About five years ago, I started raising the flag about declining enrolments in translation and interpreting programs, predicting that this trend will continue and spread across regions. At the time, I earned little more than polite dismissal from institutional representatives. Today, it’s becoming common knowledge: enrolments are dropping, everywhere, and the conversation has finally caught up to what many of us could already see coming.
I’ve written elsewhere about the reasons driving this decline [see for example here], but they can be broadly summarised in this way: the profession’s traditional allure — travel, cosmopolitanism, access to worlds closed off to others — has evaporated into the unremarkable normal of globalised life; increasingly powerful AI translation tools make it genuinely hard for young people to feel passion for a career path that seems to be shortening before their eyes; and working conditions in the field have deteriorated sharply, with opportunities shrinking and rates stagnating or falling see for example [here].
What I want to focus on here is not the causes, but the response of one particular actor in the language industry: universities offering full-fledged programs of two or more years. In particular, I want to focus on what these universities have done — or rather, what they have gotten wrong — in facing what is, for many of them, an existential crisis.
I want to be upfront: what follows is my own observation. It is limited and biased by my own experience and the conversations I’ve had. But I have been around quite a lot — I have the honour of giving talks at universities around the world, I listen carefully to their stories, concerns, and plans, and I have been asked to contribute inputs to the reform of many programs. This gives me enough contact with academia to believe this is a reasonably realistic picture. I also recognise there are success stories out there, at least temporary ones in what is surely a crisis that affects many different programs, independently of their subject. But here I want to concentrate on the pitfalls, because those are the ones that, in my opinion, we most urgently need to name — if nothing else, to stimulate some reflection among decision makers.
Mistake 1: Doubling down on hyperspecialisation
For decades, the default answer of translation and interpreting programs to market change and pressure has been to specialise further. When generic philology or literature programs struggled, institutions first created dedicated tracks for translation and interpreting — let’s not forget that professional-oriented curricula at university level are, for many countries, quite new — and then, over the years, pushed toward ever narrower specialisations: subtitling, technical translation, public service interpreting, conference interpreting, medical translation, literary translation, and so on. Each step carved a narrower slice of what was, at that time, a growing pie.
I lived this logic myself. Twenty years ago, I studied literature, then translation, then conference interpreting — each step a further refinement towards a professional profile, and therefore a specialization. I instinctively felt the pull, and I understand it. When professional profiles were expanding and their trajectory felt predictable, training people for a specific niche made sense. I am not questioning the choices of that era.
But the era has changed, dramatically, and the logic has not kept up. The fundamental problem is one that many observers are pointing to: we do not know what skills, let alone what professions, will be required in five or ten years. Thirty years ago, instead, you could project the profession’s future with some confidence. Today, that confidence is simply not available to anyone being honest with themselves.
If we accept — as we should — that uncertainty is our baseline, then training young people for a specific niche, a narrow profile such as those of translation and interpreting, is not prudent specialisation. It is gambling their futures on a bet we cannot rationally make. The right response to radical uncertainty is radical breadth: giving students deep knowledge across many domains so they have the flexibility to move, adapt, and reinvent themselves as the landscape shifts. I want to be precise here, because the distinction matters enormously: this is not shallow coverage of everything. It is depth across a broader range. I will come back to why that difference is so important. Persevering in training translators and interpreters for two, three, or five years, while making only token shifts toward whatever professional profile happens to be in vogue at the moment, is not the answer.
I write on this tension in the area of interpreting in the essay “Reflections on technology and interpreter training“, published by RED.
Mistake 2: Confusing “usable” with “useful”
Even institutions that recognise the hyperspecialisation trap and try to broaden their curricula tend to fall into a second error: the compulsion to make everything immediately market-ready. This is often the mantra of policy makers, but also of students themselves, who want to leave with “the” practical skills to succeed in the market.
And it seems reasonable, on the surface. If you introduce computer science into a translation curriculum — a very common move these days — too many assume that students should leave the class able to do something with it on Monday morning. What’s the point of learning something you can’t use immediately, when you can’t see a direct connection between it and what the market demands? The logic feels intuitive. But it is a fallacy, and a costly one.
Because this logic leads directly to superficiality. Teaching the tools of the moment rather than the principles underneath them produces knowledge with a short shelf life. What students actually need — what will serve them across a career that will span technologies and methodologies we cannot yet name — is foundational understanding.
Take computing as an example. If you want students to be genuinely capable of navigating AI-assisted translation, making informed decisions about tools, understanding what a system can and cannot do, or eventually becoming the people who shape how these technologies are adopted in real-life contexts — then what they need is not a tutorial on the software of the day. They need the fundamentals of computer science: logic, data structures, how models are trained, what optimisation actually means. That is the kind of knowledge that compounds. That is the kind of knowledge that does not expire.
Mistake 3: Asking staff to teach things they are not expert in
Universities have limited resources. This is not new, and the situation is bound to worsen. But the pressure to appear current, fashionable, modern, for example to show that programs are engaging with AI, NLP, language technology, and whatever else is generating headlines, has led to a situation that is quietly damaging: instructors being asked to teach fields they are not experts in. The implicit message from institutions is: inform yourself, read some books, follow some seminars, and then teach it yourself. This does not work. It is a recipe for exactly the superficiality that the needed reforms should be solving.
I want to be careful here. Many colleagues doing this are making a genuine effort, and that effort deserves respect. But goodwill does not substitute for expertise, and the result — almost inevitably — is teaching that remains superficial. Students come away with a surface-level familiarity that gives them the vocabulary without the understanding. And it should be obvious: if we are serious about deep knowledge, as I argued above, then we need professors and trainers who themselves possess deep knowledge. You cannot give what you do not have.
What all three mistakes have in common
I am convinced that the thread running through all three errors is a misunderstanding of what education is for. This is not exclusive to translation and interpreting curricula, but they are a textbook case of a spiral of wrong-headed thinking at university level. Universities under enrolment pressure are increasingly tempted to respond by behaving like training providers: selling relevance, promising employability, demonstrating immediate returns on a student’s investment of time and money. This is understandable. It is also, I would argue, a form of institutional surrender — and, as I called it a few years ago, a Great Illusion perpetrated on their own students.
The case for a university education in translation — or in anything — has never rested on its ability to produce a plug-and-play professional. It rests on its ability to develop people who can think, adapt, and lead. That requires depth. It requires foundations. It requires the courage to say to prospective students: we are not going to tell you exactly what job this prepares you for, because nobody can honestly say that — but we are going to make you genuinely capable of facing whatever comes.
That is a harder sell than a specialised track with a market-ready label. But it may be the only honest one left.
People often come to me and ask: if you are pointing to these errors and shortcomings, what are your solutions? The truth is that I do not know. Pointing to what is wrong is always much easier than finding good solutions, and I will be the first to admit it. But I also believe that recognizing errors is the first step toward fixing them.