Russian Sign Language Trainees of the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation Completed a Summer Internship

One of them is All-Russian Society of the Deaf. It is one of the oldest organizations, aiming at improving the living conditions of deaf and hearing-impaired people. Tatiana Borisova, chairman of the Astrakhan branch of the All-Russian Society of the Deaf, always welcomes and supports the CITS initiatives on inclusive environment. Our partners regret, that today school and university curricula do not offer discipline “Russian Sign Language”, so deaf and hearing-impaired children lack opportunities to learn sign language and sometimes are disconnected from the world. Besides, there is an acute shortage of Russian sign language interpreters in the Astrakhan Region.

The other organization, where the CITS students are interning, is the emergency call center for the hearing-impaired at the autonomous non-profit organization “Obereg”. Elina Kharchenko, the interpreter at the call center, also welcomed the course graduates to the service. She taught them numerous gestures, different variations of them and told where certain gestures came from and how to memorize them best.

Nikita Lyubashev, a student of the Foreign Languages Department, who took the course “Basics of Russian Sign Language and Studying Deaf Culture”, shares his impressions: “I really enjoyed my internship at Obereg. Our instructor shared with us some elements of informal language, junk words and so on. It helps not only to learn more signs, but also to understand in general how this language functions.”