Τhe First Language Services Working Group Meeting at Hannover
“Multilingualism changes lives”: Report from the first meeting of the Language Services Working Group, 18 October 2024, Hannover
The Language Services Working Group (LSWG) was proposed and established at the EULiST WP3 Status Update Meeting on 31st January 2024. Its purpose is to ensure effective communication and linguistic support across all project activities. The main areas of focus lie on supporting the establishment of a EULiST Language Policy and Plan, a EULiST Language Centre, and other language-related activities. From the beginning, the group has been aware of the importance of communicating with the work packages (WPs) on language-related activities and that they would send their proposals to the existing EULiST WPs.
We greatly appreciate that seven of the ten universities within the LSWG were able to attend the meeting on the 18th of October (two joined online). The group received a warm welcome by the new Vice President for International Affairs and Sustainability at the Leibniz University Hannover, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Regina Nogueira, who set the tone by giving a very personal account of her academic career across various cultures and languages. With the motto “multilingualism changes lives”, Prof. Nogueira emphasised the importance of language services in all forms of international academic collaboration. Our meeting then focused on language-related tasks in the EULiST proposal.
We began with short presentations by the seven EULiST partners on their language services, followed by question & answer sessions. These gave us a good idea of common themes, but also individual strengths that we could use for the benefit of EULiST activities. After a well-deserved lunch nearby, we focused on “logistics”, i.e. our communication channels, working modes, meeting schedules, and proposals to the WPs. We agreed to select 3-5 activities that we considered feasible (“low hanging fruits”), urgent, or related to our centres’ areas of expertise. Ideally, the chosen activities would fulfil all of these criteria. We will send a list of these activities to the respective WPs and start work only on receiving the go-ahead. We plan to work in small sub-groups with experts from various EULiST partners to create concrete proposals for implementation. After review in the LSWG, we will then submit these to the WPs for review, negotiation and approval.
After coffee, we discussed concrete language-related activities we would suggest to the WPs. These should provide a solid foundation to a future EULiST Language Policy and a EULiST Language Centre, as formulated in the EULiST proposal.
After very intensive and productive discussions and concrete results, the day ended with a pleasant dinner in Hannover’s old town. We plan to meet again online in November and our partner in Athens has already agreed to host the next LSWG meeting in May 2025.
