Embedded Strangers in One’s Own Job? Freelance Interpreters’ Invisible Work: A Practice Theory Approach

Abstract

This article investigates invisible work, as voiced by professionals in the interpreting sector in the UK. Informed by a practice theory approach alongside the sociology of invisible work, it re-frames invisibility as enacted according to the elements that organise and motivate work in terms of purposeful, normative and skilful actions. Drawing on a qualitative dataset of 20 observations and 46 interviews with interpreters, the article conceives invisibility as a functional labour logic in which compliance and resistance to being unseen are the twofold cornerstone of professionalism but also of devaluation. As a freelance workforce, interpreters face contradictions between deontological and stakeholders’ expectations of invisibility, and the individual need of displaying an expert role for securing work continuity. This article contributes to social practice and invisible work literature by uncovering the performative interrelation of the work dynamics which demand a negotiation of hidden/visible status.

Keywords

interpreters invisible work performance practice theory freelance work

Introduction

The concept of ‘invisible labour’ spans sociological investigations as ‘the work necessary for work to be accomplished’ (Gherardi, 2017: 13). Questioning the obscuring of work across socioeconomic orders, research variously frames invisibility as background activities uncaught by institutional observers, for example, nursing and policy-making (Allen, 2014; Laube et al., 2020); as lack of physical workplaces or directly observable tasks, for example, digital work (Whiting and Symon, 2020); as the exploitation of non-economic labour, such as prison work (Pandeli et al., 2019); as the gendered devaluation of women’s activities (Kofman, 2000; Kosny and MacEachen, 2010); and as the ‘crowds’ of easily interchangeable workers in freelance environments (Bonini and Gandini, 2016). This framework untangles the systems that reproduce disadvantage, contributing to the identification of structural invisibilisation factors ‘enacted on’ workers as the intersecting spatial, legal and cultural mechanisms which depreciate work (Hatton, 2017: 339). Therefore, extant scholarship approaches invisible work as made invisible by others (Star and Strauss, 1999), while it devotes less attention to work made invisible by those performing it (Petersson and Backman, 2021) or an articulation of the ways in which the organisation of work itself, besides externally enacted mechanisms, can become a precondition for its devaluation. Scholars increasingly attend to the organisation of work – processes, competencies, behaviours – as a ‘meso’ theoretical level which, in contrast with the macro-focus on structural phenomena, emphasises the socially constructed knowledge and shared understandings of work (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011; Gherardi, 2017). Identifying ‘invisibility’ in the synergy between the organisation and performances of work, this article embraces a meso-level approach, asking: ‘How does the organisation of work affect its visibility?’ Coherent with this endeavour, it adopts practice theory, which investigates social life through the meso-level of ‘practices’, processes arranged by shared competencies, motivations and norms transpiring through institutional orders and individuals’ performances (Schatzki, 2002), and increasingly adopted in work and organisational studies (Feldman and Pentland, 2003; Nicolini, 2012; Tsoukas, 2019).

The study exemplifies these dimensions by taking the ambivalent nature of the conference interpreting profession (communication service provision for high-stake multilingual encounters) and the engagements of 57 British interpreters to ‘invisibility’ as the empirical departure point. Interpreters, due to deontology and stakeholders’ expectations, are demanded to work unobtrusively, reproducing the textual body of the speaker in a self-annihilating process (Apostolou, 2009). However, interpreters are predominantly freelancers, so invisibility clashes with their attempts to display expertise for securing work continuity. This article argues that practice theory affords re-framing ‘invisibility’ as enacted according to the elements that organise and motivate work, contributing further understanding of how and why individuals might be steered to perform invisibly. Throughout, it conceptualises ‘invisibility’ as neither an unethical/ethical category, but as a functional dialectic used to navigate the organisation and performance of work in specific employment settings.

The study makes three analytical contributions to the sociological debate. First, through a practice-based approach, it re-frames invisible work as practitioners’ competent accomplishment, negotiated against rules, aims and situationality. This meso-view focuses sociological attention on invisible work as modes of knowledge and action, emerging in situ from the dynamics of social interaction. While focused on interpreting, a refreshingly atypical profession still hidden to social inquiry, this study adds to the growing sociological literature on the importance of attending to labour performance for examining the ramifications of invisibility, as in healthcare (Sargent et al., 2021), political work (Laube et al., 2020), women’s corporate work (Ballakrishnen et al., 2019) and flexible work (Whiting and Symon, 2020), illustrating that ‘to do a sociology of the invisible, means to take on the erasing process as the central human behavior of concern’ (Star, 1991: 281). Second, the study shows the tensions in the negotiation of invisibility, as workers embrace a more or less visible standing according to practice and individual goals. It adds to the literature by highlighting invisibility as an ambiguous regime for accomplishing tasks, particularly when it intersects with employment status constraints (Crain et al., 2016). Third, based on findings showing that both practitioners and stakeholders fuel invisibility either through expectations of unobtrusive work or competitive behaviours aimed at getting noticed by employers, the study contributes to broader sociological debate by emphasising the ‘always relational and recursive production of the visible and the invisible’ (Gherardi, 2017: 18) that provokes unrecognition in labour relations.

The article first reviews invisible work framed through the sociology of work and practice-based epistemology. The second section outlines the empirical case of interpreting and the methodology employed; the third discusses the findings. The fourth section discusses the findings alongside associated theoretical and practical implications.

The sociology of invisible work

Sociological research examines the complex structural factors that obscure work. Daniels’s (1987) analysis of women’s volunteering and Smith’s (1987) discussion of women’s domestic work first propel a theorisation of invisible work along gender lines. Their scholarship reveals that women’s unpaid work is made invisible by idealised visions of domestic nurturing. In paid work, gendered beliefs invisibilise women’s tasks against their male counterparts – so much of women’s work is taken for granted and undervalued (Kofman, 2000; Kosny and MacEachen, 2010). Sociological discussions also locate workers’ invisibility in precarious work, which becomes apparent in the increasing likelihood of job insecurity, particularly as workers’ rights grow opaque in the wider policy and market regulation debate (Bonini and Gandini, 2016; Pichault and McKeown, 2019). Conversely, the growth of ‘digital labour’, performed through online platforms, restructures and hides workers’ activities from users’ view through the use of algorithms (Cherry, 2016), while the lack of a physical workplace invisibilises those labouring from home, devaluing their tasks as occurring in non-traditional worksites (Craig et al., 2012). Sociological discussions abound also on on-site labour necessary for service delivery, as in nurses’ organising work – their patient–provider mediation, medical administration and equipment maintenance – which remains unseen to observers such as families and hospital boards (Allen, 2014). This dynamic is at stake, particularly with knowledge work, which takes place mostly in the head and out of sight (Star and Strauss, 1999). In notable examples such as software engineering (Suchman, 1996) and healthcare interpreting (DeVault, 2014), stakeholders rarely see the intermediate, problem-solving activities that help in producing services, resulting in workers’ overall devaluation. Re-examining these far-reaching dynamics into a conceptual framework, Erin Hatton conceptualises invisible work at varying degrees across informal and formal sectors, theorising it as ‘economically devalued through three intersecting sociological mechanisms . . . identified as cultural, legal and spatial mechanisms of invisibility’ (Hatton, 2017: 337). Sociocultural mechanisms require workers’ hidden bodily labour, for example, cultivating a specific corporate image, behaving according to organisational expectations and negotiating occupational identity to fit in the workplace. Additionally, sociocultural mechanisms invisibilise work through hegemonic ideologies of gender, race and class, which devaluate workers’ skills (e.g. by constructing female workers as innately compassionate). Sociolegal mechanisms render work invisible by excluding it from formal employment regulations, as in volunteering. Sociospatial mechanisms affect work physically segregated or carried out away from the workplace, as domestic labour.

Research thus crucially identifies which forces prevent employers, consumers and employees from ‘seeing’ work that is done (Poster et al., 2016). However, these studies mainly address the external factors shadowing work, or rather work made invisible by ‘others’ (Petersson and Backman, 2021). Despite its richness and fruitfulness, this literature contributes less to an understanding of how the processes of work can also become a precondition for its devaluation. While not disregarding but integrating these theorisations, this article adopts practice theory, contributing a ‘meso’ view of labouring invisibly as a result of the organisation of work.

Invisible work: A practice-based view

Practice theory is a paradigm rooted in pragmatic and Marxist sociology, and in Giddens’, Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s social theories. It is a ‘meso’ approach, which elevates practices as the analytical units for investigating social phenomena, for example, work and organisations (Nicolini, 2012). Practices are routinised yet creative behaviours connected by mental-bodily activities, competence, norms, and emotional and motivational knowledge. The study operationalises Theodore Schatzki’s (2002) most influential version, which conceives practices as temporally, spatially evolving sets of doings (actions) and sayings (discourses) organised by three major elements: practical understanding (competencies), teleoaffectivity (ends, emotions) and normativity (rules). Individuals combine these elements in ‘performances’, dynamic accomplishments which are judged as acceptable by people in the same social order.

A closer look at sociological literature shows that invisibility arises in the organisation and performativity of work in skilful, normative, purposeful ways. Several discussions understand invisibility as part of workers’ expected skilful conduct in formal employment relationships (Crain et al., 2016; Cutcher and Achtel, 2017). Macdonald’s (1998) study of nannies indicates that these perform competent ‘self-erasure’ for showing detached attachment to children, making employers believe they are self-sufficient nuclear families. In Whiting and Symon’s (2020) digi-housekeeping study, competence is hidden by digital work processes (e.g. email management) that tacitly support more poignant activities. Laube et al.’s (2020) study of political position-making at the German and Austrian Parliaments suggests that expertise means acting invisibly as an implicit, constitutive feature of political processes, which in turn grants legitimacy to the staff’s actions. Similarly, competence in front-facing work as customer service can become invisible because of the ‘hidden injuries of routinisation’, workers’ ability to perform unobtrusively (Hampson and Junor, 2010). There is also work employers require as invisible so that employees’ competence appears natural rather than manufactured, as for Indian call centre agents, who perform American culture to avoid customers questioning their nationality and disrupting their tasks (Poster, 2007). Practices’ organising element of ‘practical understanding’ bridges these findings, underlining invisibility as occurring in the successful outcome of individuals’ situated use of knowledge in the complex web of relations characterising work (Gherardi, 2017; Sargent et al., 2021).

Working competently can also imply invisibilisation as a normative expectation of appropriate conduct (Harness et al., 2020; McLoughlin et al., 2005). Normative behaviours are associated with objectives supporting workers’ achievements because work is organised through goal-oriented actions (‘teleo’) and emotional states (‘affectivity’) (Schatzki, 2002). Invisibility can thus become an internal logic of work motivation, as when women intentionally take up invisibility to facilitate interactions in the gendered workplace (Ballakrishnen et al., 2019), or when social workers handle uncomfortable aspects of their practice through motivational assumptions of ‘correctness’, as removing children from their families (Leigh et al., 2021).

A practice-based approach allows framing invisibility as a processual, relational accomplishment rooted in individuals’ actions, enacted according to the organisation and context of work. It generates broader sociological insights about invisible work as constituting a practical, motivational foundation for social orders and individuals alike (Miettinen et al., 2009). Furthermore, its attention to performativity affords dynamic analyses of ‘invisibility’ as a tool for managing activities and outcomes against the specific processes and patterns of different employment sectors (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011). In other words, a practice approach highlights that there are different reasons why work becomes invisible, particularly when it is made so by those who do it, offering a framework to study how and why workers might perform ‘invisibly’ (willingly or resentfully).

The study context: Interpreting as invisible work

Conference interpreting (hereinafter ‘interpreting’) is a profession entailing communication service provision from a source to a target language at high-stake technical, political, scientific and institutional meetings, including the UN and EU bodies. This article focuses on a specific modality, ‘simultaneous’ interpreting, performed while a speaker speaks with the aid of technological equipment (microphones, headphones, sound-proof booths, consoles). Simultaneous interpreting was ‘professionalised’ after the 1945–1946 Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, where it was used to expedite legal multilingual proceedings. In 1947, the UN implemented it for its operations; in 1953, the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) was founded for organising interpreters. In the UK, there are dedicated associations, like the Interpreting and Translation Institute and the Chartered Institute of Linguists. Interpreting is divided between ‘institutional’ and ‘private’ markets. The former includes staff/freelance interpreters who work primarily for supra-national institutions and enjoy an enhanced labour regime thanks to agreements such as the AIIC-EU 1969/2004/723 Council Regulation. In the private market – the segment this study addresses – freelance interpreters work for organisations, local authorities, etc. In the UK, most interpreters are in the private market and are ‘self-employed’: they do not receive sick or holiday pay, are responsible for paying national insurance and tax, and operate under service contracts with ‘direct’ clients or through intermediate providers (‘agencies’). In the former case, the interpreter manages client-facing business arrangements, while agencies outsource work for a fee, taking care of client-facing logistics. The British language industry, the world’s second largest, totals revenue of £1.35 billion (ATC, 2019), but is constrained by lack of regulation and downward pricing trends. Between 2009 and 2020, the value of interpreting services grew by just 7% (Office for National Statistics, 2021). Securing commissions, long-term planning and pension plans is difficult; many interpreters rely on state retirement or pursue additional income streams to challenge precariousness (EUATC, 2020).

The sociological importance and value of examining simultaneous interpreting resides in being a distinctive example of what social scientists call ‘invisible work’ (Star and Strauss, 1999). In contrast with occupations with relatively unseen elements (e.g. nurses’ organising work) (Allen, 2014), or where actors such as temporary work agencies obscure workers’ conditions (Andrijasevic and Sacchetto, 2017), interpreting is ‘structurally invisible’ under deontological and collectively agreed features. Users often assume that interpreters’ expertise (practical understanding; Schatzki, 2002) rests only on linguistic proficiency. Instead, interpreting involves an extraordinary blend of trained sensory–cognitive and linguistic skills, operating in unison for making sense of a message in one language while simultaneously articulating it in another. The process is continuous without opportunities to ask the speaker to stop, slow down, or clarify. Thus, interpreters lack full control: others determine their utterances’ speed and content. Interpreters’ ability paradoxically hides these complexities to users. Little is understood about the efforts involved; what users understand of it, mostly in terms of language proficiency, makes it look ordinary and naturalised so their work is, in turn, invisibilised when performed.

Sociological studies suggest that ‘whether specific forms of work are visible or invisible is the result of socially created institutions . . . and norms’ (Budd, 2016: 42). Invisibility plays out (in contested ways) in the normative professional discourse of interpreting. The AIIC’s Practical Guide for Professional Conference Interpreters implicitly frames ‘invisibility’ as performative excellence of merging with the speaker: ‘the interpreter must never change or add to the speaker’s message’; ‘it is your job to communicate the speaker’s intended messages as accurately, faithfully, and completely as possible. At the same time, make it your own speech . . . good interpreting is like acting’ (AIIC, 2016[1999]: 10). Furthermore, the interpreter ‘must never betray any personal reaction to the speech, be it scepticism, disagreement, or just boredom’, but must be ‘the speaker’s alter ego . . . to allow your delegates to comprehend the speaker’s messages just as clearly and effectively as those who are listening to the original . . . Make them forget they are hearing the speaker through an interpreter’ (AIIC, 2016[1999]: 10). Stemming from authorities’ statements, invisibility is ingrained in the profession’s collective organisation, directing interpreters’ output.

Furthermore, the profession requires the interpreter to operate in turbulent environments, coping with unpredictable communication patterns. Breakdowns in the performance provoke a loss of understanding in users, rendering the interpreter publicly ‘visible’ (and incompetent), with implications for interrupting service provision but also for potential losses of assignments and professional recognition. Since interpreting is a freelance occupation, lack of visibility and recognition can encompass precariousness, so interpreters strive to be positively noticed by stakeholders, hiding transgressions and displaying their competent self as part of the dominant ethos of the industry.

Lastly, examining interpreting has methodological value. Interpreting is a closed market, often negating research access for fears of confidentiality breaches, and for interpreters’ concerns that being observed might jeopardise their performance (Monacelli, 2009). Studies of invisible work often find negotiating field access a complex, lengthy process, as in Pandeli et al.’s (2019) one-year trust-building with the prison management, or Whiting and Symon’s (2020) use of video-diaries to record ‘unseen’ participants’ activities. Contrary to such studies where the researcher has no ties with the community investigated, I leveraged my field knowledge (I am also an interpreter) to enhance viability as an important concern for this study. The advantages of conducting insider research included access to tacit information and distinctive ways of acting, due to familiar knowledge of the phenomenon, which led to thicker descriptions of interpreters’ labour (Brannick and Coghlan, 2007), with the scope of benefitting a wider analysis of invisible work.

Methodological approach

This article draws upon an observational and interview dataset from a multi-method study of the UK interpreting industry. The original research design was rooted in ‘praxiography’, recording practice as the core analytical unit (Bueger, 2014). The philosophy behind praxiography is a theoretical and methodological endeavour entailing a qualitative, interpretative strategy for the processual reconstruction of practice. Praxiography helped in accounting for invisibility as a ‘modus operandi’ of interpreters’ symbolic and performative accomplishments (Jonas et al., 2017). It also afforded capturing interpreters’ understandings of invisibility as a work-shaping, order-producing and meaning-making enactment. Praxiography invites data collection methods, such as observations and interviews, which permit direct access to the sites and actions that reproduce practice (Bueger, 2014). Aligned with this methodology, this study used participant observation to proximally record performative dimensions of invisibility (‘doings’), and in-depth semi-structured interviews for reconstructing interpreters’ discursive accounts of invisibility (‘sayings’) (Schatzki, 2002). Interviews and observations foregrounded interpreters’ skills, actions and standards, indicating what is made visible, to whom and why (Star and Strauss, 1999).

Informants’ sociodemographics

The total sample included 57 interpreters: 46 interviewees (25 were also observed) and 11 only-observed informants. The majority (42) was female. There were n = 7 informants in the 29–35 age category, n = 22 in the 36–45 category, n = 19 in the 46–54 category and n = 9 in the 55–64 category. One striking sample feature is the limited presence of Black (one), Asian (one) and East Asian (four) respondents. Although there exists no census of interpreters in the UK, this skewed ethnic composition might suggest under-representation of some groups. This is an obvious limitation of the study. For educational level, the majority (39) had an MA degree in Interpreting Studies and n = 5 had a PhD in Interpreting Studies. N = 4 informants trained at the European Commission DG-SCIC programme (no longer active); n = 3 attended a vocational training abroad also. A minority (six), falling into the 55–64 age range, had a BA degree and learned interpreting mostly on-the-job. N = 12 informants (nine female, three male) were AIIC members and n = 13 (11 female, two male) worked at supra-national organisations. All were members of at least one British interpreting association. For length of experience, n = 2 informants had been practising for < 5 years, n = 9 for 5–10 years, n = 21 for 11–20 years, and n = 25 for 20+ years. Informants were partially recruited through snowball sampling using my network, relations with institutions and direct contact through associations’ databases. Social research ethical guidelines were followed, as well as gaining informed consent and anonymising informants’ characteristics to ensure privacy and confidentiality.

Data collection

Participant observations help to discover how work is constructed and performed (Spradley, 1980), including the knowledge people deploy to labour invisibly (Allen, 2014). The study collected 20 participant observations of simultaneous interpretations (200 hours) during corporate meetings, conferences, symposia and work councils, including a one-week observation of AIIC interpreters at an institution. In the six initial observations, I was an observing-participant, working also as an interpreter. I collected data alternating every 30–40 minutes, between my performance and the observation during my boothmate’s turn (interpreters work in pairs to contain cognitive overload). A researcher’s positionality must be ‘open to intensive scrutiny’ and ‘challenged on an ongoing basis’ (Van Heugten, 2004: 208): to redress dual role difficulties, in the following 14 observations, I withdrew to participant-observer, shifting from complete to active membership to avoid an insufficiently critical approach (Adler and Adler, 1987).

Praxiography helps researchers immersing in the data collection process to detect skilful, motivational, normative intelligibilities through ‘thick’ descriptions of practices. Analysing the configuration of invisibility involved looking closely, to attain valid sociological knowledge on the constitution of interpreting practices (Bueger, 2014; Nicolini, 2012). I conducted observations through description, focus and selection (Spradley, 1980). I described settings and interpreters’ behaviours to record spatial-situated dimensions. Then, I focused on interpreters’ performative negotiations of invisibility. Third, I selected patterns of invisibility, such as failures and self-survival strategies. I sat inside or near a booth, or in an adjacent vacant booth, following interpreters’ actions through the booths’ side-and-front glass windows. My positionality produced thick descriptions in a way nearly impossible for outsiders: to record interpreters’ actions and linguistic renditions, I used my interpreting skills. When near a booth, I wore headphones, covering my left ear to listen to the interpreters using a portable device, the same as listeners use to follow the interpretation. Simultaneously, right ear uncovered, I listened to the speaker. When in an adjacent booth, I used the sound-console, receiving the interpreter’s version into the headphones and the original speech from the console loudspeaker. When working in the booth, I alternated between speakers and interpreters. Observations included languages I speak (English, Italian, German, Spanish) and interpreters’ renditions into English for other languages. Observation data were captured through fieldnotes to produce contemporaneous accounts of interpreting work, visually complemented through non-confidential photographs of venues, objects and actions.

The study adhered to semi-structured interview principles, a flexible format that allowed for exploring the meanings people ascribe to events in their worlds (Roulston and Choi, 2018), including workers’ reflexive modes, productive activities and labour experiences, according to what they emphasise or leave out (Hollway and Jefferson, 1997). The interviews were conducted face-to-face. They lasted 80–120 minutes, were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The interview questions discussed the following topics: participants’ professional trajectory and exploration of their expert role; organisation and deontology of interpreting; impact of invisibilisation on professional recognition; relationships with stakeholders vis-a-vis normative tensions of in/visibility; and achievement and failure experiences. Issues of class, race and gender were not directly pursued, but emerged spontaneously in interpreters’ recollections. Overall, interviews offered verbal evidence of the motivational states behind interpreters’ work, ‘re-presenting’ experiences and perceptions of invisibility from sayings to a textual dimension.

Data analysis

Transcripts and fieldnotes were converted in text format, and uploaded on NVivo (Release, 11) for systematic coding. Qualitative Content Analysis − a systematic, partially inductive technique used to detect informational patterns in textual data (Mayring, 2004) − was carried out to identify empirically driven codes, categories and unifying themes of invisibility. Initial transcript readings determined codes as the smaller analytical units, which concerned doings and sayings ascribable to interpreters’ labour. Codes were compared to locate differences and similarities, and grouped into categories covering micro-aspects of invisibility of interpreting work. Categories were unified through three major performance-based themes: skilful, normative and motivational dimensions of invisibility. Finally, through practice-based reasoning, the invisibility themes formulated were tied to practice epistemology through the organising elements of interpreting: practical understanding (skills, behaviours, ideologies), teleoaffectivity (achievements, breakdowns) and normativity (compliance, deviations, teamwork). The following section explores these themes. The analytical process was non-linear: it sought augmentation, interweaving and contradiction between data and themes, until saturation yielded no further information (Miles and Huberman, 1994).

Findings

The normative dimensions of invisibility

The first pattern shows that invisibility derived from the normative organisation of interpreting as work practice. Most of the informants (including AIIC members) adhered to invisibility as their normative positioning, to facilitate the service provision of seemingly effortless communication:

I always say the biggest compliment an interpreter can get is that the client says, I talked to that person as if you weren’t there, so invisibility is essential . . . the more I can achieve that with smooth interpreting, the better. (Katie, 44)

Invisibility is the result of the performance: Because of active engagement with this norm, the interpreters’ expertise is invisibilised as they carry out work processes through an isomorphic enactment of the speech, which complies with organising authorities’ expectations. However, most informants disagreed, suggesting that invisibility did not equate to playing a ‘non-person’. For them, invisibility was a functional agency, calibrated through situated performative arrangements to control communication outcomes by alertness to the environment, and a constant level of analytical processing:

Providing constant communication . . . according to the situation, managing the interpretation without exposing your inner workings . . . allowing people to take actions according to the message. (Elisabeth, 42)

Although invisibility is restricted to delivering the message for facilitating the event, these informants negotiated invisibility as a strategic, not a categorical function, attending to collective agreement and subjective mediation to support their labour.

The expertise dimensions of invisibility: Enactment and devaluation

The second pattern shows that invisibility was also linked to practical understanding as part of the work organisation of interpreting (Schatzki, 2002). Compare this observation, following two interpreters in the English booth at an international organisation’s headquarters:

Delegates discuss legal implementations of technical instruments. Jackie cannot recognise all the instruments that the chair launches as darts, so pauses for two seconds, breathes, pushes the ‘mute’ button on the console. Lynda, her colleague, frantically jots down their names; Jackie reprises by hastily reading them. Delegates now discuss regulations; Jackie struggles to interpret the long, numbers-full document titles. ‘Regulation III3/1, memo 14 n.21, paragraphs 8.1, 8.2, 8.5 of the international amendment III3/55 . . .’ Jackie leafs through to help herself with sight-translation so that delegates exactly know the points discussed. One delegate takes the floor; interpreters roll their eyes. He is known for his high speed, Lynda will tell me later. Jackie concentrates, uttering sentences at the speed of light, delivering core information by reformulating some content. After her turn, Lynda takes advantage of a nanosecond-long pause of the delegate to gaze at Jackie, who takes over.

The practical knowledge embedded in performances contributes to building invisibility, as interpreters performed expertise through an inconspicuous mode of its doing. On normative grounds, Lynda and Jackie calibrated invisibility according to actions (their responsiveness to the speaker/speech), social relationships (teamwork) and material contexts (using documents and objects) to sustain communication flow. They enacted invisibility as the appropriate professional conduct required to perform satisfactorily and master difficulties. Therefore, invisibility was a dynamic adaptive resource enacted in the operational work carried out by interpreters’ practical understanding, to adjust what is made in/visible and proceeding unhampered.

Notwithstanding successful performative calibrations, some informants experienced negative invisibilisation. Hegemonic ideologies pervade practitioners’ social reality and the organisation of interpreting work enmeshed with sociocultural mechanisms of invisibility, such as racist prejudices (Hatton, 2017). Antje, a 38-year-old Dutch interpreter¹ of Black descent, shared the complexities of fitting in against stakeholders’ assumptions:

When clients see me, they may act surprised. They don’t expect a Black Dutch. Many times they’ve questioned how I interpreted this and that, as if they won’t trust I’m a native speaker. This never happens to my white boothmates. I’ll try and chat with them, throw in some language jokes when interpreting, to stop them seeing me as non-Dutch.

Antje used performatively her language/interpreting skills to protect herself from discrimination and visibilise herself, negotiating her occupational identity to fit in the racialised sociospatial environment of the assignment against clients’ devaluing cultural discourses.

Additionally, some informants strived to perform a native or near-native standard English accent, which was idealised as correct and prestigious, to signal quality and better fit into the working environment. Justin, a 36-year-old interpreter from Manchester, felt invisible as his accent was misaligned with such expectations:

Clients half-jokingly accent-shame: ‘Oh, yes, I’d tell you’re from Manchester because of your Northern accent, the others sound more posh . . . your accent should go’. I always try to clean it up now, to sound more skilled.

Experiences about ‘accent’ can be identified as another sociocultural mechanism of invisibility, caused by class ideologies, which reference the traditional working-class/posh accent division. Attempting to perform a ‘correct accent’, these informants engaged in performative labour to adhere to employers’ image and enact more visible professionalism.

Gender ideologies emerged as another sociocultural invisibility mechanism. Unprompted, informants such as Emily (36) reasoned that interpreting is subject to gendered skill beliefs:

Most think it’s a feminine job, because you work with languages, because interpreting equals speaking. The usual stuff that women are better communicators, and that it’s a service. Many also think male colleagues are gay, because languages are feminine.

Interpreting was symbolically devalued as a category of innately caring women’s work, due to the provision of language/communication services. By contrast, male interpreters’ occupational identity was marginalised in a process of sexual identity attribution. Both cases imply gendered consumer recognition of expertise, which correlates with interpreters’ performative and social invisibilisation.

The teleoaffective dimensions of invisibility

In the organisation of interpreting work, invisibility also transpired through teleoaffectivity, entailing two motivational aims guiding practitioners (Schatzki, 2002). The first was tied to ‘success’, which informants understood as maximal effectiveness of communication characterised by ‘public orderliness’ of competent performance, which ensures seamless interaction to parties. These achievements were an ‘oughtness’, as stated by Fiona (45), an AIIC interpreter with 20 years’ experience:

Meeting goals means that you need to be successful . . . making people communicate all the time . . . it’s implicit . . . That’s the ethical way of acting in this profession. It’s nice if delegates acknowledge you at the end of the day, but it is just presumed that you interpret and you do it well.

Owing to the performative invisibilisation of expertise, successful achievements were granted low visibility. Although interpreters’ work was traceable and legitimate, it was embedded into a background of expectations equally shared by interpreters and users, meaning it was functionally hidden from view.

The second aim referred to retaining success by avoiding failure. Interpreting exhibited many contextual and internal challenges as a taxing multi-tasking activity: analysing, structuring and reproducing a message into another language, without controlling the original speech. In the process, the interpreter prioritised information, activated short-term memory and technical terminology, attending to the often-ambiguous nature of communication and cultural references. Furthermore, interpreters managed the constant repairing of mistakes unfolding in communication. These factors characterised interpreting as ‘precarious’ work, where avoiding failure is pivotal. An interpreter who failed, disrupted the aim of tacitly successful service provision to users who, in turn, could not pursue their stakes due to lack of understanding. Therefore, interpreters’ activities were inherently face-threatening, as they performed for public fruition in high-stakes settings. Multiple stakeholders – clients, audiences, organisers, even media – benefitted from their work, intensely scrutinising its quality. Often, when interpreters failed, they were finally, but negatively, acknowledged: through communication breakdowns, their apparently effortless work became fully noticeable for the wrong reasons. Take Margaret (56), a London-based interpreter with 25 years’ experience:

Very technical meeting for a pharmaceutical corporation. They didn’t give documents for preparing . . . when the speaker on this particular disease came on, he’s an expert, so you can’t know any more that he does; we didn’t brief with him. All the talk was very fast, since he knows everything inside out, it was free talk . . . I struggled to understand the meaning, my colleague also couldn’t do much. Afterwards clients said in my face . . . ‘I didn’t understand what you were saying’ . . . They didn’t hire me again.

Given interpreting’s ‘one-off performance’ nature and public exposure, failure caused the loss of positive ‘invisibility’ as a seamless performance and generated negative visibility as a display of incompetence. As Elisabeth (42) remarked, all the sample avoided these potential repercussions to professional standing:

You must solve, hide things you can’t keep up with . . . or you look as someone who can’t do her job. The client won’t be happy, they’ll report to the agency, you end up losing commissions . . . Colleagues might avoid partnering with you. It’s a niche world, gossiping about what you can and can’t do.

Teleoaffective commitments oriented the ‘negotiation about the relationship between visible and invisible work’ (Star and Strauss, 1999: 9), supporting informants towards successful service provision and against public failure.

Tensions of in/visibility

Because of the distinctive organisation of their work, informants experienced striking tensions of in/visibility. The informants complained that taken-for-granted achievements and their invisibilisation in ‘effortless’ performance was a hindrance; clients normalised interpreter labour as a natural product, rather than the manufactured outcome of competent effort:

Our ability to keep performance on track hides all the complexities. Most clients think we just speak another language, naturally parroting what they say. (Maud, 36)

Paired with little client knowledge of interpreters’ skills, the obscuring of interpreters’ work process and the need for pursuing work continuity, it was exemplary of sociolegal invisibility (Hatton, 2017). To defy such contradictions, informants strategically performed to attract clients and assignments. This negotiation was, however, complex:

You do things with what you get . . . play with the language to make yourself as a professional peek through, so that you stay invisible and help communication but . . . clients notice you a bit. (Jamie, 43)

Sometimes we’d be, ‘the speaker said’, if we might be hit upon because of something they said; ‘the interpreter said’, to show off there was an issue that might’ve gone unnoticed, but that we managed. (Rose, 39)

Normative establishments, career preoccupations and stakeholders’ expectations influenced interpreters’ conduct, further complicating conflicting work boundaries.² To counterbalance this deficit, informants used the locus of the performance and linguistic strategies to visibilise their expertise and be positively evaluated by stakeholders. The more users noticed the linguistic manipulation, the more the interpreter was visible: many informants switched from the established use of the first person (merging with the speaker) to the third person to distance from speech controversies and show their ability. Interpreting work was not intrinsically visible or invisible; this relationship was negotiated according to the presence of different actors. These normative calibrations balanced managing tough challenges, such as high-stake meetings for famous organisations, which was another way to get visible to stakeholders:

It was a trade union advisory committee. I’m passionate about workers’ rights, so I felt engaged. I was sticking to the message but voicing all the emotions. Afterwards, this representative came and said: ‘You should keep up with this, because you’re a great interpreter’. Being noticed working behind the scenes as if I was in the first row helped me to land it there. (Sarah, 44)

Interpreters who wanted to become more visible sometimes pretended to normatively act ‘in accord’ with deontological unobtrusiveness, but more prominently cultivating a positioning that attracted users’ attention. These attempts were an essential source of tensions, because invisibility derives also from the self-employment arrangement of interpreting, including exposure to low stability:

We’re invisible also because we’re freelancers. A constant workflow, income, relative security is how you measure visibility, too – in the market. (Dan, 42)

The ‘prescribed spirit’ of invisibility expanded beyond interpreters’ action, typifying their labour as obscure, given their struggles to establish employment continuity in a freelance environment. Many informants attempted to prove their worth against colleagues to secure commitments in an environment where competition and availability (or disposability) of interpreters is high:

The market is saturated. We all compete for jobs. You get people who . . . correct you . . . with the microphone open, who jump in your interpretation, push the ‘mute’ button to say you’re doing it wrong, interrupting the broadcasting . . . They undermine your performance to look better in comparison . . . as if you failed . . . to get recognition . . . to kill you professionally. (Margaret, 56)

As seen in ‘Jackie and Lynda’s’ vignette, interpreters collaborated as a precondition of their work. However, this relational basis – grounded in teamwork and interdependence aiming at service quality – was problematic. Interpreters struggled for achieving competitive advantage as independent economic units at the behest of multiple clients. Teamwork did not sufficiently showcase individual expertise to clients, which prompted many to compete for asserting professionalism. To be better noticed than colleagues, interpreters could push them to fail. To manage this paradox, the informants reproduced an oppression system by controlling their own and colleagues’ standing, playing upon the visible nature of failure and the tacit nature of success in the profession. They engaged with adversarial in/visibility to serve their power interests at the expense of other practitioners, distorting colleagues’ external evaluation.

Concluding discussion

Using a meso, practice theory approach to provide a fine-grained account of the challenges interpreters face, this study finds that the organisation of work – in terms of skills, workers’ interdependencies and tasks divisions, rules and coordination to fulfil service provision – can cause invisibility and recognition struggles. As a consequence, the organisation of work entails a tension between the reproduction of invisibility, which workers internalise as the expected work conduct, and a negotiation of invisibility as part of workers’ relationality with stakeholders, colleagues and the market to avoid self-effacement. The concept of interpreters as ‘embedded strangers’ helps in explaining this process. Interpreters are embedded because they are a vital part of orchestrating communication and stakeholders’ practices. Nevertheless, they are ‘strangers’: present on the job, but acting as if removed from it. Interpreters’ work organisation requires following deontological standards to act ‘inconspicuously’, masking efforts to offer smooth services. Reliance on teamwork and linguistic strategies supports interpreters’ seemingly effortless façade, avoiding negative repercussions and incompetence judgements from communication breakdowns. These abilities paradoxically make interpreters invisible to stakeholders. However, as freelancers, interpreters need acknowledgement for securing commissions and upholding their market profile, so they often break invisibility to project their ability, or push colleagues to fail publicly to be hired in their place. The concept of ‘embedded strangers’ relating to how interpreters act and struggle in their professional life, helps to thread the findings’ wider significance. Through this reframing, the study contributes to sociological debates on invisible work, highlighting the intersections between the organisation of work practices with broader labour issues.

First, the study finds that the performance of invisibility – being ‘embedded strangers’ – engenders from the constant balance of the interdependent elements of work practice: norms, ends and skills. Interpreters balance invisibility against the practice’s aims (communication effectiveness), its rewards (commissions, reputation, income) and its relationality (clients’ satisfaction and teamwork). This balance is complicated by a constant negotiation of both normative compliance (for orderly service and breakdown control) and resistance to invisibility (to avoid self-erasure). In fact, interpreters and clients mutually expect blending in and masking failures as a precondition for an orderly job, and as marks of expertise which secure a smooth communicative experience. This finding corroborates sociological views that workers can leverage invisibility to gain advantage, keeping processes and mistakes out of sight (Laube et al., 2020; Star and Strauss, 1999; Suchman, 1996). Nevertheless, the research reported here involves not just clarifying that the goal of such labour is to make its products appear natural and successful (Hatton, 2017; Poster, 2007), but, more fundamentally, the very assembling of invisibility through the complicity of practitioners in sometimes adhering to, sometimes deviating from, the organisation of their work practice according to the stakes at hand.

Second, the study finds that interpreters are embedded strangers in both performances and working life. Their ability to work through ‘manifest absence’ makes their expertise, dismissed as a ‘natural’ language process which does not integrate any specialised knowledge into stakeholders’ productive practices. Critically, low expertise recognition limits the rewards made available by the practice (e.g. reputation), exacerbating interpreters’ challenges as freelancers striving for professional and economic security in a precarious labour environment. This finding has important analytical and practical implications which extend to other occupations. Sociological scholarship argues that freelancers are invisible to society due to lack of social protection, employee rights, job security and policy channels (Craig et al., 2012; Worth and Karagaac, 2021) and that several freelancers across industries sell their work invisibly to make it more user-enjoyable, with the purpose of gaining commissions, achieving a branded status and combating precariousness: communication and media specialists as translators, localisers, language-software developers (Rao, 2021), radio speakers (Bonini and Gandini, 2016) and gig workers (Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2020). This study contributes sociological knowledge by bridging the insidious link between the organisation of work and employment arrangements in reproducing invisible labour. Interpreters, as those workforces, experience invisibility twice: first, as they reproduce the internalised logic of being embedded strangers for successful service provision; second, as this invisibility combines with unprotected employment status. When these elements combine, workers become invisible as they are effectively embedded in the market, for which they remain, however, strangers in terms of protection and recognition. Building on this study, the dehumanising reality of continuing lack of acknowledgement can give renewed policy and industry urgency to exposing the cross-sector impact of invisibility.

Third, the study finds that invisibility is linked to constant alternations of competition and collaboration among practitioners. Because of their work organisation, interpreters are obliged to cooperate in performance: their individual expertise blurs into teamwork, adding to being unnoticed by stakeholders. Consequently, the precarious nature of interpreters’ employment and the need to secure jobs can push them to sabotage colleagues to stain their market reputation. In this sense, interpreters uphold their embedded strangers role, because they are embedded into the same assignment and in a practice which prescribes collaboration. Nonetheless, they remain strangers to each other, damaging collaboration when competition opportunities arise. This finding provides a renewed understanding of cooperation practices at work, raising important points for sociological debate around the collegial and competitive use of invisibility for securing employment opportunities. Available research does not explicitly address this link, though it argues that individuals can use invisibility as a contested terrain to accommodate opportunities for power and resistance (Budd, 2016; Hatton, 2017); freelancers particularly can compete with each other because of their ‘disposable’ nature, which makes them invisible to stakeholders (Bonini and Gandini, 2016; Holtgrewe, 2014). This study takes these subjects together – freelance work, collaborative labour production and competitive relations – to show that work organisation and practical aims can legitimise adversarial action as a professional endeavour around invisibility. It suggests that when work remains largely elusive to users, individuals can exploit being embedded strangers for attracting symbolic and material gains, negotiating a continuum of more or less visible positions at the expense of others. The acknowledgement of these dynamics as central, and the understanding of their contradictory positioning in the bigger picture of collaboration in work practices, is the necessary step to not only dismantle the invisibility rhetoric behind the organisation of some forms of work, but also to make sense of how practitioners participate in the invisibilisation of their occupational category.

Overall, the study re-frames invisibility as a performative negotiation of the behavioural and organisational expectations of work practices against their employment arrangements. This framing aims at fighting devaluation and marginalisation, and has practical implications for practitioners, stakeholders and policy to rethink damaging invisibility. Interpreting associations could re-evaluate how they regulate interpreting services, re-thinking deontology to avoid self-effacement. Interpreters might interrogate how they perform such services, to improve their role recognition and limit their struggles within a precarious market. This could minimise actors’ conflicting expectations through policy briefings and stakeholders’ education by considering the mutual expectations around the interpreting process. More widely, the study could adjust engagement with invisibility by generating awareness of how different jobs work, clarifying contradictions about workers’ hidden role.

As one of the first practice-oriented explorations of invisible work, this study presents limitations and future research opportunities. First, an unexpected finding interrogates the connections between ideologies and invisibility. Interpreters’ invisibility is partly determined by gendered, classed and racialised ideologies, which cause unequal positions vis-à-vis stakeholders. The original research design did not account for ideologies; further research is recommended, not least because of growing suggestions that they intensify workers’ misrecognition (DeVault, 2014; Hatton, 2017). Second, the study did not include stakeholders, yet the findings highlight that invisibility transpires from dynamic interactions between practices, people and their social environment. Future studies should account for how such relations affect and legitimise invisibility.

Lastly, the results are limited by the focus on interpreting, a freelance profession where stake and competition pressures are acute. More investigation is needed to capture invisibility across industries and employment arrangements. This observation does not discredit the study. Rather, it raises the theoretical potential of practice approaches to identify which labour outcomes are ultimately affected by invisibility as a result of the internal mechanisms of work. The sociology of invisible labour normally explicates invisibility as the result of external mechanisms of work devaluation (Craig et al., 2012; Hatton, 2017; Poster et al., 2016). This study contributes a theorisation of invisible work deriving from workers’ co-ordinated, competent activities, as the effort to problem-solve combinations of aims imbued with meanings drawn from a normative, situational context. This approach is advantageous as it allows framing invisibility ‘practically’ as something that workers do, using skills, rules and goals, with (and against) other people and in the wider frame of the labour market. Ultimately, practice theory invites scholars to untangle the complex inner workings that propagate invisibility. Since practices are organised through the same overarching logic, attending to the performative interrelation of their elements allows analysis of invisibility across infinite types of work. The implication is that, by tackling the social forces that propagate the dynamics of labour, it is possible to embrace a more composite sociological model of the nuances and specificities that render work invisible.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the insightful comments and invaluable guidance offered by Davide Nicolini, Wendy Bottero, Wai Lau and Marta Fanasca on early-stage versions of this manuscript.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Deborah Giustini

Notes

Deborah Giustini is a postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven. She has a broad interest in sociological aspects of invisibility, expertise and labour, with a particular focus on understanding how various dynamics of invisible work affect stakeholders’ practices, and engender forms of inequality and competition against changing market landscapes.

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