The T&I training programmes at the Universität Leipzig were initiated in 1956. Over the following decades, the institute was home to prominent scholars and very productive in the field of T&I research. The so-called “Leipziger Schule der Übersetzungswissenschaft” (Leipzig school of translation studies) gained reputation well beyond the Eastern bloc countries. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the institute was renamed, underwent a substantial faculty change and opened up to Western ideas. This paper summarizes the key characteristics of the “new” Leipzig approach to T&I studies and highlights those aspects which can be attributed to the ideas of Hans J. Vermeer.