Posted on behalf of Nitya Raghava, BA Dutch and Spanish

This August, I had the chance to participate in the Taalunie Zomercursus, an intensive two-week course, with other students of Dutch hailing from all around the globe. We had our choice of four themes – media and politics, literature and culture (my choice), commercial and literary translation, and finally linguistics and teaching. We explored these through workshops with our course leaders, Nikki and Tom, and then in an independent group project which involved compiling and presenting research. (more…)

A female psychiatrist is appointed by a judge to evaluate three women who, strangers to each other, have each confessed to the murder of the same man. Their rage toward and hatred of their male-dominated society is gradually understood by the psychiatrist, who begins to question her own nature.

“A Question of Silence is a fluent reminder of the cinema’s ability not only to please us with the eloquence of formal, optical arrangements and conventional scenarios, but to critically alter the moments of our lives: to connect the suggestions in the movie theater’s darkened interiority with the exteriority of public life. And in doing so, it is another step in the welcoming of female spectators into the audience of men.” – Barbara Kruger

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By SELCS Language Co-ordinators (Marie Fournier, Anne Grydehøj, Helga Hlaðgerður Lúthersdóttir, Joana Jacob Ramalho, Christina Massaccesi, Marga Navarrete, Mazal Oaknín, Dagmar Paulus, Christine Sas)

Some students may feel that the lockdown has bereft them of essential face to face contact time with peers and tutors to develop fluency and gain a better understanding of the languages they study. We have all been adjusting to these changing times and finding our way around this conundrum too and would like to invite you all to think creatively and share with each other how you have been practising your Danish, Dutch, French, German, Icelandic, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Swedish, this vast array of fascinating languages on offer in SELCS!

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by Rachel West, 18/04/20

February 2020 marked the beginning of a collaborative translation project on an excerpt from Fikry El Azzouzi’s De Beloning. The project saw the coming together of three universities which are home to the Dutch language departments in the UK: The University of Sheffield, The University of Nottingham and the University College London. Three universities, twenty-one students and one book extract to translate from Dutch to English, the project aimed to promote cultural exports from Flanders while providing students an opportunity to gain real, hands-on experience in translation. Despite the unexpected curveball of the Coronavirus outbreak, a complete commitment to the task prevailed. Here’s how we got on!

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