Alumni AudioLab is a monthly podcast series where alumni of the OeAD talk about themselves and their research. The OeAD brings together researchers from all over the world and from different fields of research who spent part of their research career in Austria – some of them have even stayed here. In the Alumni AudioLab they tell their stories, talk about their scientific ambitions, their motivations and their personal backgrounds. It is an open format for all those who are not only interested in science as such but also in the people behind it.
https://oead.at/en/to-austria/alumni/audiolab
AAL_24_Alumni AudioLab with Blerte Ismajli
Today her students meet in intercultural dialogue with students from Serbia and Montenegro – for example in theater workshops. Blerte Ismajli herself studied at the time of the Kosovo war. She achieved her high level of German language through German-language radio, television and excessive practice - in wartimes, this intensive examination of a previously unknown language was also a refuge and a protective mechanism against the political unrest in the country.
In 2010 she came to Austria for her doctoral studies with a scholarship from the OeAD. The sheer endless pool of knowledge in Vienna's libraries opened up possibilities for her that she did not have at a young university like that in Pristina and a still younger institute of German studies. To this day the local conditions are limited, although the resources are constantly being expanded - also with Austrian help.
Currently she is conducting research on grammatical structures such as evidentiality. This means where does a speaker get his information from? Although German and Albanian have their roots in the same language family - the Indo-European - there are very different ways of expressing this. Especially for her work as an interpreter and translator, such language comparisons are important – and also exciting.