The Impact of COVID-19 on the Translation Industry: Insights from Turkiye

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, which devastated social and economic life all over the world, led to significant changes in the organizational processes within educational, social, medical, and working settings. The primary aim of this study is to explore the perceptions and first-hand experiences posed by the actors of the translation industry regarding the permanent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on socio-economic and psychosocial conditions in the wider and personal context through inductive content analysis. With this purpose, drawing upon a course-based applied research project, a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews administered to 86 participants were instrumentalized to scrutinize socio-economic vulnerability, the dynamics of work-life balance, work-family balance, changes in the translator and interpreter profiles, and permanent changes in the field on the basis of the evolving translation market during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings revealed that participants informed about negative experiences about teleworking or telecommuting during the pandemic, (i.e., lower performance, demotivation, work-life imbalance, work-family conflict, and the risk of burnout) in addition to some favorable outcomes such as enhancement of quality of life, increasing job performance and satisfaction, lesser work-family imbalance, reduced rates of stress. In spite of a rise in the required qualifications of the workers in the sector concerning technology literacy, skills in using CAT tools and familiarity with remote interpreting, promotion opportunities and wages were reported to decrease. Moreover, this study underlines the emergence of an interpreting mode and the required technology literacy impel a revolutionary change in the translation training and inevitably jeopardize the job of those who cannot keep up with the digitalization and technological development.