This year, Open Days of the University of Gdańsk were divided into a few parts. The 30th of March was the Institute of English and American Studies Day. Our Institute wanted this event to be as adventurous and fun as possible. That’s why students and lecturers organized the kind of a location-based game. All people who were interested in the event (mainly high school students, but also younger kids) needed to register at the website. When the day came, they took part in a lecture about the Institute and then they received the so called “passports” in which they were to collect the stamps from every station.
Stations were situated in certain rooms in the building. There were 14 of them. Some were to present specific fields of study and the others were devoted to Students’ Clubs operating in the Institute. That’s what we were needed for. We were to organize our own little show to convince people that translation studies is fun. At the same time, we had a great opportunity to promote our Club.
Firstly, we needed to come up with the idea, what kind of activity we wanted to present. We decided to give our guests the opportunity to make their own subtitles. We prepared a few short videos in English that they were to “translate”. The videos were provided with transcripts to make the task easier. Basically, the accuracy was not important at all. We wanted them to have fun and create some crazy stuff. Believe us, it turned out really great!
We met some great (or sick) people, who produced subtitles so “creative” that we do not dare to quote them here. Not all of the participants wanted to leave, despite the fact that time to collect stamps was limited. In the end they all received a stamp from our chairwoman (a sweet little bunny; I mean a stamp, not a chairwoman), together with a short handout listing all the great aspects of our studies, and a cookie and/or a candy.
There’s not much more to say; it was another great event we took part in. It was fun and gave us the opportunity to talk with people and make them laugh. We hope they remembered the name LINGUANA and if they ever start studying at our Institute, they will join us right away.
