Introduction
Introducing labour (and work) in translation and interpreting

Cornelia Zwischenberger and Alexa Alfer
University of Vienna | University of Westminster
Publication history

Date received: 24 July 2026

Date accepted: 6 August 2026

Table of contents

In spite of Translation Studies’ growing interest in the rapidly evolving socio-economic and socio-technical conditions of the translation and interpreting professions, systematic investigations of the concept of labour in relation to translation and interpreting remain relatively scant. In our paper “Translaboration: Translation and Labour” (Zwischenberger and Alfer 2022), we offered a first conceptual differentiation between translational labour and translational work, arguing that, while work is, in professional discourses at least, more readily associated with translation, translation as labour (i.e., as an activity structurally embedded in capitalist chains of surplus-value production) has so far featured far less prominently in Translation Studies debates. This has resulted in the perpetuation of the positivist and neoliberal orders of discourse (Baumgarten 2017) that govern the translation industry and academia alike and further consolidate

Funding

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Vienna.

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Address for correspondence

Cornelia Zwischenberger

Centre for Translation Studies

University of Vienna

Gymnasiumstrasse 50

1190 VIENNA

Austria

[email protected]
ORCiD logo with linkhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-4897-4037

Co-author information

Alexa Alfer
University of Westminster
[email protected]
ORCiD logo with linkhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0149-2732
 
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