You are invited to help rebuild translation professions!

This project is a collaboration with FIT Europe, which is a “meta-association” of translation professions: It brings together 58 European associations of translators, terminologists, and interpreters. Together, they represent roughly 40,000 professionals. 

Translation professions have suffered from AI adoption consequences more than most. The impacts started with machine translation, long before the generative AI boom, but now the situation has worsened drastically. It is to the point that many are considering leaving the profession, and those who stay face severe economic pressure, loss of agency over their own work, and heightened levels of stress and anxiety, among other impacts.

Our project is about creating a way forward. We are helping the boards of translation professions associations (FIT Europe's members) understand how to use AI to build a new future for their professions with their communities and empower their individual members. We aim to create a shift in translation professions as a whole through the trickling down of this effort. 

What we did so far

Starting from December 2025, I gave a series of workshops to the FIT Europe board. The goal was to expand their perspective about AI and work through learning my Chef Approach to AI, which centers on thinking critically about AI, strategic focus on future work, ethics, and learning how to build AI tools.

Our conversations surfaced a nuanced understanding of the devastating impact of AI on their professions. Yet, despite the grim circumstances, the board members who participated said it changed their thinking on AI, leaving them feeling more empowered to wield it to rebuild their professions. So the next natural step is to expand.

We are opening the process to everyone because we believe rebuilding translation will take a village.

In this workshop

We will brainstorm together about what boards of translation associations can do. The outcome will be ideas such as tools they could create and activities they can lead.

First, we will briefly explain what we did so far and where we are headed.

Then, we will co-create ideas for what boards of translation associations should do:

1. Ideation - You will write down your initial thoughts on what boards should do in a shared whiteboard. We will add our own pre-existing ideas.

2. Creating groupings - We will cluster the ideas people write into groups.

3. Naming the groups - We will discuss the groups we made. You will say whether you see things in common between the ideas and, if so, what. As we do this, we will also share our pre-existing suggestions for what the groups should be.

4. Vote - You will vote on which ideas are the most important to execute.

5. Discussion - we will discuss the ideas that get the most votes.

Anyone welcome!

We are very much interested in perspectives from other professions!

What is happening to the translation professions is not unique to them. We want an outside perspective, and we think many of our insights are applicable to a broad range of professions so you will probably learn insights applicable to your domain.

To read more:

• Read here about the rest of the project and here about how non-translators can help

• Board members in FIT Europe organizations are welcome to apply to participate in the expert group here

We look forward to seeing you at the workshop!