Fully funded PhD position in Translation Studies ATHAAR project M/F

Job Description

Thesis Subject

Scientific background:
The PhD student will conduct his/her thesis as part of the interdisciplinary research project ATHAAR (“Theoretical Contributions to the Multilingual Translation of Technical Texts and Emerging Applications for the Recognition of Handwritten Arabic Texts”), funded by the TIRIS Scaling Up Science initiative in 2025 for four years (start date: November 2025; project leader: Guillaume Loizelet, University of Toulouse). This project falls under the themes of TIRIS “Pilier” #2 (Societal Change and Impact: Understanding Global Changes and Their Impacts on Societies; Priority #3: “Long-Term Evolution and Societies”).
The PhD student will benefit from a high-quality research environment, with the opportunity to interact regularly with the other PhD student and the researchers involved in the project, and to participate in related scientific activities. Interactions with other researchers and other areas of the project are expected, particularly with historians of astronomy and mathematics.
The ATHAAR project aims to develop effective and innovative tools in two areas related to the critical editing and translation of scientific documents:
• (1) The development of artificial intelligence tools enabling the automatic recognition of Arabic manuscripts (HTR) and information extraction (LLM) from these sources to facilitate their reading. This is a critical issue not only for the history of science but for history as a whole. The first thesis, underway since November 1, 2025, addresses this particular objective. It is titled “Automatic Recognition of Medieval Arabic Scientific Manuscripts and Development of Dedicated LLMs” (Supervisor: Farah Benamara, IRIT; Co-supervisor: Nabil Hathout, CLLE; Co-supervisor: Guillaume Loizelet, IMT)
• (2) The production of theoretical resources for the creation of coordinated translations from one language into multiple languages of various linguistic families for a text with a significant scientific or technical component (of which al-Qānūn al-Masʿūdī, written by al-Bīrūnī around 1035, is a specific example with Arabic as the source language). The second thesis, which will begin on September 1, 2026, will address this objective.
A distinctive feature of the ATHAAR project is that it brings together researchers in the history of science, translation studies and terminology, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, linguistics, mathematics, and medieval Arabic texts (Farah Benamara, Nabil Hathout, Amélie Josselin-Leray, and Guillaume Loizelet).
The ATHAAR project has a strong international dimension. The PhD candidate is expected to take advantage of the international networks and activities associated with the project and its members. He / she is also expected to travel for data collection and/or scientific presentations at the national and international levels.

PhD Topic:
Design of a theoretical framework for the coordinated multilingual translation of medieval scientific texts
The thesis, which has a strong practical focus, aims primarily to establish a conceptual framework that can be used by different teams of translators working in different languages when translating medieval scientific texts (among the potential target language are Arabic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, Uzbek). Some scientific texts are indeed currently still available only in the source language or in a very limited range of target languages (e.g., texts translated only into Russian, and sometimes into Uzbek, in the 1970s and 1980s, such as al-Bīrūnī's Al-Qānūn al-Masʿūdī (al-Bīrūnī, trans.) or texts translated only into Latin before the mid-20th century, such as al-Battānī's Zīj al-Sābi' (al-Battānī, ed. 1899–1907). Beyond the difficulty of producing critical editions, there is also the issue of coordinated translation into a multitude of target languages. The European Union's open science policy has highlighted the need to disseminate scientific knowledge beyond the circle of specialists alone. One of the pillars of this policy is the promotion of multilingualism. It is therefore important that the edited text be translated into several languages (including languages outside the EU) so that it can reach a wide audience.
A number of studies and projects focus on the historical multilingual translation of ancient texts (for example, the ANR GAIA project— Galen in Arabic: More than a Translation, which examines the translation of Greek philosophical texts into Arabic during the Abbasid period). However, the issue of contemporary multilingual translation of ancient texts has scarcely been documented in the existing literature, and even less so when it comes to specialized source texts such as those dealing with astronomy. Moreover, the issue is very rarely addressed from the perspective of translation studies (with the exception of Véronique Boudon-Millot, a philologist and historian of French medicine, who examines the challenges of translating ancient specialized texts for a modern audience, focusing on the contemporary translation of Greek medical texts (Boudon-Millot, 2023)). Among the main obstacles that have been listed, one can find: identifying the target audience of the translation, identifying the various stages (edit before translating, or translate before editing?), managing the style for a translation into a contemporary language, and dealing with terminological difficulties (neologisms, hapax legomena, and polysemy in an archaic language).
The thesis will aim to explore these implications in greater theoretical depth and broaden their scope, as they largely pertain to methodological issues.
Initially, the thesis will explore multilingual methodological tools, such as the TraduXio platform (https://www.philippelacour.net/fr/traduxio/ ; Goncharova & Lacour 2011; Lacour & Henkel 2020), to assess how they can be theorized. The PhD candidate will also be supported in compiling a bibliography that enables him/her to engage in an epistemological reflection on the act of translation itself, focusing in part, for example, on the notion of the “untranslatable” (“intraduisible”) brought to the forefront of debates by Barbara Cassin (Cassin 2019). A third focus of the thesis will examine the specificities of translating ancient specialized texts (Duris 2008), particularly issues of terminology from a diachronic perspective (Ducos & Vigneron 2025). The conclusion of the thesis will be dedicated to a novel synthesis of these theoretical and empirical approaches. To strike the right balance between theoretical investigation and the objectification of the concepts developed, the PhD candidate will be able to draw on an international network (Germany, China, Egypt, Spain, Iran, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Uzbekistan, the Netherlands, Russia, Turkey, and the USA) of historians of medieval astronomy involved, through Guillaume Loizelet, in the project to edit the Qānūn al-Masʿūdī written by al-Bīrūnī (11th century

References
-Al-Battānī. éd. 1899-1907. Sive Albatenii Opus astronomicum. 3 vol. Édition, traduction en latin et commentaires par Carlo Alphonso Nallino. Milan : Pubblicazioni del Reale osservatorio di Brera.
-Al-Bīrūnī, Abū Rayḥān, éd. 1954-1956. Al-Qānūn al-Masʿūdī. Sous la dir. de Nizamū'd-Dīn. 3 vol. Hyderabad : Osmania Oriental Publications Bureau.
-Al-Bīrūnī, Abū Rayḥān, éd. 1954-1956. Al-Qānūn al-Masʿūdī. Édition par ʿAbd al-Karīm Sāmī Jindī. 3 vol. Beyrouth : Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmīyah.
-Boudon-Millot, Véronique, 2023. “Traduire Hippocrate et Galien aujourd'hui : pour qui? pourquoi?” , Lettre de l'INSHS, sept. 23, pp. 36-38.
-Cassin, Barbara, 2019, Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. Le dictionnaire des intraduisibles, Editions du Seuil.
-Ducos Joëlle et Fleur Vigneron (ed.), 2025. « La science par les mots ou comment former une terminologie scientifique au Moyen Âge », Cahiers de lexicologie, vol.1, n°126.
- Duris, Pascal (ed.), 2008 Traduire la science hier et aujourd'hui, Maison des sciences de l'Homme d'Aquitaine.
-Goncharova Yuliya et Philippe Lacour, 2011, « TraduXio : nouvelle expérience en traduction littéraire », Traduire n°225.
-Lacour Philippe et Daniel Henkel, 2020, « Collaboration Strategies in Multilingual Online Literary Translation », in R. Desjardins, C. Larsonneur and P. Lacour, When Translation Goes Digital, Palgrave, 2020.

Keywords
Translation Studies, Terminology, Multilingualism, Specialized Texts, Corpus, History of Science, Astronomy

Application
Requirements
• Master's degree in translation and/or translation studies completed at the time of thesis enrollment, or an equivalent degree (an additional degree in a relevant scientific field is an asset);
• CV;
• Cover letter;

Skills
• Ability to interact with others and work in a team;
• Rigor and method;
• Fluency in English or French is required.
• Proficiency in at least two language families, including a Semitic language (proficiency in Arabic is not required but is an asset).
• Basic knowledge of translation technologies

Your Work Environment

Institutional Affiliation
The thesis will be conducted at the CLLE Laboratory (Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès University), within the PLC (Language and Cognitive Processes) team. A joint thesis supervision arrangement with the Toulouse Institute of Mathematics and the University of Toulouse will be established to allow the PhD student to benefit from both research environments.

Duration of funding
Three years (note: this duration is shorter than that of the ATHAAR project, which is four years).

The CLLE laboratory (Cognition, Languages, Language, Ergonomics) is a CNRS UMR created in January 2007 and mainly hosted on the Toulouse Jean Jaurès University site. It is a multidisciplinary research unit relating to Cognitive Sciences: the work carried out there covers the fields, more or less broad in scope, of linguistics, psychology, computer science, philosophy, education and neuroscience. The laboratory, made up of 205 members, is structured into 3 teams each composed of an average of 25 Teachers-Researchers and Researchers:
• “Languages and language” team, working more particularly on themes relating to linguistics;
• “Language and cognitive processes” team, focused on the interdisciplinarity between language and psychology;
• “Cognition in complex situations” team, working more particularly on themes of social and cognitive psychology.
The laboratory is also developing transversal research axes between these teams.
It also welcomes many doctoral and post-doctoral students.
CLLE is a CNRS UMR with the CCU experimental platform.

Compensation and benefits

Compensation

2300 € gross monthly

Annual leave and RTT

44 jours

Remote Working practice and compensation

Pratique et indemnisation du TT

Transport

Prise en charge à 75% du coût et forfait mobilité durable jusqu’à 300€

About the offer

About the CNRS

The CNRS is a major player in fundamental research on a global scale. The CNRS is the only French organization active in all scientific fields. Its unique position as a multi-specialist allows it to bring together different disciplines to address the most important challenges of the contemporary world, in connection with the actors of change.

CNRS

The research professions