CITS Holds RSL Week at Astrakhan State University

From 11 to 15 April, the Faculty of Foreign Languages held its first Russian Sign Language Week. Every day CITS staff members and graduates of our RSL courses acquainted the faculty students with the world of the deaf.

An introductory lecture was held on the first day of the project: students were told about the origin of sign languages, including Russian, the ways to establish contact with the deaf even if you don’t know signs, and fingerspelling; they also learned a few basic phrases in RSL. The students can now introduce themselves and offer assistance in RSL. They also took part in an interactive quiz, where short videos with signs were presented, and they had to guess their meaning. Many students guessed that Russian Sign Language is mostly associative.

For the next two days, the faculty became a platform for a social experiment. The aim was to “deafen” students for a while with earplugs and immerse them in a quiet environment, to make it clear how hard it is to live in a society where you’re neither heard nor understood. All the participants had to do was to play Chinese whispers without words and transmit the original message to each other correctly. As it turned out, it is not as easy as it seems!

Then the organizers offered a quest which helped the participants learn fingerspelling better: they managed to fingerspell entire words and learned new phrases in RSL. At the final event, the faculty students consolidated their knowledge, asked their questions of interest and learned that RSL is not only a language of communication, but also a language of expression of their creativity. The ASU sign song club Silent People performed two popular songs – Nashe Leto by Valentin Strykalo and Kukla Kolduna by Korol i Shut rock band – into RSL.

Thanks to the RSL week, the faculty students learned more about the deaf, who are real foreigners among us. Many of the participants were motivated to learn this unusual language, and the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation can help them do it.

Recall that the project is being implemented by the winner of the Vladimir Potanin Foundation’s competition Practices of Personal Philanthropy and Altruism.