PhD Translation and Intercultural Studies / Programme details

Our PhD Translation and Intercultural Studies programme will enable you to carry out a significant piece of original research under the supervision of our academics.

The Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies (CTIS) at Manchester has the largest concentration of translation studies specialists in the country. It attracts visiting scholars and postgraduate students from a wide range of countries and backgrounds.

By collaborating with experts in fields such as literary studies, linguistics, intellectual, social and cultural history and theory, CTIS provides unique opportunities for doctoral researchers in translation studies, both in core areas of the discipline and at its interdisciplinary cutting edge.

CTIS provides an excellent environment for research and organises regular scholarly events for the benefit of postgraduate students. These include a series of weekly seminars which attract a large national audience of researchers, students and practitioners. The seminars, delivered by invited speakers, form an important part of students' initiation into scholarly research, while also offering valuable opportunities for informal contact with leading academics.

The Centre also provides specialist research training for doctoral students in the form of masterclasses.

International conferences and symposia which CTIS has organised in Manchester and in which PhD students have participated include:

• Research Models in Translation Studies II (2011);
• Citizen Media: New Mediations of Civic Engagement (2013);
• New Perspectives on Translation: Insights into the Performative and Cognitive Work of Translators (2014);
• Researching Translation in the Context of Popular Culture: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives (2015);
• Genealogies of Knowledge: Translating Political and Scientific Thought across Time and Space (2017);
• International Postgraduate Conference in Translation and Interpreting (IPCITI) (2018).

The Centre houses the world's first and largest computerised corpus of translated text. The Translational English Corpus and the necessary software for processing it are freely available to the research community on the CTIS website.

CTIS is also home to Genealogies of Knowledge: The Evolution and Contestation of Concepts across Time and Space , a large AHRC-funded project exploring how translation has impacted the transformation of key concepts in political and scientific thought as these concepts have travelled across centuries, languages and cultures.

Find out more about our research , our staff and what our current postgraduate research students are working on.

Graduate School

All of our postgraduate students become members of the Graduate School when you start at Manchester. It has dedicated facilities for students and offers opportunities to collaborate with other postgraduates.

REF 2014

In the 2014 REF, Modern Languages and Linguistics at Manchester, the unit of assessment that includes Interpreting and Translation Studies, had more than 70% of research outputs rated at 4* (world leading)/3* (internationally excellent).

These results place Modern Languages and Linguistics at Manchester at a highly impressive 3rd out of 57 submissions, nationally, based on research power (calculated by 4* and 3* times number of staff submitted).

The PhD is the major postgraduate research degree. It involves three years of full-time study or six years of part-time study and the preparation of a thesis of not more than 80,000 words that makes a significant contribution to knowledge.

A satisfactory PhD topic is one that a suitably qualified and properly supervised student can bring to completion within the permitted timeframe. 

Recent thesis titles include:

• Theatre Translation, Communities of Practice and the Sri Lankan Conflicts: Renarration as Political Critique
• Analysing Fragmented Narratives: Twitter Reporting of the 3 July 2013 Events in Egypt
• Managing Translation Projects: Practices and Quality in Production Networks
• A Narrative Perspective on News Translation by Non-Professional Virtual Communities: The Case of Yeeyan
• Re-narrating the City: A Genetic Investigation into the Narrative Impact of the Translation Practices of Wikipedia Volunteers
• Hegel's 'Phenomenology' in Translation: A Comparative Analysis of Translatorial 'Hexis'
• Investigating the Cultural Determinants of Advertising Style in the UK and Greece
• The Phenomenon of Self-Translation in Puerto Rican and Puerto Rican US Diaspora Literature Written by Women
• The Translation of Children's and Adolescents' Literature in Iran: A Structurationist Approach
• Theorising Translation as a Process of Cultural Repatriation: The Greek Civil War Narrative Translated into Greek
• Making Knowledge Move: Translation and the Travel of Technical Textbooks in Meiji-era Japan, 1868-1894
• Amateur Translation and the Development of a Participatory Culture in China: A Netnographic Study of The Last Fantasy Fansubbing Group
• Transgressive Textualities: Translating References to Gender, Sexuality and Corporeality in Contemporary French and Francophone Women's Writing
• Connecting Protestantism to Chinese Ruism: Religion, Dialogism and Intertextuality in James Legge's Translation of the Lunyu

Please note that all PhD students are required to undertake research training as part of their PhD programme.

Your research will normally be supervised by two members of staff at the University. Your supervisors will most likely be members of the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, but if your research requires it, we may arrange for supervision by someone outside the School.

Supervisory arrangements at Manchester are governed by a Code of Practice which is available on the University's website.

Regular meetings will be held with the supervisors, and details of each of the meetings will be recorded.

Research panels (consisting of at least three academic staff, including the supervisors) are held once per semester to monitor progress.

Please note that the first year of the full-time programme is probationary. This means you will be required to show evidence of satisfactory progress to proceed with the programme.

Manchester is home to one of the UK's five National Research Libraries - one of the best-resourced academic libraries in the UK and widely recognised as one of the world's greatest research libraries.

Find out more about libraries and study spaces for postgraduate research students at Manchester.

We also have one of the largest academic IT services in Europe - supporting world-class teaching and research. There are extensive computing facilities across campus, with access to standard office software as well as specialist programmes, all connected to the campus network and internet.

Every student is registered for email, file storage and internet access. If more demanding computer access is required, our specialist computing division can provide high-end and specialist computing services.

The Graduate School offers dedicated state of the art facilities to research students, including common rooms and workstations.

Find out more about facilities for Translation and Intercultural Studies students.