Gökhan Fırat’s article awarded joint runner-up in Martha Cheung Award 2022
Gökhan Fırat’s article on “Uberization of Translation” is awarded the position of joint runner-up by the Martha Cheung Award 2022 for Best English Article in Translation Studies by an Early Career Scholar.
The article entitled ‘Uberization of Translation: Impacts on Working Conditions’ by Gökhan Fırat, a PhD Student/Postgraduate Researcher at the Centre for Translation Studies, has been deemed by the Martha Cheung Award Committee and independent reviewers to be of outstanding quality and awarded as joint runner up of 2022 for Best English Article in Translation Studies by an Early Career Scholar.
The article was published in The Journal of Internationalization and Localization 8/1 (2021). It explores the critical literature on digital platforms from a labour studies perspective and presents the findings of a quantitative survey of 70 translation workers residing in Turkey and working on/for digital labour platforms. In this article, Fırat argues that the introduction of digital labour platforms into translation production and business networks has not yet provided a significant contribution to the working conditions of translation workers living in Turkey. Instead, their working conditions have been rearranged and reorganized in accordance with the uberization of (translation) work. According to Fırat’s article, engaging in such work on/for digital labour platforms exposes translation workers to risks related to employment status, income level, work-life balance, social protections, free agency, bargaining power, dependence on the platform, allocation of risks and rewards, and data collection, protection and privacy. The full article is available open access here until the end of 2022 at: https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jial.20006.fir.
Gökhan Fırat is currently continuing his research on the same topic within the scope of his PhD studies with the help of funding from the E3 grant secured by the Centre for Translation Studies in 2019. His interdisciplinary PhD study maintains the focus on the collaborative and cooperative forms of translation work (translaboration and transcooperation) in the digital economy, also known as the gig or platform economy. By exploring and analysing the challenges and opportunities of different digital platform economy models (i.e. platform capitalism, platform cooperativism and open cooperativism), Fırat’s study aims to expand his analysis on the ‘uberization of translation work’ and assess the impacts of novel platform economy models on translation workers, especially against standards for measuring decent, fair and sustainable work.
Given annually since 2019, the Martha Cheung Award is a prestigious award established by The Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies in honour of the late Professor Martha Cheung (1953-2013), formerly Chair Professor of Translation at Hong Kong Baptist University. The Martha Cheung Award aims to recognize research excellence in the output of early career researchers, and to allow them, like Professor Cheung herself, to make their voices heard in the international arena and play a role in charting the future directions of research in the discipline. You can find out more about this prestigious award, by visiting the official Martha Cheung Award page.
- Fırat, G. 2021. "Uberization of Translation: Impacts on Working Conditions". In The Journal of Internationalization and Localization (JIAL) 8 (1) by Julie McDonough Dolmaya and Minako O'Hagan (Eds). John Benjamins.
