With that in mind, the coordinators of the dual Masters at ASU, Prof. Dr. Assam El Ammary and Prof. Dr. Abdelhamid Marzouk, along with the new head of the German department Prof. Dr. Nahla Tawfik, invited the IALT delegation to visit Cairo from 5–11 May to begin discussing the future shape of the collaboration. During the visit, Dr. Ende and Dr. Foradi gave their ASU colleagues and students insights into several aspects of training at IALT in areas such as the fundamentals of interpreting, academic research techniques and writing, and translation and interpreting technology, while Prof. Czulo gave two presentations on current research at IALT on discourse studies in translatology. In turn, the visitors from Leipzig were impressed by the wide range of activities at Ain Shams University, particularly a cutting-edge start-up incubator which only last year awarded a prize to a graduate from the Al Alsun Faculty. On 10 May, Prof. Czulo also attended the opening sessions of a conference discussing ASU's position with regard to central fields of activity in society.
After the academic programme was concluded, the IALT delegation sat down with the Dean of the Al Alsun Faculty and the Vice-President of ASU to explore what form a cooperation between IALT and the Al Alsun Faculty could take; there were also discussions with representatives from the DAAD and the German Embassy in Cairo. Feedback from students on the dual Masters programme is also currently being evaluated with regard to its practicability.
No visit of this kind would be complete without a cultural programme, of course, and the IALT team was privileged to be given a tour – organised at very short notice – of ASU's new museum the day before it opened, and in the company of a former Egyptian minister of culture, no less. The museum houses copies of a number of old texts that were digitalised in cooperation with the University of Leipzig, whereby the particular highlight for friends of IALT is the app that can be installed on a smartphone or tablet with a camera to allow sections of the documents to be read in a professional English translation. The visitors from Leipzig were also treated to a tour through Old Cairo and the obligatory trip to the pyramids at Giza, during which they were accompanied by students on the dual Masters programme. An evening in a local bazaar and a shared meal rounded out a very productive visit that everybody hopes is the overture to a renewal of the existing cooperation.
