Student projects at the Institute of Slavic Studies

The Institute of Slavic Studies at TU Dresden offers students the opportunity to organize, plan and participate in numerous student projects. The project work, both as part of a seminar and independently of courses, is intended to enable students to gain practical experience during their studies.

Eastern European Film Days at the Kino in der Fabrik

TU Dresden students translate and subtitle festival films

© Mirko Schöne

"Cinema and films, passion and fascination, excitement and discussion" - these are the keywords with which Kino in der Fabrik invites you to the 7th edition of the Eastern European Film Festival in November. This means that for one week, the arthouse cinema in Tharandter Straße will be transformed into an exciting venue for films from Eastern Europe, most of which will be shown for the first and only time in Dresden. Teachers and students from the Institute of Slavic Studies at TU Dresden will be taking part again this year - and not just as cineastes and film fans. They are helping to design the supporting programme for the third time and have now specialized in translating and subtitling films. For this year's project event in the cinema, the organizing team selected coming-of-age films as the main theme. Most of these films do not have a German distributor and are only shown, if at all, at festivals; this is the first time they have been shown in German translation in Dresden.

Although translation is not a new territory for students of Slavic Studies (it is a part of studying foreign languages), translating a film that will be shown on the big screen in front of an audience is still something special. Three working groups of students dealt with film translations as part of the cooperation project in the summer semester of 2019 and were thus able to gain professional experience and put the knowledge they had acquired during their studies into practice. In addition to the usual translation issues, they were confronted with the problems of colloquial and youth language, slang, vulgarisms and language variations.

An insight into the seminar work was provided by the lecture with film clips and an audience discussion entitled "The age of teenagers. Between Adaptation and Outbreak", which took place at the Kino in der Fabrik on November 12. Afterwards, the Ukrainian coming-of-age film "When the trees fall" was shown and discussed.

Image impressions from the event

"The age of teenagers. Between adaptation and escape"

The Dresdner Universitätsjournal (30(17), page 7) published an German article on the collaboration between KiF and the Institute of Slavic Studies: "Osteuropäische Filmtage im Kino in der Fabrik. TU Dresden students translate and subtitle festival films".