This prestigious prize, awarded by the European Commission, recognizes educational projects that promote innovative, inclusive and collaborative teaching practices. In 2025, only 117 projects were selected across Europe, including three in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.

The award-winning project concerns the Certificat interuniversitaire en Langue des signes de Belgique francophone (LSFB) et français, co-organized by UNamur and UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles and supported by the Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès (UTJJ) thanks to Erasmus+ funding. Running from September 2023 to June 2024, it aims to professionalize deaf interpreters in French-speaking Belgium and France, by offering them a unique training course leading to certification. Thanks to an innovative pedagogical approach, combining formal, non-formal and informal learning, 19 deaf adults were able to obtain certification, strengthening their professional recognition and role in society.

"We implemented this certificate because of the urgency and need to develop continuing education for deaf interpreters in French-speaking Belgium and the necessary reflection on the new profession of deaf interpreter in France," emphasizes Professor Dany Etienne (UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles), Dean of the Marie Haps Faculty of Translation and Interpreting.

"Deaf interpreters in Belgium are often self-trained, with no official recognition, which limits their professionalization and affects the services offered to deaf people. By integrating knowledge and tools from other universities, we have been able to develop suitable training, guaranteeing professionalism and ethics, in order to improve the quality of interpreting services and encourage recognition of the profession," adds Professor Laurence Meurant (UNamur).

This project thus marks a first in Belgium and France, filling a major gap in the training of deaf interpreters. It paves the way for better quality interpreting services and official recognition of the profession.

The complementary expertise of the three partners has enabled the development of a unique training program of excellence:

• The research into the linguistic study of LSFB at UNamur conducted in collaboration with the ASBL École et surdité and the Centre scolaire Sainte-Marie Namur.
• Research and practice in the field of co-interpretation for UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles.
• Translation didactics for UTJJ.

This collaborative work has made it possible to develop tailor-made modules, adapted to the specific needs of deaf learners, and to create transnational links with experts in the UK, USA and Germany.

Find out more

• About the certificate in Interuniversity Certificate in Sign Language of French-speaking Belgium (LSFB) and French
• About the Laboratoire de langue des signes de Belgique francophone (LSFB-Lab)
• On the French-LSFB bilingual dictionary

This is also a project to support ! More info: https://unamur.be/fr/soutenir/lsfb

This project was made possible thanks to co-financing from the European Union.

In late October, Rector Annick Castiaux, accompanied by Vice-Rector for International Relations and Cooperation Stéphane Leyens, visited Université Savoie Mont Blanc. The aim: to identify opportunities for bilateral collaboration between the two institutions.

Professors Denis Saint-Amand (Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, President of the Namur Institute of Language and Transmediality) and Johan Yans (Director of the Department of Geology and President of the Institute of Life,Earth and Environment) were also part of the UNamur delegation. Université Savoie Mont Blanc was represented by its President, Philippe Briand, as well as Mareva Sabatier (Vice-President of the Board of Directors, in charge of personnel), Pascal Hot (Vice-President in charge of research) and Emilie Viret-Thasiniphone (Director of International Relations).

Meetings were held with representatives from various institutes and laboratories: mathematics, physics, earth science and geology, business administration, literature. Opportunities for collaboration in these fields were discussed.

The RELIEF Network (Réseau d'Échanges et de Liaisons entre Institutions d'Enseignement Supérieur Francophones) brings together four universities: the UNamur, the Université Savoie Mont Blanc, the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR) as well as the Haute École Spécialisée de Suisse Occidentale (HES-SO).

Created in 2015, the RELIEF network aims to:

• Foster exchanges and interactions between partner institutions;
• Develop high-quality joint projects on an international scale, particularly in the French-speaking world, for students and teacher-researchers;
• Strengthen the visibility and impact of initiatives carried out by the network and its members.

Invited to join RELIEF in 2025, UNamur looks forward to this integration.

Whether it concerns linguistics, economics, politics, sustainable development, law, history, educational sciences, literature or translation, research in the humanities and social sciences is as eclectic as it is rich and essential for tackling society's challenges. Of UNamur's eleven research institutes, seven are directly involved in SHS research. While there is a high degree of complementarity in these areas of research, better pooling of resources, sharing and easier access to certain services, resources and support will help to sustain and strengthen the excellence of SHS research at UNamur. It is with this in mind that the SHS impulse platform has just been created.

• Axis 1 - Support for the acquisition of databases, documentary resources and software
• Axis 2 - Subsidy for cutting-edge training in the use of specialized methods
• Axis 3 - Funding access to the SMCS "Support en Méthodologie et Calcul Statistique" platform at UCLouvain, thanks to an inter-university partnership.
• Axis 4 - Setting up an SHS space, containing a laboratory for running experiments and shared work tools promoting exchanges between researchers.

This initiative, launched in January 2025, addresses the specific challenges faced by SHS researchers. The long-term aim is to sustain and expand the services. "We will also hire a researcher expert in methodological analysis in SHS who will be able to inform innovative methodologies and frame the methodological design of research projects," emphasizes Sandrine Biémar, vice-dean of UNamur's Faculty of Education and Training Sciences, a member of the IRDENA institute and the SHS Impulse management committee. "The wish is also to support networking between SHS researchers at UNamur and to be a lever for setting up interdisciplinary projects," adds Sandrine Biémar.

The platform's management team is made up of representatives of the university's various SHS institutes, and ensures efficient management of resources. The platform's impact will be assessed during its initial phase (2025-2027), enabling strategies for its sustainability and development to be defined.

The Sign Language of French-speaking Belgium (LSFB) has acquired several resources in recent years. A dictionary, developed and enriched since 2010 by the LSFB asbl association (https://dico.lsfb.be/). A contextual bilingual dictionary, developed at the University of Namur from LSFB-Lab research data and put online in 2022 (https://dico.corpus-lsfb.be/) . Today, MOSI brings these two resources to the user's fingertips, while enabling the signing community to contribute to the enrichment of the data.

From a web browser, a reader will now be able to highlight a word and see a video appear with the corresponding sign. It will also be possible to carry out manual searches in the database, which currently boasts over 7,000 signs. Sign language speakers will be able to add new signs to this resource. MOSI is thus conceived as a bilingual (French - LSFB) and collaborative tool; it is both a site and a web extension.

MOSI is accessible free of charge: https://www.mot-signe.be/

Based on research carried out at the University of Namur (LSFB-Lab and the NaDI institute), the LSFB asbl association and the partnership forged between UNamur and Ecole et Surdité 25 years ago, MOSI will be particularly useful for students, adults, families, teachers, speech therapists, interpreters and anyone working in the field of deafness. The test phase demonstrated the enthusiasm of the 40 registered users, who carried out 30,000 searches and recorded 500 signs.

Linguistic research on LSFB began in 2000 at the University of Namur, pioneering the field in French-speaking Belgium. Since then, a team has developed, the Laboratoire de langue des signes de Belgique francophone (or LSFB-Lab). Several fruitful collaborations between the LSFB-Lab and UNamur's Faculty of Computer Science have led to ambitious projects, such as the bilingual and contextual dictionary: a dictionary that can be queried in both French and LSFB, via a webcam, and provides access to translations illustrated with examples in context, taken from real conversations.

The origins of MOSI lie in the needs of students and teachers in the bilingual classes at Sainte-Marie in Namur. A teacher, Magaly Ghesquière, was aware of the resources available, and had the idea of making them more accessible to students and teachers. A first version of the tool was developed by two students from the Faculty of Computer Science (Innocent Ye and Babacar Sow). This was followed by a collaboration between computer scientists from the PreCISE center and the HuMaLearn laboratory at UNamur (Jérôme Fink, Pierre Poitier, Benoît Frénay, Anthony Cleve), the LSFB-Lab (Sibylle Fonzé, Laurence Meurant and Bruno Sonnemans), École et Surdité teachers (guided by Magaly Ghesquière and Sibylle Fonzé), and the LSFB asbl association (Bruno Sonnemans) which led to the completed version of the tool.

"Despite the progress made, French sign language bilingual education is still sorely lacking in resources and tools for both students and their teachers. By bringing together players from the signing community at large: researchers, teachers, interpreters and all LSFB speakers, the MOSI project offers the hope of a concrete response. It's a citizen's advance that's both generous and collaborative."