English Unit
Head of the Unit: Susan Lindsay PICKFORD
Your M.A. in Translation at the FTI
FTI’s three- to four-semester MA programme in translation from French and/or Spanish into English puts students in the classroom with renowned academics, seasoned professionals and a small group of highly talented peers. The practitioners on our teaching staff occupy key positions in translation and multilingual communications at large multinational firms, Swiss banks, and international organizations like the United Nations (UN), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Our core curriculum is resolutely practice-oriented, but a translation-theory specialization is available and may be pursued through to a PhD/post-doc. Students with other languages – in addition to French and/or Spanish – will find a host of resources available within the larger Faculty, which also offers translation courses in German, Italian, Russian and Arabic.
Classes are often taught as small workshops. Topics range from financial and business translation to literary, legal, and diplomacy-related texts, as well as terminology, computer-assisted translation techniques, multilingual communications management and even sub-titling.
Compared with similar English translation MAs in Europe and North America, FTI graduates have an unrivaled range of career options. This is due in part to the exceptionally large number of in-house translation teams in Geneva and the Faculty’s longstanding ties to the leaders of those teams, who teach many of our workshops. In a profession that can be difficult to break into, these ties mean that our English graduates have privileged access to the high end of the translation market.
The programme’s status as an acknowledged talent pool for some of the most elite organizations in the profession also entails an admissions policy that is more selective than those of comparable English translation MAs. However, every admitted applicant receives an automatic State subsidy/grant that reduces effective tuition costs to less than 1000 Swiss francs (about USD 1000, CAD 1100, EUR 900, GBP 600) per year.