voice. The gendered and racialized body of the interpreter as a site through which labor is performed and how the interpreter’s laboring body is perceived by others offer a unique set of tools to address how structural and embodied dynamics in gender, class, and race play into the expectations clients have of interpreters (Woodall-Greene and Bailey 2025Woodall-Greene, Taylor, and Lucy Bailey 2025 “Theorizing the Body in the ASL Interpreting Field: Promising Dimensions for Further Research.” Journal of Interpretation 33 (1): Article 5, 1–20.Woodall-Greene, Taylor, and Lucy Bailey 2025 “Theorizing the Body in the ASL Interpreting Field: Promising Dimensions for Further Research.” Journal of Interpretation 33 (1): Article 5, 1–20.).77.See Woodall-Greene and Bailey (2025)Woodall-Greene, Taylor, and Lucy Bailey 2025 “Theorizing the Body in the ASL Interpreting Field: Promising Dimensions for Further Research.” Journal of Interpretation 33 (1): Article 5, 1–20.Woodall-Greene, Taylor, and Lucy Bailey 2025 “Theorizing the Body in the ASL Interpreting Field: Promising Dimensions for Further Research.” Journal of Interpretation 33 (1): Article 5, 1–20. for a detailed analysis of body politics in the American Sign Language Interpreting profession, and how the body is profoundly gendered and racialized in ways that shape field dynamics. In various parts of the world, conference interpreting is presented by the media as a well-paid, prestigious, modern-day profession, particularly suited to women (Du and Wang 2021Du, Yiwei, and Binhua Wang 2021 “A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of the Representation of Conference Interpreters in Chinese Media.” Translation Spaces 10 (2): 306–328. Du, Yiwei, and Binhua Wang 2021 “A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of the Representation of Conference Interpreters in Chinese Media.” Translation Spaces 10 (2): 306–328. ; Diriker 2022Diriker, Ebru 2022 “The (Re)presentation of Interpreters in the Turkish Media: A Diachronic and Cross-Setting Analysis.” The Translator 28 (2): 196–214. Diriker, Ebru 2022 “The (Re)presentation of Interpreters in the Turkish Media: A Diachronic and Cross-Setting Analysis.” The Translator 28 (2): 196–214. ). In some contexts, it is portrayed as ‘an alternative to modelling’, with vibrant pictures and lengthy interviews with female interpreters in the media framing them as “angels of a challenging profession” or “Angels of Congresses” (Diriker 2022Diriker, Ebru 2022 “The (Re)presentation of Interpreters in the Turkish Media: A Diachronic and Cross-Setting Analysis.” The Translator 28 (2): 196–214. Diriker, Ebru 2022 “The (Re)presentation of Interpreters in the Turkish Media: A Diachronic and Cross-Setting Analysis.” The Translator 28 (2): 196–214. , 209).88.It must be highlighted that “in settings marked with political tensions or conflicts of interest, on the other hand, the visibility given to interpreters may turn out to be unfavorable, reflecting the diverse interests” (Diriker 2022Diriker, Ebru 2022 “The (Re)presentation of Interpreters in the Turkish Media: A Diachronic and Cross-Setting Analysis.” The Translator 28 (2): 196–214. Diriker, Ebru 2022 “The (Re)presentation of Interpreters in the Turkish Media: A Diachronic and Cross-Setting Analysis.” The Translator 28 (2): 196–214. , 212). See Diriker as well for an analysis of how the media representations of interpreters in Turkey have changed over the years. In others, the beauty of interpreters is identified as a salient feature which elevates them to the status of public celebrities selected and consumed just like in popular culture (Du and Wang 2021Du, Yiwei, and Binhua Wang 2021 “A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of the Representation of Conference Interpreters in Chinese Media.” Translation Spaces 10 (2): 306–328. Du, Yiwei, and Binhua Wang 2021 “A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of the Representation of Conference Interpreters in Chinese Media.” Translation Spaces 10 (2): 306–328. ). Cho’s (2017Cho, Jinhyun 2017 “Why Do Interpreters Need to Be Beautiful? Aesthetic Labor of Language Workers.” Gender and Language 11 (4): 482–506. Cho, Jinhyun 2017 “Why Do Interpreters Need to Be Beautiful? Aesthetic Labor of Language Workers.” Gender and Language 11 (4): 482–506. , 483) in-depth focus on the phenomenon of “eoljjang tongyeoksa” ‘good-looking interpreters’, highly sensationalized by the Korean media, reveals beautification practices emerging among English–Korean female interpreters as a way to add value to their English proficiency in the saturated Korean freelance market, which demonstrates “how quickly and easily aesthetics have been justified among interpreters who were once socially respected exclusively for their language skills” (500). Female interpreters in the Korean market push themselves to compete and implement various “self-styling practices” (493) such as working on smile, voice, body management, fashion (clothes and hair), and even plastic surgery in extreme cases. In addition to their language and cultural skills, as Cho (2017)Cho, Jinhyun 2017 “Why Do Interpreters Need to Be Beautiful? Aesthetic Labor of Language Workers.” Gender and Language 11 (4): 482–506. Cho, Jinhyun 2017 “Why Do Interpreters Need to Be Beautiful? Aesthetic Labor of Language Workers.” Gender and Language 11 (4): 482–506. contends, these interpreters present themselves as a “perfect service package” (502) with aesthetic skills preferred and desired by male clients. Presentations of femininity in female-dominated occupations such as interpreting thus become a salient “investment strategy” (Lovell 2000Lovell, Terry 2000 “Thinking Feminism with and against Bourdieu.” Feminist Theory 1: 11–32. Lovell, Terry 2000 “Thinking Feminism with and against Bourdieu.” Feminist Theory 1: 11–32. , 22) to get ahead in a competitive market. Such practices provide, from a feminist perspective, valuable insights into the interpreter’s ‘commodified labor’ (Giustini 2024Giustini, Deborah 2024 “You Can Book an Interpreter the Same Way You Order Your Uber: (Re)Interpreting Work and Digital Labor Platforms.” Perspectives 32 (3): 441–459. Giustini, Deborah 2024 “You Can Book an Interpreter the Same Way You Order Your Uber: (Re)Interpreting Work and Digital Labor Platforms.” Perspectives 32 (3): 441–459. ) and their commodified ‘voice and gaze’ lent to the client (Bahadır 2024Bahadır, Şebnem 2024 “The Political in the Voice and the Gaze of the Field Researcher/Interpreter.” In Translating Migration, edited by Angela Treiber, Kerstin Kazzazi, and Marina Jaciuk, 163–184. Berlin: Springer. Bahadır, Şebnem 2024 “The Political in the Voice and the Gaze of the Field Researcher/Interpreter.” In Translating Migration, edited by Angela Treiber, Kerstin Kazzazi, and Marina Jaciuk, 163–184. Berlin: Springer. ).

3.Parameters of the study

To elaborate on aesthetic labor in relation to the interpreter’s gendered and racialized body, I draw on data from two series of interviews with professional interpreters. The first series was conducted between March and August 2018 with twenty-one conference interpreters (15 female, 6 male) working in various sociocultural contexts in Belgium, Germany, Turkey, and the US. Sixteen participants worked as freelancers, and the remaining five were affiliated with a government institution or a private company as staff interpreters. Five of these twenty-one interviews were conducted in English; the others I translated myself. Since conference interpreters’ networks are small, and the professional stakes are high, I am not identifying the languages from which I translated. All of the interpreters in this first series have university degrees in translation and interpreting. Two have PhD degrees, one of which is in Interpreting Studies, and the other one is in Translation Studies. Two participants were enrolled in a doctoral program in Translation Studies at the time of the interview. Nine participants are registered members of a national association. Five are members of AIIC.

The second series of interviews were conducted between November 2023 and July 2024 with nine community interpreters (7 female, 2 male) in British Columbia, Canada, who work in legal, medical, asylum, and immigration settings as certified members of the Society of Translators and Interpreters of British Columbia (STIBC). Out of the overall total of thirty interviews, three participants identified as a member of the LGBTQIA2S+ community.99.My interviews have not currently yielded enough data for a systematic analysis of how interpreters of the LGBTQIA2S+ community experience aesthetic labor. However, I am aware that it constitutes an important variable to take into consideration for future research.

I collected my data through semi-structured interviews, which varied in duration between forty-five and ninety-five minutes, depending on the interpreters’ schedule and availability. Six of the interviews were conducted in person, and twenty-two were conducted remotely on Skype or Zoom. Two interpreters (female) preferred to have an audio call instead of a video interview. It should be acknowledged that the difference between in-person and online interviews may have had an impact on documenting interactional outcomes such as conversational involvement, as well as the interviewees’ non-verbal cues such as body language and facial expression (Anthony et al. 2025Anthony, Kelly, Michelle Miller-Day, Monica Dupuy, Jarrod Ventura, Arielle L. Hodges, Denise Alonso-Pecora, and Hannatu Dimas 2025 “Is There Really a Difference? A Comparison of In-Person and Online Qualitative Interviews.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 24: 1–13. Anthony, Kelly, Michelle Miller-Day, Monica Dupuy, Jarrod Ventura, Arielle L. Hodges, Denise Alonso-Pecora, and Hannatu Dimas 2025 “Is There Really a Difference? A Comparison of In-Person and Online Qualitative Interviews.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 24: 1–13. ). In the first series, I started with interpreters I personally knew (but with whom I never worked in an interpreting assignment) and then used snowball sampling. In the second series, I reached out to interpreters through their professional profile on STIBC’s website. In the selected quotes, I provide information on the interpreters’ self-reported gender. Details of ethnicity are only provided when the interpreters claimed that their racial features were central to their experience. I have removed details of language pair(s) to ensure anonymity.

I transcribed the first series of interviews myself and outsourced the second series to an external transcriber. Transcribing interpreters’ oral statements into written language can never provide a complete account. Pauses, hesitations, and intonations in the oral language can be difficult to reflect in written language (Point and Baruch 2023Point, Sébastien, and Yehuda Baruch 2023 “(Re)Thinking Transcription Strategies: Current Challenges and Future Research Directions.” Scandinavian Journal of Management 39 (2): 1–10. Point, Sébastien, and Yehuda Baruch 2023 “(Re)Thinking Transcription Strategies: Current Challenges and Future Research Directions.” Scandinavian Journal of Management 39 (2): 1–10. ). Those moments during which interpreters laughed or hesitated were indicated in the transcriptions. It should also be taken into consideration that the setting of the interview can have an influence on the subject’s behavior, which might eventually affect my own observation and interpretation. These biases, as well as my role as co-creator of knowledge along with the interpreters, must be acknowledged.

In the analysis, I draw on feminist standpoint theory (Hartsock 2004Hartsock, Nancy 2004 “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism.” In The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, edited by Sandra G. Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, 35–54. New York: Routledge. Hartsock, Nancy 2004 “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism.” In The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, edited by Sandra G. Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, 35–54. New York: Routledge. ) to bring the female interpreters’ voices to the forefront. Rooted in Marxist theory, feminist standpoint theory argues that marginalized groups, particularly women, possess unique insights from their outsider-within positions, challenging dominant, often male-centric views to offer a more complete understanding of society. It is crucial to analyze marginalized voices in relation to various dynamics and hierarchies since there is no universal account of experience from which to construct knowledge. In this respect, I also benefited from interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), which understands knowledge as inter-subjectively created, focusing on the “rich, detailed, and first-person account” (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009Smith, Jonathan. A., Paul Flowers, and Michael Larkin 2009 Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research. London: SAGE.Smith, Jonathan. A., Paul Flowers, and Michael Larkin 2009 Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research. London: SAGE., 58) of the participants’ testimonies and my interpretation of their lived experiences. In IPA, therefore, “the researcher is trying to make sense of the participant trying to make sense of what is happening to them” (Smith and Osborn 2015Smith, Jonathan A., and Mike Osborn 2015 “Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis as a Useful Methodology for Research on the Lived Experience of Pain.” British Journal of Pain 9 (1): 41–42. Smith, Jonathan A., and Mike Osborn 2015 “Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis as a Useful Methodology for Research on the Lived Experience of Pain.” British Journal of Pain 9 (1): 41–42. , 41). Instead of looking for similarities out of context, these approaches highlight participants’ subjective self-understandings and examine shared attributes and distinctive features emerging in each testimony.

4.The ‘pretty privilege’ of ‘looking good’ and ‘sounding right’

Aesthetic labor emerged in my interviews in connection with Hochschild’s (1983)Hochschild, Arlie 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.Hochschild, Arlie 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. theory of emotional labor, which I had not anticipated. My intention was to investigate how speaking through another ‘I’ impacts interpreters’ sense of identity, including gender. I was interested in understanding how interpreters perform on the ‘social stage’ (Goffman 1959Goffman, Erving 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday.Goffman, Erving 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday.), creating an impression of themselves for the benefit of a target audience as the ‘ideal interpreter’, especially during those moments when they have to translate utterances that go against their own ideologies. I also sought to explore how feminization of the profession took place in different settings, and whether interpreters feel marginalized at work due to their perceived gender. While interpreters were describing their understanding of the ‘ideal interpreter’, they used the language of emotional labor; the concept of ‘presentability’, as well as how this affects their preparation for assignments, also came up from varying viewpoints. Several interpreters (I1, I2, I3, I4, I5, I6, I10, I11, I13, I17, and I20 from the first series) mentioned that requirements such as “we are looking for presentable interpreters,” or “we are looking for female interpreters” appear every so often in certain job advertisements. This led me to explore what it means for interpreters to be ‘presentable’, asking them questions such as what type of preparation it requires, and what difference they think it makes in their practice, performance, and interactions with clients. One female participant (I10) portrayed the ‘ideal interpreter’ as “a lean, fit, active, agile and fleet-footed woman who is not necessarily overly muscular.” A male interpreter (I11) claimed that “one’s physical appearance is a marker of one’s intellectual identity.” Another female interpreter stated that having the appropriate look and voice matters to fulfil the image of an ‘ideal interpreter’:

Looking nice and professional is important. I needed to make myself look even more professional in my twenties to increase my reliability in my clients’ eyes, because, uhh, I was considered as a junior, not a senior at that time. I used to wear business suits most of the time. Even in the booth for example, uh, the audience might see you sitting inside. When they, uh, if… they see me dressed in a professional way, they think that I’m reliable, a reliable interpreter. I also try to make my voice sound more, like… like that of a news-anchor. This is one of the advantages I have. One of my professors told me that. I, uhh, also have the experience of working as a hostess, so I know how to make my voice sound more professional. It sounds more, like… more professional when your voice is soft. And smooth. It makes it very easy for the audience. I put effort in making my voice sound like that.(I1, March 2018)

Young female interpreters reported their need to make themselves be taken more seriously and mentioned “putting on makeup” and “wearing business suits,” “high heels” (I1, I4, I5, I10, I15), and even “fake wedding rings” (I18) to “look older” and “more professional.” These feminine strategies are noteworthy. Highly visible, intelligent, smart, and good-looking conference interpreters under the spotlight become more than part of the décor of the event; they attract the desired attention to contribute to the success of the event for which they are hired for their interpreting services. As I1 states above, aesthetic concerns also seep into the booths as interpreters are reminded that they “are acoustically but not visually insulated from the meeting room” (AIIC 2016AIIC 2016 “Practical Guide for Professional Conference Interpreters.” Accessed January 29, 2026. https://​fr​.scribd​.com​/doc​/307244372​/Practical​-Guide​-for​-Professional​-Conference​-InterpretersAIIC 2016 “Practical Guide for Professional Conference Interpreters.” Accessed January 29, 2026. https://​fr​.scribd​.com​/doc​/307244372​/Practical​-Guide​-for​-Professional​-Conference​-Interpreters, 16).

Another freelance interpreter reported a client’s explicit request for a certain type of female body in a consecutive interpreting setting when I asked her what she thinks of ‘presentability’:

The secretariat of the agency I’m affiliated with received a call from a client a couple months ago. The client in question was, uh, actually a popular television channel. They requested interpreting services live for television, for a talk show. Until here, everything seems normal, right? Uh… Then, um, then their next request was… Um, that the female interpreter they wanted “must have appropriate height and weight measurements to be able sit on a bar stool without any issues during the show.” I think this is what a presentable interpreter means for them [she laughs].(I14, phone interview, July 2018)

The interaction between aesthetic labor and client status creates conditions of vulnerability for interpreters of marginalized genders. The use of female interpreters as aesthetic objects underpins the sociocultural links between female subjectivity and the body, solidifying and perpetuating the traditional binaries of masculine/reason and feminine/body (Butler 2011Butler, Judith 2011 Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith 2011 Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge. ). It leads to female interpreters being treated like a minority — despite their statistical majority in the field. Aesthetically motivated recruitment requests also further female interpreters’ cultural and actual exclusion from professional respect, which can have a significant effect on their body image, creating pressure for them to conform to certain appearance standards in the freelance market to get hired for assignments in which interpreters receive a great deal of public attention such as ceremonial types of gatherings and live TV shows, as Cho’s (2017)Cho, Jinhyun 2017 “Why Do Interpreters Need to Be Beautiful? Aesthetic Labor of Language Workers.” Gender and Language 11 (4): 482–506. Cho, Jinhyun 2017 “Why Do Interpreters Need to Be Beautiful? Aesthetic Labor of Language Workers.” Gender and Language 11 (4): 482–506. analysis illustrates. In a similar vein, drawing on the Romanian freelance market, Spânu (2011)Spânu, Liliana 2011 “Skirts and Suits in Conference Interpreting: Female Interpreters and Male Clients on the Current Romanian Market.” Studia UBB Philologia 1 (6): 175–189.Spânu, Liliana 2011 “Skirts and Suits in Conference Interpreting: Female Interpreters and Male Clients on the Current Romanian Market.” Studia UBB Philologia 1 (6): 175–189. demonstrates the devaluation of highly skilled professional female interpreters and their work, making them dependent on their male clients, and in turn, affecting their career advancement. Body objectification transforms female interpreters into bearers of social hierarchies and power asymmetries, a form of ‘docile bodies’ in Foucault’s (1977)Foucault, Michel 1977 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Peregrine.Foucault, Michel 1977 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Peregrine. sense, in which they become the direct site of social control, treated not only as desired and manipulable bodies, but also as “political puppets” and “small-scale models of power” (136).

The link between presentability and body objectification was present in other interpreters’ testimonies as well. Another seasoned interpreter reported the following when I asked her how she experiences her work as a female interpreter:

There was going to be a factory inauguration ceremony, a factory owned by a foreign private company. I was very young. Um, uh… I dressed formally, a jacket and suit pants. When I went there, my client said: ‘But I will ask you to wear a mini-skirt at the inauguration ceremony. You will be on stage. So, mini-skirt and high heels, please.’ His request made me so angry. I told him, I told him that he was confusing me with a top model!(I12, phone interview, June 2018)

I wondered how the client in question reacted. She continued:

He called the agency and said: ‘I don’t want this interpreter.’ The agency cancelled my assignment. And then my colleagues and my competitors refused to work at that company’s event after all of this. You know what, they seriously hired a top model who spoke English! They asked her to work in the inauguration ceremony. Apparently, she messed it up, because I learned it later. It looks like a minister who took the floor said he could translate his speech by himself.(I12, phone interview, June 2018)

Another interpreter reflected on the moral dimensions of ‘presentability’, and how ‘presentability’ has become ingrained in certain types of assignments:

I identify myself as a feminist, and I dislike the meaning that clients attach to presentability most of the time. It makes me feel that it’s my body which is sold. You feel like you are an object, a commodity being marketed. At the same time, this has become the modern-day marketing strategy for some, hasn’t it? I mean… It represents a trick for those who want to reach a certain profile of clients. Some clients enjoy presentable interpreters. They can show off thanks to them. Um, they don’t care about your experience, um, uh, your interpreting skills. Your credentials don’t mean anything. They’re just not being professional at all. There’s definitely a moral dimension to this, I think.(I20, virtual interview, July 2018)

This systemic tension for female interpreters appears to be experienced differently by male interpreters in similar contexts when they are asked to be ‘presentable’. In my interviews, two male interpreters (I6, I11 from the first series) mentioned that it makes them “feel good” to hear compliments about their bodies (including their voice) from their clients, while female interpreters mainly reported their discomfort when being complimented on their looks, underlining that it is “not appropriate, nor professional” to receive such comments from clients. In comparing the emotional experiences of female and male flight attendants working in the same environment and doing the same work, Hochschild (1983Hochschild, Arlie 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.Hochschild, Arlie 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press., 174) coins the term “status shield” to describe protection afforded to men based on their social status, arguing that thanks to their relatively greater social status, men are shielded from the various abuses of working in a service job compared to women, who, by contrast, possess a more penetrable shield.1010.Highlighting that this phenomenon is not exclusive to gender, Hochschild (1983Hochschild, Arlie 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.Hochschild, Arlie 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press., 174) contends that “persons in low-status categories — women, people of color, children — lack a status shield against poorer treatment of their feelings.” Objectification at work thus weakens female employees’ shield, making them more prone to alienation from their bodies and female characteristics (Hochschild 1983Hochschild, Arlie 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.Hochschild, Arlie 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.).

Bodies achieve significance in their particular contexts; they make sense in their respective social fields where certain privileges play out with significant effects. Below is a testimony from the second series of my interviews, which illustrates how looks and language are intertwined in terms of aesthetic labor in the context of community interpreting, perpetuating racial hierarchies through the privileging of Whiteness. An Asian-identified interpreter, born and raised in Québec, Canada, gives an account of how her racialized body shapes the way the quality of her interpreting skills is perceived and evaluated once race is inserted into the situation. She reported the following when I asked about her background in the field right at the beginning of the interview:

I used to work from and into French, but since facing, um, racial slurs and, you know, mistreatments and, uh, all that, I just stopped working in French. So, in court, I show up as a French interpreter, you know, uh [the accused] would tell me right in my face, “I don’t want interpretation by an Asian.” They look at me and they find out, uh, [I’m] an immigrant or an Asian, they don’t even want to work with me. I grew up in Montréal. French is my second language. People don’t see me as French person, because I have this face and I was like, you know, this is not worth my time. So, I stopped working in French.(I1, November 2023)

Racialized bodies are associated with imagined linguistic deficiencies (Flores and Rosa 2015Flores, Nelson, and Jonathan Rosa 2015 “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education.” Harvard Educational Review 85 (2): 149–171. Flores, Nelson, and Jonathan Rosa 2015 “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education.” Harvard Educational Review 85 (2): 149–171. ; Rosa and Flores 2017Rosa, Jonathan, and Nelson Flores 2017 “Unsettling Race and Language: Toward a Raciolinguistic Perspective.” Language in Society 46 (5): 621–647. Rosa, Jonathan, and Nelson Flores 2017 “Unsettling Race and Language: Toward a Raciolinguistic Perspective.” Language in Society 46 (5): 621–647. ). The above testimony illustrates how corporeal aspects of interpreters can be perceived within racial hierarchies, affecting their professional credibility and perceived reliability. Not having the commonly accepted and desired ‘aesthetic look of a French-speaking face’, this interpreter manages the negative perceptions of her racial appearance, feeling the need to remind the judges at the court of her native-level proficiency, and thus her ability to “speak both in Québécois and Parisian accents” without any issues. On the other hand, the ‘pretty privilege’ of looking White sometimes may not be enough; accent may be used as a proxy for racial marginalization in aesthetic labor (Ramjattan 2019Ramjattan, Vijay 2019 “Raciolinguistics and the Aesthetic Laborer.” Journal of Industrial Relations 61 (5): 726–738. Ramjattan, Vijay 2019 “Raciolinguistics and the Aesthetic Laborer.” Journal of Industrial Relations 61 (5): 726–738. ). Even when it is not physically visible, race and accent — intertwined through social perception and bias — may still determine the credibility of an interpreter’s voice.

Another court and medical interpreter (I2, interviewed in December 2023), who has an interpreting degree from an Eastern European country, reported the subtle complaints she receives from high status clients — such as White doctors — regarding her accent in English when I asked whether she feels marginalized at work. She stated that she feels “more comfortable working with service providers who are immigrants, a visible minority, or a non-native speaker of English.” In her experience, although speaking English in a way that is influenced by the pronunciation, intonation, and rhythm of her native language does not seem to directly undermine her earned professional status, it makes her feel that she does not meet the norms of ‘good quality’ interpreting in terms of ‘pleasant voice’ and ‘native accent’ (cf., Kurz 2001Kurz, Ingrid 2001 “Conference Interpreting: Quality in the Ears of the User.” Meta 46 (2): 394–409. Kurz, Ingrid 2001 “Conference Interpreting: Quality in the Ears of the User.” Meta 46 (2): 394–409. ).

6.Concluding thoughts

Across the different testimonies outlined above, aesthetic labor adds valuable insights to the two crucial aspects that influence interpreters’ experience and performance: the role of their local context and the role of power in that context. ‘Looking good’ and ‘sounding right’ constitute assets grounded in power relations. Power imbalances and expectations are unique in each interpreter’s work setting. The desire to have interpreters subscribe to specific body, gender, race, and language aesthetics (including accent and voice) can evoke different emotional and practical responses in interpreters, leading to feelings of marginalization, vulnerability, and alienation from their bodies and their professional status. Although objectification/commodification is predominantly associated with women’s experience, it can be multidirectional in the sense that it can also happen to, and be done by, all genders in varying forms and at varying levels of intensity. For women, ‘looking professional’ and ‘sounding right’ entail a degree of sexual objectification. In some contexts, female interpreters may only gain status at the expense of putting up with their own objectification via various forms of emotional labor, as emerged in my interviews. Because such objectification is not only tolerated but also viewed as an unspoken yet taken-for-granted tenet of ‘looking professional’ and ‘sounding nice’, it can affect interpreters’ performance as well as their perception of professionalism.

In a profession that “seeks neutrality, in the sense that interpreters strive to translate exactly what they hear/see,” the body is conceptualized as an “instrument rather than an ontologically whole, racialized/gendered self” (Woodall-Greene and Bailey 2025Woodall-Greene, Taylor, and Lucy Bailey 2025 “Theorizing the Body in the ASL Interpreting Field: Promising Dimensions for Further Research.” Journal of Interpretation 33 (1): Article 5, 1–20.Woodall-Greene, Taylor, and Lucy Bailey 2025 “Theorizing the Body in the ASL Interpreting Field: Promising Dimensions for Further Research.” Journal of Interpretation 33 (1): Article 5, 1–20., 11–12). The value of aesthetic labor-oriented research in conference, community, and sign language interpreting is thus not simply its ability to examine language and the racialized/gendered body of the interpreter at the same time; it is also its particular focus on identifying and addressing the institutional and structural inequalities within which interpreters work on a daily basis. Because it situates the interpreter’s body in its particular sociocultural context, aesthetic labor allows us to see how the value of bodily capital is both produced by and reproduces social classifications such as race, gender, class, and age. In this regard, it would be worthwhile to explore lived experiences of interpreters from all genders, nationalities, and age groups in various (sub)cultures and timeframes.

Furthermore, testimonies in this article call for outside-the-box thinking with regard to the dynamics of interpreter–client relationships. Interpreters’ voices offer unique tools to revisit the norms of integrity, ethics, and neutrality, among others, providing useful insights as to how to educate clients, a highly relevant topic which came up frequently in my interviews. An interesting area would also be clients’ perceptions of interpreters with various accents and body presentation, as well as interpreters’ feelings of ‘linguistic insecurity’ (Bouchard 2024Bouchard, Marie-Ève 2024 “A Youth Perspective on the Challenges Related to Fostering Linguistic Security in the Classroom: New Insights from the English-Dominant Context of British Columbia.” Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics 27 (3): 102–119. Bouchard, Marie-Ève 2024 “A Youth Perspective on the Challenges Related to Fostering Linguistic Security in the Classroom: New Insights from the English-Dominant Context of British Columbia.” Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics 27 (3): 102–119. ) at work, how this (in)security is (re)produced, experienced, and displayed, and how it affects the interpreter’s performance. It is also important to emphasize that, although aesthetic labor tends to reduce employees to marginalized and subjugated bodies, it does not preclude the possibility of resistance. Interpreters still possess a degree of agency by which they can break free from the grip of their clients’ aesthetic guidelines and preferences, creating a space for themselves to display various forms of aesthetic resistance.