Translator employment and the risk of market collapse: News from Australia

According to the economic theory of adverse selection, a general failure to signal the quality of a product or service can lead to lower prices, which forces good quality out of the market and may lead to market collapse. Applied to translation services, this suggests that a strong certification system, as a signal of quality, should stabilise the market. Australia has perhaps the world’s most developed system for the certification of interpreters and translators, and yet there are indications of adverse selection: up to a third of practitioners self-report that they are likely to leave the sector. We therefore ask whether professional certification has actually had a stabilising effect on the Australian market. To address the question, we evaluate several other factors that could contribute to adverse selection: an oversupply of certifications may drive prices down; low remuneration may be endemic; deceptive business practices can skew the signalling of quality; public discourse can lead to low trust in professionals, independently of quality; and uncertified community members can take over translation functions. Quantitative and partly longitudinal data and interviews with 35 stakeholders suggest that these factors may indeed combine to produce downward pressures on the market, and that no certification system can be expected to counter all those effects. Other remedies are also required.