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Translation Studies Research and Scholarship Group

The Translation Studies Research and Scholarship Group meets every semester to discuss and share recent research in Translation Studies, including the practice of translation. Members have a wide range of research specialisms, including literary translation, gender and translation, interpreting, translation in the cultural heritage sector, and translating multilingualism, among others. The group is open to both research and scholarship colleagues, not only from within the department of Languages, Cultures and Film, but also from beyond, and we welcome PGRs and ECRs.

If you are interested in joining this group or in finding out more, please email Dr Sheela Mahadevan: sheela.mahadevan@liverpool.ac.uk

Members

Mariam Aboelezz (Lecturer in Arabic Translation Studies) is a translator and sociolinguist with a career traversing academia and the translation industry. Her research in Arabic linguistics, sociolinguistics and translation is driven by an interest in the juncture between language and identity politics, and she is currently completing a monograph on language ideologies in the context of political change in Egypt. Professionally, she is a certified translator who has worked in several specialised fields, most notably in the cultural heritage sector. She is currently serving as Vice Chair of Council for the Chartered Institute of Linguists, a role through which she advocates for greater recognition and regulation of the translation profession in the UK.

Carmen Ríos García is a Lecturer in Spanish, and her work covers sociolinguistics, pragmatics, translation and Public Service Interpreting as well as second language acquisition. She has presented research on hedges in literary translation and in political language, interpreters in film representations of migration, definiteness and specificity, anaphoric reference, and language attitudes surrounding the use and perception of Murcian Spanish. She led the validation of the Distance MA Translation at Lancaster University (2018) and was part of the validation team for the MA Translation Studies at the University of Sussex (2022) before contributing to the design of the MA Translation at the University of Liverpool.

Ting Guo is Senior Lecturer in Translation and Chinese Studies at the Department of Modern Languages, Cultures and Film. Her research straddles Chinese queer popular culture, gender and translation, and transcultural fandom. She serves as Associate Editor of Target: International Journal of Translation Studies and is a council member of the British Association of Chinese Studies. Dr Guo has published widely in leading journals such as Translation Studies, Translation and Interpreting Studies, and Feminist Media Studies. She is the author of Surviving Violent Conflict: Chinese Interpreters in the Second-Sino Japanese War (1931-45) (2016). Her recent works include the co-authored book Fan Translations (2025) and the forthcoming co-edited volume Translating Sexuality: Queer Popular Culture and Cinema in China (2026). She is currently working on a Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded project, “International Counterculture in the 1970s: Glasgow and Hong Kong” (PI Dr Evans, Glasgow), exploring countercultural practices in Hong Kong and their links with practices in Scotland before China’s Opening up in the 1980s.

Sheela Mahadevan is a Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies. Her research interests include the theory and practice of literary translation, literary multilingualism and its translation, contemporary Francophone literatures and practice-based research. Her recent publications include the translation of a French novel Lakshmi’s Secret Diary by Ari Gautier (Columbia University Press, 2024), and the monograph Writing between Languages: Translation and Multilingualism in Indian Francophone Writing (Bloomsbury, 2025), which is part of the ‘Advances in Translation’ series. She is a consultant editor for the Cambridge Journal of Literary Translation.

Lyn Marven is Reader in Contemporary German Literature and Translation and a literary translator. She translated and compiled the anthology Berlin Tales (2009) and translates contemporary literature by authors such as Maike Wetzel (Long Days, 2008; Elly, 2020), Larissa Boehning (Swallow Summer, 2016), Ulrike Draesner and Roman Ehrlich. She has also published research on affect in translation, and has a particular interest in translator autofiction.  

Kate Taylor is a Postgraduate Researcher in the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Film. Her research examines translation as a decolonial tool in adolescent literature. Her PhD thesis specifically uses a practice-based approach to demonstrate the utility and validity of translation as a research method and to further decolonial translation theory. Her corpus encompasses works from French, Spanish, and Italian postcolonial contexts to reflect diverse cultural and historical narratives. In developing a methodology that prioritises agency, Kate’s project examines how translation can actively challenge the dominant epistemologies present in adolescent literature.

Xian Xiao (Bettina) is a first-year PhD student at the University of Liverpool in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Film. Inspired by her personal translation and interpretation experience in Chongqing Historical Sites Museum of the War of Resistance Against Japan, her doctoral research project “Translation, Identity, and War Narrative in Chinese Museums” takes a narrative approach to explore the interplay between local and national museums, focusing on how war museums shape identities and represent painful memories through translation. Her project aims to help international audiences better understand Chinese museums and enrich the ongoing global conversation regarding the pivotal role of Chinese museums in terms of identity construction and dissemination.

Jiayue Zhang is a PhD student in Translation Studies, supervised by Dr Ting Guo and Dr Lyn Marven. Her research project examines the transnational and translingual representation of Chinese laotong relationships—conceptually akin to lesbian relationships in English—across literature and film.