QTE Archives - The Queen's College, Oxford

In October, the Translation Exchange welcomed Year 6 pupils from Tyndale Community School to Queen’s for two mornings of workshops on Mandarin language, Chinese culture and creative translation. Pupils discovered ancient Chinese writing and poetry, experienced a day in the life of a undergraduate studying abroad in Taipei, translated part of a German novel and delivered sensational multilingual musical performances.

The two days showed the power of language in bringing together different parts of our community.

Over two sunny mornings in October, Year 6 pupils from Tyndale Community School in East Oxford joined the Translation Exchange in the Schulman Auditorium at Queen’s for interactive sessions on Mandarin language and Chinese culture, followed by Creative Translation workshops led by QTE Creative Translation Ambassadors.

The Mandarin Chinese workshops were supported by the Swire Chinese Language Foundation. Tyndale pupils learn Mandarin from Year 3 onwards as part of the Swire Chinese Language Programme, which aims to expand the provision of Mandarin Chinese language teaching across the UK. Inviting the pupils to Queen’s was a chance to show these young linguists where their Mandarin Chinese language studies could take them.

The Mandarin workshops were designed and led by undergraduate students from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. The first workshop was delivered by Cosmo Siddons, a final-year student in Chinese Studies at Queen’s, and Noah Shenoy, a third-year student in Chinese Studies at Wadham College. A whistlestop tour of the pair’s travels and studies in China culminated in an imagined visit to a Chinese restaurant. Pupils were tasked with ordering popular Chinese dishes – many of which they were already familiar with from their Mandarin lessons in school – including spicy beef noodles, 牛肉面 (niúròu miàn), and dumplings, 饺子 (jiǎozi). Finally, the pupils explored the history of Chinese writing, tracing the evolution of Chinese characters from ancient Chinese writing on stone and bamboo to the modern characters they recognised from their Mandarin language classes, before hearing about how the undergraduates used the same linguistic detective skills to study ancient Chinese texts and classical Chinese poetry at university.

The following morning, the second Mandarin workshop was delivered by Rebecca Gardner, a final-year Chinese Studies student at Pembroke College. Having spent a year studying abroad in China as part of her degree, Rebecca led an interactive session about a day in the life of a university student in Taiwan. Pupils decided how to spend their day in Taipei, from picking a mode of transport to choosing which snacks to buy at the market, honing their Mandarin language skills along the way.

The sessions were inspiring and enriching for both the Tyndale pupils and the Oxford undergraduates. Cosmo said the following:

“My experience with The Queen’s Translation Exchange was deeply enriching and enjoyable. I had done some teaching beforehand, but this was my first time planning and conducting a workshop fully from scratch and therefore the process made me reflect and reconsider the most effective approaches to language learning. During the session, I was amazed by the level of enthusiasm and focus shown by the students. Their grasp of Mandarin Chinese was remarkable, which motivated me in my own studies, and they asked thought provoking questions about university life and China. The lesson also taught me the importance of adaptability during teaching. It’s fun to have to adapt on the spot to the flow of the lesson and the educational needs of your students. Overall, I finished feeling inspired by the students.” 

The Mandarin workshops were followed by Creative Translation workshops led by QTE Creative Translation Ambassadors. On Thursday, Teddy Nze, a final year student in Japanese Studies at Queen’s, delivered a French creative translation workshop on translating songs. Comparing the French-Malian singer Aya Nakamura’s performance of ‘For me, formidable’ at the 2024 Olympics opening ceremony in Paris with the original version performed by legendary French-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour, the pupils discussed French cultural identity, colonial history and multilingualism in French society. Having never studied French before, the pupils successfully translated the song into English, before writing their own multilingual songs inspired by Aznavour and Nakamura’s renditions. Many of the pupils used languages they spoke at home to write their songs, including Wolof, Portuguese and Urdu. Others used elements of Aznavour’s original song and words from their French glossaries to compose new songs in English and French. A highlight of the morning came when the pupils ascended to the mezzanine balcony of the Schulman Auditorium foyer to perform their songs to their peers.

Teddy noted:

“I love these workshops because they prove that language learning can be fun. Part of the difficulty of getting children into studying foreign languages is that it seems like a lot of work without much of a tangible benefit, especially when STEM subjects are being prioritised more than ever in schools, but through these workshops students are able to use their creativity and subjectivity and get to take back with them a memorable experience that languages are fun. My workshop was about translating an old 60’s French song into English. Our workshops are always very diverse so we had students who could translate parts of the poem into Portuguese, Wolof, Urdu and Welsh. What I didn’t expect though was for them to turn them into and perform their own songs! It was wonderful to see the students using so much of their creativity to create a memory I’m sure we all won’t forget for a long time.”

Valuing and celebrating multilingualism is central to the Translation Exchange’s mission and our Creative Translation workshops for schools. The Tyndale students were excited to explore new and unfamiliar languages as well as to share their own linguistic knowledge and bring this into the workshops. One pupil said, “I liked learning about how things are pronounced in different languages and how we got to share our thoughts about the different languages we speak”. Another pupil commented, “I liked the way we got to share our different languages”.

It was wonderful to see the students using so much of their creativity to create a memory I’m sure we all won’t forget for a long time.

On the second morning, pupils took part in a German creative translation workshop led by Creative Translation Ambassadors and Queen’s students Emily Dicker and Lia Neill. Watching a scene from the 1999 German comedy film Sonnenallee, an adaptation of Thomas Brussig’s novel Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, pupils learnt about life in East Germany and discovered the history of the creation of the GDR through the story of a street divided in two by the Berlin Wall. Using the film clips to decode the text, pupils were able to translate an extract from the novel despite never having studied German, before creatively rewriting their translations to capture the feel and tone of the original.

Across the two mornings, it was inspiring and motivating to learn from both the pupils and the undergraduate ambassadors, and to bring together so many languages, cultures and experiences within a few short workshops. John Sparks, from the Swire Chinese Language Centre in Oxford, remarked:

“A wonderful two days! Thank you to everyone at Queen’s who made the experience possible for the children at Tyndale Community School. The children were challenged and inspired, while having the opportunity to share their own learning. The student ambassadors were outstanding, providing a deeper insight into learning languages and sharing their personal experiences of the countries they have visited. The two days showed the power of language in bringing together different parts of our community.” 

The visit to Queen’s was also an opportunity for the pupils to learn more about life at university and their options for future study. During each workshop, the Tyndale students had the opportunity to engage directly with Oxford undergraduates and ask questions about studying languages at university. Eating lunch together in Queen’s Hall was a chance for the pupils to experience student life at an Oxford college. One pupil remarked, “I want to go here in five years’ time!”. Another pupil was left with a single question: “when can we come back?”.

Thank you to the Queen’s College, the teachers and pupils from Tyndale Community School, the undergraduate students who delivered the workshops, and everyone at the Swire Chinese Language Foundation for making these two days possible.

Dr Charlotte Ryland is Supernumerary Fellow, and Founding Director of The Queen’s Translation Exchange.

At an event on ‘Making the Case for German’ last week, led by a coalition of partners committed to promoting language learning, I had lots of great conversations with some of my favourite people from my favourite profession – languages teachers in schools. These conversations are always a highlight, both because it’s such a pleasure to speak to fellow linguists, and because the insights from teachers into their experience of the languages classroom and curriculum, and how these interact with our Creative Translation programmes, are so helpful as we develop our work. Despite a vibrant community of motivated and committed teachers, our impression from these discussions is that an increasingly limited school curriculum has put languages in crisis.

This time, many of the conversations centred on our Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators, since it has recently launched for 2024-25. One colleague from a large state comprehensive told me that for the first time last year, the winners and commendees were awarded their Anthea Bell certificates at the school’s Speech Day. The teacher was thrilled about this, remarking how rare it is for languages to have high-profile recognition of this kind within the school. We hear this kind of thing so often from teachers, that while STEM subjects and their many ‘olympiads’ sweep the board at speech days, school assemblies and the like, the equivalent opportunities for languages are few and far between. This is a problem that the Anthea Bell Prize and our sister award, the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation, seek to address. A second conversation, this time with a colleague from a large independent school, brought this full circle. They told me that pupils are now regularly asking about the Anthea Bell Prize, fully expecting that they’d all be able to get involved – that this was now an integral part of their languages study. ‘It’s starting to feel like the Physics or Maths Olympiad’, they remarked – pupils are hearing about the opportunity from elsewhere and are keen to get involved.

It was conversations like this with teachers that led us to found the Anthea Bell Prize in the first place, and those conversations have remained central to our programmes as they’ve expanded. The latest development in our work is entirely collaborative in this way. Following a fair amount of urging from teachers over the years, we now have enough capacity to tag all of our teaching resources with key curriculum points (themes, vocabulary, grammar, phonics). We’ve been supported in this by some of the teachers in our network – hats off to Kate Thirlwall, Clare Phillips and Juliette Claro – who have helped us to link our existing creative-cultural resources with the nuts and bolts of the curriculum. A Spanish resource for KS4 that has a poem by Lorca at its core, for example, is tagged with the ‘Media & Technology’ and ‘Education & Work’ themes which appear in many schemes of work, and with the imperfect tense.

As we develop this project, we’ll be tagging French fiction resources with ‘en ville’ and the present tense, German graphic novels with ‘art’ and ‘youth culture’ and adjectival endings, excerpts from Italian novels with ‘media’, ‘colonial history’, and past tenses. Teachers will therefore have access to adaptable resources that can be easily integrated into their existing schemes of work, enabling them to teach the curriculum content through these texts.

Yesterday we shared a little taster of our Spanish curriculum tagging with the 1,900+ teachers registered for the Anthea Bell Prize, and we plan to publish tags for all of our 96 teaching resources in the new year – covering KS3-5 in French, German, Italian, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish. If you’re a languages teacher and would like to get involved with this project, do drop us a line at translation.exchange@queens.ox.ac.uk.

Meanwhile, we’ll be including this evidence of how possible it is to integrate language acquisition into a creative, cultural curriculum in our submission to the CAR. We hope many readers will do the same.

Thomas Hirth (Y13) is a student at Wood Green School, Oxfordshire, studying French and German at A-Level. Thomas completed his Year 12 work experience at the Queen’s College Translation Exchange in July 2024. As part of the placement, he completed an evaluation of Wood Green School’s Language Leaders programme. The Language Leaders programme aims to fuel motivation in languages, with the hopes of increasing uptake of languages at GCSE and smoothing the transition between primary and secondary school. During his week at the Translation Exchange, Thomas also reflected on his experience taking part in the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators. Read on below!

I am a Year 13 student at Wood Green School. I have been studying both French and German and have so far taken part in two consecutive Anthea Bell Prizes in both languages. Having a German background from birth, I have always been exposed to languages. However, I have never really noticed the intricacies around translation, at least before participating in the Anthea Bell Prize.

Alongside languages, studying both Maths and Physics at A-Level has resulted in me tending to approach languages from a logical perspective, where ‘Der Wald’ means forest and ‘Einsamkeit’ means loneliness, for example. This literal approach, whereby I translated word for word, is the one I had acquired throughout school. It however falls short, particularly when the words are amalgamated. ‘Waldeinsamkeit’ means so much more than just forest loneliness. When used as the title for a poem by Heinrich Heine, it displays a greater sense of connectedness, a magical bond between human and nature, which is depicted despite the apparent seclusion usually connoting something more negative. This ultimately begs the question – is it right to reduce a word merely to its synonymic counterpart, losing the depth that it originally held?

Clearly, the logical approach I tend towards can only act as a gateway into the text, a means for working out the various constituents of which a text consists. This indicates that my previous idea of translation couldn’t do a text any justice, especially when attempting to align it alongside the contextual requirements. The Anthea Bell Prize demonstrated this concept to me, highlighting how it was insufficient to solely translate the words, and that real translation comes from manipulating the insight you gain from literal translation into literary translation through interpretations and reimaginations. The Prize quickly debunked the assumptions that I had subconsciously made, causing me to shift my view of translation from a relationship exercise between words to a medium for conveying thoughts and mood.

I am not sure where I want to go in the future, but one thing has become clear to me over the years – how much I don’t want to stop learning languages.

I remember first being introduced to the Prize through a taster lesson, where we were given a poem in the shape of a mouse. We then had to translate it, staying as close as possible to the literal translation. Naturally, our poems weren’t making much sense and didn’t adhere closely to the colour of the original. Consequently, we were told to repeat the process, but this time we were required to actively match the rhyme scheme. This automatically forced us to think more creatively because words don’t rhyme the same way between languages. It gave us a sense of freedom in that we could create our own shaped poems using the translation as a base, allowing our own interpretations to shine through. This was effectively the debut of the prize in our school, and it was then explained that it was the latter approach to translation that was required for the actual competition. Fascinated by this process, I decided to enter.

Naturally, I adopted the method of translation ingrained into me through school. However, I remember quickly coming across challenges by doing so. I was met with phrases where the corresponding English words just didn’t work, where there was no feasible equivalence, where the English translation made less sense than that of the foreign language itself. It was clear that elements of transparency, and consequently meaning, were being lost through translation. Therefore, it was this transparency that needed to be regained, without losing all the context. Nevertheless, this taught me that the discrepancies regarding translation all exist for a reason. The heavy criticism regarding translation not being close to the original is backed up by the idea that context and cultural specifics need to be considered, making it impossible for an entirely literal translation to be truly reflective of the original.

In particular, the Anthea Bell Prize offered me a platform to work through the selected texts as if they were a puzzle, working out individual parts and then seeing how it contributes to the meaning as a whole. A means for incentivising language learning is the way in which you can explore the text and consequently discover culture. For me, there was an element of satisfaction in seeing how all the parts come together. The words on the page are just a script waiting to be realised in whichever you imagine it. This was a challenge, but a fun and stimulating challenge to say the least.

I am not sure where I want to go in the future, but one thing has become clear to me over the years – how much I don’t want to stop learning languages. I feel that learning is one of the most stimulating and eye-opening things anyone can do, and it is a process that I always want to be a part of. For that reason, I aim to study both French and German at university, for which the Anthea Bell Prize has given me a taster and has left me wanting to delve further into the world of translation and the possibilities that come with it.

Last week, Dr Charlotte Ryland, founding director of The Queen’s Translation Exchange, held a webinar as part of the OPEN Leaders Programme – an initiative supported by the Oxford Policy Engagement Network to encourage graduate students and ECRs in the field of modern languages to get involved with policy engagement.

Last week’s webinar looked at “Careers in policy for linguists”, the final instalment of a series of training events in the OPEN Leaders Programme for Languages. The event was attended by graduate students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) from UK universities.

Georgina Edwards, coordinator of the training series, chaired a panel of four civil servants, discussing policy career paths for languages graduates and researchers: Hanna Campbell (Department for Education), Hannah Jack (Department for Education), Karoline Oakes (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero), and Lizzie Peck (Ministry of Justice).

Do I need to have a degree in policy to work in the sector?

Our panellists had all studied languages at university, including German, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese and Mandarin. Before entering the policy world, they embarked on career paths in teaching, PR, and the third sector. All of them entered the civil service as external candidates from outside the policy sphere.

Most of our guest speakers had not studied policy as part of their degrees. They came to their current roles through their drive to apply their skills and experience in a national and international context, to create social and environmental impact.

How does studying languages help you in a policy role?

All our guests had a clear and compelling sense of the many ways in which their language studies had helped them in their careers. In Karoline Oakes’ case, for example, being able to speak German enabled her to contribute to major events such a UK Government liaison for the German Embassy at a UK-hosted international summit. Lizzie Peck, who studied Russian and previously worked for a charity campaigning against human trafficking and modern slavery, was able to use her language skills to help Ukrainian refugees avoid exploitation.

For Hannah Jack and Hanna Campbell, having learned languages themselves has helped them to understand the experience of multilingual pupils in the classroom. Hanna explained, ‘It’s not just about knowing the languages being taught at school or spoken at home – it helps you become aware of the presence of multilingualism in general.’ With linguistic diversity comes cultural diversity, which should be embraced in teaching. Promoting the benefits of studying languages is also important for Hannah, who is now the co-lead of the Civil Service Languages Network Outreach team, undertaking outreach events with pupils to encourage wider uptake of language learning.

But it was the deeper benefits of studying languages that really came through in the discussion – what we might call ‘transferable skills’. From problem solving to creative thinking, analytical skills to wider cultural appreciation, there was consensus across the panel that their language studies had prepared them extremely well for a career in policy.

All the panellists agreed that the process of learning to read, write and speak in another language has improved their overall communication. Karoline recalled her year abroad in Europe: “When you’re in another country, you have to adapt quickly in a range of situations. That made me feel assured that I can always ’have a go’ at things. That confidence is something that has helped me a lot in my current job, when I’m speaking to senior officials and foreign ministers.’

Confidence in communicating is something that you develop when learning a language, according to Hannah. “When you’re learning a language, you often have to practise presenting and public speaking. Once you’ve presented in other languages, you realise that doing it in English is a lot easier!”

For Lizzie, studying language through translation helped her to develop an awareness of nuances in the wording of legislation.

How can I get experience or employment in policy work?

There are plenty of summer internship opportunities in policy, at government departments, think tanks or NGOs, which may be advertised through your university’s careers service or languages department. It is also worth checking whether your university has its own policy team – some universities have dedicated staff who are responsible for liaising between researchers and policymakers.

If you are interested in how languages are taught in the UK, Hannah Jack recommends following the work of organisations such as the National Consortium for Language Education and the British Council, and the associated Language Hubs.

If you are considering searching for a policy role, you can find vacancies and tips on the Civil Service Careers page, as well as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website for positions based overseas.

It was pointed out that it’s important to remember that there are many policy roles outside of the civil service. A wide range of other professional roles benefit from the transferable skills that languages students and researchers bring to the table – such as working in research, advocacy and policy influencing at think tanks, charities, and political parties. These are options to consider if you would prefer to be able to campaign for change on the issues that matter to you the most, regardless of the incumbent government’s policy. Find policy roles by signing up to newsletters with the organisations whose work you admire, and searching for keywords such as “policy”, “advocacy” or “research” on industry-specific websites like CharityJob.

Stay in touch

If you would like to be involved in future policy training events for linguists run by Charlotte Ryland and the Translation Exchange, join our mailing list here.

Evie Cann (Y10) and Lois Tromans (Y13) are Languages Ambassadors at Kings Norton Girls’ School and Sixth Form, Birmingham. At KNGS, Language Ambassadors are partially responsible for running the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators. This is a real step forward in building a community of linguists in our schools, where young linguists set the example for their peers. Read their blog about running the Anthea Bell Prize in 2024. Congratulations to all students and teachers!

Here at Kings Norton Girls’ School and Sixth Form in Birmingham, we have participated in the Anthea Bell translation prize for the past 3 years, and it has been great to see the participation increase every year. At KNGS, the Anthea Bell translation prize is managed by the language ambassadors’ team. We are a group of students ranging from year 10 to year 13, who have a passion for languages and language learning, and who want to share this love for languages throughout the school.

Our early preparations for the Anthea Bell prize started in September, sorting out the materials ready to be distributed later in the school year. Part of our role also involves spreading awareness of languages-based events, which we do through form notices and word of mouth. Our school offers three languages at KS3 (French, German and Spanish) and all students study at least one language at GCSE so it has meant that we’ve had great levels of participation. We hope to see level of participation increase in the coming years.

We’ve had a wide range of ages participating over the last 3 years, starting from year 7 students, who have only just started their language learning journey, all the way up to students in year 13, who are approaching their A-Level exams. Although students at KNGS can choose from French, Spanish or German in key stages 3 and 4, the range of languages that we have seen participation from has also been varied, with some students taking part in languages such as Mandarin and Italian. It has been great to see the linguistic diversity within the KNGS community.

As language ambassadors, we are also very keen to support any student who wants to participate at any level of the competition, and some of our students have been lucky enough to receive commendations for their work. These include:

2024: Yasmin Ahmed – Commendation in French level 2 (pictured)

2023: Carina Li – Midlands winner in Mandarin level 3

2023: Lois Tromans – Commendation in French level 3

2022: Favour Shaba – Midlands winner in Italian level 2

2022: Shaowen He – Midlands winner in Mandarin level 3

2022: Marianne de Wildt – Commendation in German level 2

Having participated in the Anthea Bell translation competition for the past few years, the initiative that our students have used while tackling tricky texts in language is brilliant to see (especially as some have only been learning a second language for less than a year!). By having the opportunities to translate texts, many KNGS students have been able to improve their translation skills as well as using the extracts to learn more about prose, poetry and culture in other languages.

We are pleased that we have had the opportunity to take part in the Anthea Bell translation prize, and we hope to continue doing so in the future, while also promoting the importance of languages in the modern world. We would encourage any school to take part too!

Kate Sligo is a PhD student in French at the University of Oxford. She completed an undergraduate degree in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (Arabic and French) at the University of Cambridge. She is one of the participants in the Modern and Medieval Languages Policy Engagement Project under the direction of Dr Charlotte Ryland.

Language learning in the United Kingdom is in a state of crisis. In November 2023, the University of Aberdeen opened a consultation period to consider discontinuing all honours degrees in French, Gaelic, German and Spanish. In January 2024, reforms were proposed at the University of Kent to close the School of Cultures and Languages along with other humanities fields. While these plans have been partially or completely withdrawn following major protests, other establishments, such as the University of Lincoln, have not fared so well. Between 2007 and 2013, eleven universities closed their language departments.

The situation in schools is no brighter. The Labour Government’s 2002 decision to scrap compulsory foreign languages at GCSE-level has been catastrophic for young people who may have fostered an interest in them and the universities which offer degrees in modern languages. Between 2002 and 2018, there was a 40-50% decline in GCSE foreign language entries. Since Brexit, native language assistants have all but disappeared from UK state schools. There are reduced opportunities for overseas trips and exchanges, which leaves students with no first-hand experience of other cultures. Language learning occupies a fraction of the time accorded to other school subjects and is far behind the duration in EU countries. French, Spanish and German are still harshly graded at GCSE level and there are ongoing shortages of skilled teachers. In April 2024, the Department of Education announced that a scheme aimed at relocating foreign trainee teachers to the UK would not be eligible for renewal.

The UK used to participate in Erasmus, a reciprocal exchange allowing British university students to study at European establishments and vice versa. Secondary school students could also participate in exchange initiatives. Following Brexit, Erasmus was replaced by the Turing Scheme. The new initiative lacks the same networks and infrastructure as Erasmus. 79% of higher education institutions reported difficulties with the Turing application process. Delivery issues such as delayed funding impacted students from disadvantaged backgrounds who did not have recourse to alternative funds. Significantly, the new scheme focuses on outbound exchanges as opposed to reciprocity.

One of the “selling points” of the Turing Scheme was that it ‘strengthen[s] partnerships all over the world – not just those in Europe’. If the UK shuns collaboration with its closest neighbours, how can a spirit of reciprocity extend globally? The two options are not mutually exclusive. Countries outside the EU including Turkey, Serbia and Norway already participate in Erasmus. There are further partner countries such as Egypt, Morocco and Ukraine. In April 2024, there was cause for hope when the European Commission proposed a youth mobility scheme which would enable those aged between 18 and 30 to live, work and study between the EU and the UK. The Conservatives and Labour swiftly rejected the proposal.

Beyond schools, the general national discourse on languages is cynical. There is a widespread belief that ‘English is enough’ as a global lingua franca. This belief is perilous in a globally focused, hyper-connected world. Learning a foreign language goes beyond the attainment of linguistic skills. Students discover the intricacies of perspectives far removed from their own. Embracing a different culture – its history, politics, literature, philosophy, music, art, cinema and more – alleviates fear, misunderstanding and prejudice which are barriers to international collaboration. The world is globalising with or without the UK. As the pool for applicants with language expertise rapidly reduces, areas such as trade, government, diplomacy, law, military and education will struggle to recruit exceptional candidates. In an international climate of war, xenophobia and isolationism, the country will find itself crippled as other cultures become increasingly familiar with our own but not vice versa. According to new research from the University of Cambridge, a rise in secondary school pupils learning French, Spanish, Arabic or Mandarin could boost the UK economy by billions of pounds. The advancement of artificial intelligence has not relegated the vital function of language degrees which go to the heart of what it means to be human.

Change begins at home and at the University of Oxford, a group of postgraduate linguists remain hopeful. They are assisting Dr Charlotte Ryland, founding director of The Queen’s College Translation Exchange, with a Policy Engagement Project sponsored by the Oxford Policy Engagement Network (OPEN). The aim is to transform policy engagement within the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages (MML) from one dependent on the commitment, energy and contacts of individuals to one that is embedded institutionally in the Faculty. The students will gather internal feedback from academics in the MML Faculty at Oxford, exploring existing and potential capacity for engagement. There will be cross-faculty collaboration with the Classics, Education and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies departments. Crucially, the group will work with members of the Cross-Government Languages Group to explore what effective collaboration between academics and policymakers can look like, and how it can be seeded and supported. The postgraduates will co-create a training programme on policy engagement, which we hope to repeat in future years. While it is a short-term initiative, running from March to July 2024 with a budget of £8000, it will establish a bridge between two entities in desperate need of dialogue.

In an inaugural meeting in May 2024, the students expressed their thoughts on why discussion between academics and policymakers is essential. Marie Martine, a PhD student researching French, German and comparative literature, commented on the expertise that academics can give policymakers to assist in their decision-making. She described the need for the former to ‘learn the language’ of the latter to find common ground. James Hughes, who is completing a Master of Studies in French, furthered the notion of reciprocity, remarking that policymakers can help academics ‘translate’ their ideas for a different audience and subsequently inflect their research. Isabel Parkinson, a PhD Germanist, is interested in outreach and how language policy considers regional and social disparities. Ola Sidorkiewicz, who is undertaking a PhD in Slavonic studies, seeks to challenge the view that area studies experts must be social scientists. Humanities specialists need to showcase their research to policymakers. She recognises that language degrees are in a state of crisis – academics understand their value but it is time that others do too.

The group listened to presentations from Dr Ryland and Tom Kelsey who is the Humanities and Public Policy Officer with OPEN. They learnt about the importance of translating ‘academic speak’ into practical solutions which civil servants can implement into policies. They were informed about the complexities of achieving lasting change within a political system and the importance of celebrating small victories. This new strategic approach to policy engagement in the MML Faculty will ensure continuity of effective exchange. Faculty members will have an improved understanding of their role in supporting researchers to connect with policymakers who, in turn, will be aware of engagement opportunities.

Rather than dwelling on what a future without a vibrant language learning sector in education will look like, it is important to envision the qualities that would be fostered in a nation where every student is encouraged to discover a different society. Empathy – that superpower which prioritises perspective over perception – thriving beyond borders.

Anne Beaumanoir is but one of her names.

She exists, indeed she does, not only in

these pages, but also, to be precise, in Dieulefit,

a village – ‘God-made-it’ – in south-eastern France.

She does not believe in God, but He no doubt believes in her.

And if He does exist, then surely He made Anne.

Anne Beaumanoir ist einer ihrer Namen.

Es gibt sie, ja, es gibt sie auch woanders als auf

diesen Seiten, und zwar in Dieulefit, auf Deutsch

Gott-hats-gemacht, im Süden Frankreichs.

Sie glaubt nicht an Gott, aber er an sie.

Falls es ihn gibt, so hat er sie gemacht.

Anne Beaumanoir : c’est un des noms qu’elle a.

Et elle existe, oui, elle existe bel et bien et donc

ailleurs que dans ces pages, précisément à

Dieulefit, une petite ville dans la Drôme.

Elle ne croit pas en Dieu. Qu’Il croie en elle

n’est pas exclu. Si Lui existe aussi, il est probable qu’Il la fit.

With these opening lines, Annette, the protagonist of Anne Weber’s award-winning modern epic is brought to life. Indeed, one might say, the heroine is born three times over: First in German, the author’s mother tongue, then in French, the language which Weber adopted after having settled in Paris as a young adult, enabling her to translate her own writings and produce a consistently bilingual literary oeuvre. Having been published in 2020 as Annette, ein Heldinnenepos (Matthes & Seitz)and Annette, une épopée (Seuil), the work, finally, made its way into English and appeared once again as Epic Annette: A Heroine’s Tale (Indigo Press, 2022), in Tess Lewis’s translation. What the work’s very first lines also make clear, however, is that Annette’s existence is more than literary. Weber’s account is based on the biography of a real, historical figure – the French Resistance fighter and anti-colonial activist Anne “Annette” Beaumanoir, who was born in Brittany in 1923 and died two years after the publication of Weber’s text, on 4 March 2022, in the above-cited village of Dieulefit. As it evolves across multiple languages and contexts of reception, the work continues to question its grasp on Annette’s extraordinary story and the epoch-defining historical events which it traverses, therefore grappling with the uniquely fraught relationship between literary representation and historical testimony.

On 8 and 9 February 2024, I had the pleasure of discussing these topics with Anne Weber and Tess Lewis when hosting them for two events in Oxford. This initiative developed out of my doctoral research, which explores transnational forms of memory in contemporary French and German literature, and was made possible thanks to the expertise and generous support of the Queen’s College Translation Exchange (QTE), the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre (OCCT), the Medieval and Modern Languages Faculty (MML), and Karen Leeder, the Schwarz-Taylor Chair of German.

During the first of the two events, a podium discussion held in the Shulman Auditorium at Queen’s College 8 February, we explored how the text’s existence across different languages mediates its relationship to history. On the one hand, the author’s sympathy for Annette and emotional investment in her story became palpable; yet, Weber simultaneously highlighted distances which separate the first-hand experience of history and any narrative account completed with the benefit of hindsight. Beaumanoir was confronted with life-and-death decisions at a very young age, facing historical situations as they unfolded. During her engagement for the Communist resistance against the German Occupation of France, she thus decided, at great personal risk and against her superiors’ orders, to save three Jewish children from being arrested by the Gestapo. After the end of the war, she sided with the Algerian Independence movement in its struggle against French colonial oppression – a new form of resistance, which eventually saw her incarcerated and forced into exile in North Africa. Obliged to reduce the multi-layered complexity of this life to fit the parameters of a singular narration, Weber emphasised that her work does not lay claim to any absolutist notions of historical truth. Instead, she seeks to retain an awareness that her relationship to Annette’s story is inescapably marked by her own subjective vantage point – especially given that she approaches it as a German author, whose family history is burdened by her ancestors’ complicity in extreme German nationalism and National Socialism.

Tess Lewis, Anne Weber, and Hannah Scheithauer in conversation at The Queen’s College (left to right).

In completing two versions of the heroine’s tale in French and German, Weber also had to reckon with fundamentally different audience expectations, often adding sections which explain French cultural and historical references to her German public – and vice versa. In some cases, however, the differences resulting from Weber’s self-translation are more than just points of information and instead affect the very core of a given section’s rhetorical thrust. The death and burial of Roland, Annette’s lover, and a fellow Resistance fighter, exemplifies this: Refuting the epithet Mort pour la France, which the government places on his grave, the narrator highlights the violence which the Jewish Roland experienced at the hands of the French Vichy administration, which eagerly collaborated with the Germans. In German, Roland is then said to have died not for the ‘Vaterland’ [fatherland] but for a different ‘Bruderland’ [brotherland]; in French and in Lewis’s English version, by contrast, he is said to have died for a land called ‘fraternité’ – for ‘fraternity’. Explaining this difference, Weber noted that ‘fraternité’ is one of the core ideals of French republicanism, which is held up against the moral corruption of France under Vichy. In using ‘Vaterland’ and ‘Bruderland’ in the German version, by contrast, Weber obliquely critiques her own country’s history, given that for German readers, the former term immediately evokes its abuse by the Nazis, whereas ‘Bruderland’ provides a more positive, resistant variation on the same family metaphor.

Lewis outlined that, when rendering the work in English, she experienced the differences resulting from Weber’s free self-translation as a kind of liberation, which enabled her to select the version she deemed most effective for an English-speaking audience. She was also able to build on the work of cultural mediation which Weber had already begun, often combining the historical information the author added for French and German readers respectively into a version which offered sufficient background for an English-speaking audience. The biggest challenge for Weber and Lewis alike, however, they both stressed, was conveying the text’s unique rhythm and free verse form across different languages, and exploring anew what a modern epic mode might mean with each new rendition in German, French, and English.

During our second event with Weber and Lewis, an interactive translation workshop held at St. Anne’s College on Friday, 9 February, we were able to gain first-hand insights into this very process. Moderated by Charlotte Ryland of QTE, the workshop brought together diverse participants from first-year undergraduate students to professional translators. Working together in mixed groups combining French and German speakers, they engaged with selected passages from both original versions in order to produce their own, collaborative English-language rendition. Practising what Lewis termed ‘translation as triangulation’, participants presented their results at the end of the session, compared them to the published Epic Annette, and discussed their challenges and choices with both the author and the translator. This conversation once again highlighted the complexity of Lewis’s task – doing justice to a formally unique and already-manifold, border-crossing original –, and ultimately valorised the work of translation as a continuation of the creative processes and mediation efforts at stake in all literary writing.

Workshop Participants translating Annette, ein Heldinnenepos/Annette, une épopée.

It was deeply motivating to learn from Weber and Lewis during the two days of their visit to Oxford. The generous and thoughtful insights they gave into their work on ‘the rhythm of a life’ – as Lewis’s translator’s note puts it – confirmed my belief in the value of translating, both in a literal and in a metaphorical sense, between different experiences of history and across the boundaries of existing communities of memory. Annette’s moving story, therefore, can ultimately provide an encouragement to question established historiographies find new, dynamic articulations for our evolving relationship with the past, which shapes our ethical consciousness and therefore, is bound to affect both our present and our future.

Hannah Scheithauer is a DPhil candidate in French and German at The Queen’s College, and is currently a Guest Doctoral Researcher, Friedrich-Schlegel-Graduiertenschule, FU Berlin.

Header photo: Translation Workshop with Charlotte Ryland, Tess Lewis, Anne Weber, and Hannah Scheithauer (left to right).

The Queen’s Translation Exchange is delighted to co-host, with Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT), an evening organised by Queen’s DPhil candidate in French & German, Hannah Scheithauer.

Epic Annette: Podium Discussion with Anne Weber and Tess Lewis

Thursday, 8th February, 5-7pm, Shulman Auditorium, The Queen’s College

Registration free but essential: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeFePK_VdFUD4kEHP-4lqc3I2qKpNeVV3j0GBKcfVsAiXzguw/viewform

Having grown up in Germany and later settled in France, Anne Weber is an author and translator whose work reaches across two distinct cultural contexts and linguistic traditions. Weber consistently completes both a French and a German version of her writings, engaging in practices of self-translation which maximise the creative potential of her two languages of expression. The stakes of translation, in this context, go far beyond the purely linguistic, as they necessitate an acute awareness to questions of history, memory, and cultural identity. This is aptly illustrated by her latest work. Published in 2020 and titled Annette, ein Heldinnenepos in German, Annette, une épopée in French, it retraces the life of a heroine of the French resistance, who came to fight for Algerian independence in the post-war era. Using a verse form inspired by ancient epic, Weber thus addresses the contested place of colonialism in French national memory. At the same time, the work speaks to distinctively German debates on the singular status of the Holocaust in the country’s memory culture and its relationship to other – and most notably, colonial – histories of violence.

The text was translated into English by Tess Lewis and published as Epic Annette: A Heroine’s Tale by Indigo Press in 2022. Having already won a PEN Translates Award for her skilful translation of the text’s unique form and style, Lewis has recently been shortlisted for the Schlegel-Tieck Prize, which will be awarded in February 2024. Lewis is an accomplished writer and translator from both French and German, with previous translation projects including a range of authors such as Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Montaigne, Lutz Seiler, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Christine Angot.

During the podium event, Weber and Lewis will discuss their work on the text, the relationship of translation and literary creation, and the challenges of conveying a complex and sensitive story to audiences with vastly different backgrounds, insights, and expectations. Their conversation will be followed by an audience Q&A and a drinks reception.

In this blog for The Queen’s Translation Exchange, Dr Aleksandra Majak (New College) writes about the story behind Modern Poetry in Translation magazine, its early policy of ‘literariness’, and its connections to Eastern Europe of the mid 1960s.

In 1962, a few friends who had known each other since their university days met up at a New Year’s Eve party. Over the course of the evening, they came up with an idea; a new kind of publication, aiming to shake up and revitalise the literary landscape: Modern Poetry in Translation. This journal, still published today, was the first such initiative in Britain to publish the poetry of contemporary and foreign authors exclusively. As one of the authors published in the first issue put it years later, German-Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, the journal ‘expresses a certain cultural tendency, not just a magazine’ [1].

Front cover of the inaugural 1965 issue of MPT

The group present at the New Year’s Eve party that brought about the founding of the pioneering magazine included the poet Ted Hughes, translator and editor Daniel Weissbort, and the literary critic and impresario Al Alvarez. Their aspiration for the magazine was for it to become ‘an airport for incoming translations’ [2], sharing a conviction that, as we read in the first editorial to MPT, ‘what is being written elsewhere can only stimulate poetry-making in this country’ (MPT 1).

After months of gathering material, seeking financial assistance from the Arts Council of Great Britain, and connecting with fellow poets and translators, the first issue of MPT was launched in 1965 in a limited run of 500 copies. Designed by Richard Hollis and printed as a thin, semi pellucid broadsheet, the magazine more closely resembled a promotional flyer than a serious publication with the ambition to reinvigorate the domestic literary scene. Though the fragile format would soon be changed, the appearance of the first issue was purposeful and represented a deliberate and significant shift in the intended readership of such a publication. Hughes hoped to make the magazine ‘functional, current, disposable’ [3], ultimately widening access to the poetry in translation.

Letter from Richard Hollis to Daniel Weissbort

Courtesy of King’s College London Archives MPT 3/1/15

Even though the materials available in the magazine’s archives (located at King’s College London) contain ample evidence of the fact that Hughes and Weissbort had been toying with the idea of such a publication (taking inspiration in format of Belgian Journal des Poètes) for quite a while already, the energy which ultimately brought the project to life came from Alvarez. Not long before the fateful New Year’s Eve party, the critic returned from his travels around the Eastern Bloc where, as a correspondent for the BBC Radio Programme, he had been gathering material for a series of broadcasts (later published by Penguin in text form, with the title Under Pressure), each offering a spotlight on the distinct cultural scenes of the individual countries comprising Eastern Europe as well as the political pressures local artists felt themselves to be under.

The front and back cover of Al Alvarez’s Under Pressure (1965)

It was during these travels that Alvarez encountered the poetry of Miroslav Holub of Czechoslovakia, Zbigniew Herbert of Poland, Vasko Popa of Serbia, and János Pilinszky of Hungary – all of which would ultimately be printed in the first few issues of MPT. The translations he brought back from the other side of the Iron Curtain proved inspirational for Hughes and Weissbort. The editors would later recall: ‘what finally overwhelmed us into publishing our first issue was the translated work of a group of poets who seemed to us revelatory’ [4]. In the first editorial for MPT, they asserted:

There has been little attempt to impose any unity on this first issue, but the unity, such as it is, has imposed itself on us. While we had material coming from many other areas of the world, it was that which came from Eastern Europe, which was somehow the most insistent. (MPT 1)

This might seem like a strange comment – how, after all, could unity (subject of editorial choice and policy of inclusion) impose itself on the editors? One possible answer may come through thinking of translation as always bearing an imprint of the receiving culture, which as the translation studies theoretician Lawrence Venuti has shown, mirrors its values and expectations [5]. The influx of translations happily coincided with a growing general sentiment that British high modernism was coming to its natural end and the Island was, to allude to John Esty’s thought-provoking book, indeed ‘shrinking’ [6].

Therefore, the translation boom came about against the backdrop of many political and social changes, including critiques of the cultural malaise and creative inertia of 1960s Britain; the expansion of the literary market; and the inception of some of the first literary festivals — like 1967’s Poetry International — which made authors more ‘visible’ and changed the traditional expectation that authors be performers of their own work.

Broadside of the Poetry International 1967 Festival

It is no coincidence that, not long before the launch of MPT, Alvarez was engaged in compiling The New Poetry anthology which would later become both controversial and influential. ‘Anthologies of this kind’ – Alvarez explained in his autobiography – ‘they are statements of personal taste, literary criticism in disguise, and if not one is offended by them they have failed’ [7]. Its combative introduction turned again the poetic idiom of the Movement and urged British poetry to develop a ‘new kind of seriousness’ and go ‘beyond [the] gentility principle’ by firstly addressing the question of the barbarity of writing poetry after Auschwitz (as famously pronounced by Theodore Adorno), and secondly by turning its attention to rougher poetic idiom and the threat of global nuclear disaster [8].

The cover of Alvarez’s anthology The New Poetry (1962, revised and expanded edition 1966)

What Hughes and Weissbort deemed ‘revelatory’ in their early encounters with translated poetry responded to precisely these demands of ‘going beyond’. Their comments keenly show how early encounters with foreign lyric was a catalyst not just for the foundation of MPT but for a wider and deeper reflection on the general condition of British poetry at large.

Poets from Eastern Europe were not just translated into the English language but translated with a whole range of extra-textual expectations. Editors were especially fascinated by what they described as the ‘direct’, ‘rough’, ‘unpolished’, and ‘literal’ style of the foreign poetry. This latter concept seems especially problematic today – the editorial to the Czech issue of MPT gives a hint of the basis of this unusual policy:

after our experience as editors of this paper, we feel more strongly than ever that the first ideal is literalness, insofar as the original is what we are curious about. The very oddity and struggling dumbness of a word-for-word version is what makes our own imagination jump. (MPT 3)

It remains uncertain what this ideal of ‘literalness’ actually represented to the editors, and this passage exhibits a sense of urgency that prompt the very act of translation. It does not stand for any recognised method of rendering poems from one language to another. Though the question of equivalence is as old as the history of translation, seeking ‘literalness’ was very much an idiosyncratic and time-specific idea. Years later, Weissbort admitted that Hughes might have taken the concept a bit too far, distorting the original works in favour of what he wished to see (and feel) in translation.

Even if we may now disagree with such a purposeful foreignization of incoming lyric, the pattern speaks to the needs and climate of the time. The editors of MPT continued to see the ‘extremity’ of the Eastern European experience as adding value and a means of authenticating the dramatism of poetry. In the mid-1960s, a period marked by the stark political divisions, poetry from the region must have felt vague and remote to the British audience; it is fascinating to think of the extent to which the poetry of Eastern Europe, viewed at the time as one homogenous entity with little distinction made between each nation’s own poetic tradition, satisfied local needs and filled gaps in ‘seriousness’, bringing much-desired ‘anti-gentility’ to the domestic literary market.

The cover of the Centres of Cataclysm anthology, ed. by Sasha Dugdale, David Constantine, and Helen Constantine (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2016)

Entering the British literary scene through backstage doors, poetry from Eastern Europe had a significant (though surprisingly little-known) influence on the British translationscape of the mid-1960s. As MPT’s website states, the magazine’s origins should now be seen as rooted in the larger context of Cold War politics. In her editorial for Centres of Cataclysm (2016), an anthology published in celebration of fifty years of MPT, former editor Sasha Dugdale observed that the selection of Eastern European poets published in the first issue should now be seen merely as a ‘partial snapshot’ from the region that just happened to be in line with the editors’ interests and ‘favoured few European male voices, a new canon in place of the old’ [9].

For more theoretically-informed readers, it is interesting to contextualise the editors’ 1965 hope for stimulating the domestic literary scene in reference to concepts later developed by translation studies [10]. However, the 1965 launch of MPT occurred before the new academic field of translation studies fully emerged in the early 1970s and it is important to stress that the magazine was a collaborative effort of poets, translators, and most of all, friends — not of theoreticians and academics. On the one hand, dispatches from the early days of MPT evidence a shared urgency of ‘going beyond’ the domestic literary scene and exploring beyond the UK’s border. On the other, many early commentaries may be deemed to say more about the reality of mid-1960s Britain than of Eastern Europe, contributing to a ‘flattened’ image of the region in an otherwise fascinating and complex cultural transfer.

Since 1965, Modern Poetry in Translation has inspired international collaborations, contributed to the popularity of the first literary festivals, and engendered valuable collaborative and social bonds between influential individuals based primarily on the shared sentiment that translation makes something happen. And as such it, to bring us back to Amichai’s words, it represented and continues to stand for a broader cultural tendency, not just its own stated values.

Notes

[1] The Poetry of Survival: Post-War Poets of Central and Eastern Europe, ed. by Daniel Weissbort (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1991), p. 305-312.

[2] Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, Selected Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 204.

[3] See Ann Skea, ‘Ted Hughes and Small Press Publication’ (2015) <https://ann.skea.com/RainbowPress.htm> [accessed 10 Oct 2023].

[4] Hughes and Weissbort, Selected Translations, p. 205.

[5] See Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2000), 467-88.

[6] Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2004)

[7] Al Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right? (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999), p. 210.

[8] See Al Alvarez, ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, in The New Poetry: an anthology, ed. by Al Alvarez (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), pp. 21-33.

[9] Centres of Cataclysm: Celebrating Fifty Years of Modern Poetry in Translation, ed. by Dugdale, Sasha, David Constantine, and Helen Constantine (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2016), p. 14.

[10] In particular one can think of the polysystem approach, first developed by Israeli scholar Itamar Even-Zohar; Hans Vermeer’s writing on skopos and commission in translational action; André Lefèvre’s ideas of refraction, translation as re-writing, and patronage; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of ‘translates’, or Venuti’s writing on translation as a mirror in which the reader recognises their own particular domestic situation.

Saqi Books kindly offered review copies of Wild Thorns by Sahar Khalifeh, first published in English in 1985 and newly rereleased, to participants of our International Book Club for Schools. We are committed to exposing young people to the diversity of world literature, and affording them the space to express their critical responses. Opinions expressed in these reviews are of the student author alone. Anisa Ali (Year 13) had the following thoughts about Wild Thorns.

The novel opens with the main character, Usama, returning to the Israeli-occupied West Bank in Palestine finding himself in a country that is so familiar yet so different to what he knew. He came to blow up buses that transport Palestinians to Israeli factories. We immediately meet a character who cannot seem to comprehend how his people have come to live normally under occupation. This is different to how people would typically view Palestinians under occupation. Instead of the stereotype of a rebellious state, Khalifeh reflects the real Palestine. It shows two different reasons for a slow resistance: lack of power and divided fronts. This is shown by the lack of Israeli characters and the fact that most of the conflict is between Palestinians who typically grew up with each other. The different characters show the ways of coping during the occupation making it both harder yet somehow easier to rebel against the occupation.

Through the introduction of Nuwar, we get a display of a female character who is fierce in nature. She talks of trying to be strong and the possibility of not accepting defeat. Shahada is a character who shows the effect of accepting defeat as he becomes someone completely materialistic, not at one with his nation or past, instead, he works with the Israelis for the sake of money. This character evokes anger, a common theme across the novel. It is Adil who is an important character as he shows that some people cannot afford to be angry, as he is consumed by his burdens, and so is not concerned with the idea of a revolution. In contrast, Zuhdi is a character who completely succumbs to his anger, hurting an Israeli and feeling guilty afterwards. It is through all of these characters that we can see a realistic aspect of life in Palestine: the Palestinians must work with the Israelis to live due to the environment that they find themselves in under occupation, relevant to the slow pace of change towards peace today.

Khalifeh is good at evoking questions throughout as the reader is drawn into the book, asking themselves if Usama will complete his mission in Palestine, who will get arrested next, if he will convince Adil to join the cause and who will cause the occupation to finally fall – an answer we do not receive. It is powerful in its message because the lack of total victory is faithful to the current situation.

However, it is the ending of the novel that is most powerful, as Adil sees his whole life fall apart. He can simply walk down the street and see everyone else living their normal lives because that’s what it feels like in a nation that is being taken from you. You fall on your own and everyone slowly comes with you. Feelings of anger and isolation are inevitable as the effects of occupation hit each household.

On Saturday 3 June 2023, secondary pupils from Oxfordshire joined the award-winning writers and translators Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton for a Creative Workshop at the Taylor Institution Library as part of their Joint Translation Residency at the Queen’s College Translation Exchange.

The workshop was one of four public events which took place across ten days in June 2023, when the Translation Exchange welcomed the Japanese writer Aoko Matsuda to Oxford to take part in a joint translation residency with her translator, The Queen’s College 2022/23 Translator-in-Residence Polly Barton.

Polly Barton

The joint residency was the culmination of Polly’s year at Queen’s, during which she delivered a programme of events around the theme of “The Visible Translator”. A critically-acclaimed translator of Japanese literature and non-fiction, Polly’s events were designed to make processes of translation visible, accessible, and interactive for new audiences across the University and the city. From research seminars, Translation Masterclasses and workshops for graduate students at the Ashmolean Museum, to “Translating Comics” workshops at Cheney School and a live translation duel at Oxford Literary Festival, the residency showcased the vibrancy and creativity of translation and international literary culture.

By inviting Aoko Matsuda to Oxford to take part in events with Polly, audiences were able to hear directly from both author and translator, and learn more about contemporary Japanese literature and culture. Telling Japanese Ghost Stories, a creative workshop for young people, drew inspiration from Aoko Matsuda’s award-winning short story collection Where the Wild Ladies Are – translated by Polly Barton – which was selected as one of the 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020 by TIME, and won and World Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 2021.

Where the Wild Ladies Are is a collection of feminist retellings of traditional Japanese ghost stories, folklore and yōkai tales. Unlike in the UK, where ghosts are associated with cold, dark nights and Halloween, in Japan, summer is the season for scary stories. During the Buddhist festival of Obon, which takes place in mid-August, it is believed that spirits from the afterlife return to roam the Earth. Traditionally, Japanese ghost stories are told around this festival, when the chills that run down your spine also provide relief from the intense summer heat.

Unlike in the UK, where ghosts are associated with cold, dark nights and Halloween, in Japan, summer is the season for scary stories.

The creative workshop invited participants to take part in this summer tradition. In the Taylor Library, with the curtains drawn, the residents read aloud excerpts from Where the Wild Ladies Are in a traditional ghost story circle. However, even in the darkened room, it quickly became clear that Matsuda’s ghostly tales were not your typical scary stories. The stories were funny, clever, feisty, heart-warming – and certainly not average, terrifying tales of ghosts and monsters.

Why did the writer decide to subvert some of Japan’s most well-known ghost stories? Matsuda explained that, having heard and read many traditional Japanese folk and yōkai tales as a child, she had always been disappointed by the fates of these stories’ female protagonists. Her collection addresses the mistreatment of these women – both dead and alive – by rewriting their stories to give them the ending, or the voice, that they deserve.

And how about the translating the stories? Polly explained that it was sometimes challenging to translate Matsuda’s collection, given that English-speaking audiences would likely be unfamiliar with the original ghost tales. To deal with this, Polly decided to include some short introductions to some of Matsuda’s stories, briefly outlining the content of their traditional counterparts. Providing context for the reader, without interrupting the feel and flow of the original text, is one of the tricky balancing acts that literary translators have to contend with.

Then it was over to the participants. Using what they had learnt about Matsuda’s collection, they were tasked with writing an original story that turned the typical ghost story on its head. They could either write a scary story about something entirely ordinary – think biscuit tins, sports day, a new pair of jeans – or an entirely un-scary story about something that would ordinarily be considered scary – ghosts, monsters, vampires, you name it.

The workshop really opened my eyes, helped me improve my creative writing skills and made me realise just how much I enjoy creative writing.
Workshop participant

After taking some time to write, the group came back together to share their stories in the ghost story circle. The work produced by the participants was fantastic, and both the residents were incredibly impressed (and sometimes even a little scared!). The workshop ended with a Q&A session, covering topics including writing and translating as potential careers, studying languages at school and university, and how to practise your own creative writing.

The workshop aimed to allow young people to learn more about Japanese literature, culture, and literary translation, as well as provide an opportunity to speak directly with professional writers and translators, and create a space to get creative and experiment with their own writing. One participant said that they “learnt so much about Japanese culture and ghost story literature”; another enjoyed being able “to ask questions on language careers as well as talking to an author about her writing inspiration”.

I found this workshop very insightful and a great opportunity to be creative in a way that I wouldn’t normally be. Everyone was very welcoming and friendly. I would definitely come again to experiences similar to this. I learnt a lot and had a lovely time.
Workshop participant

The other events held as part of the joint residency were also a great success. The programme began with a sold-out talk and Q&A about Where the Wild Ladies Are at Daunt Books Summertown, in which the audience heard from the residents about their experiences writing and translating the collection. On Wednesday 7 June, Pembroke College hosted the residents for a panel discussion titled “Feminist Praxis in Writing, Translating and Publishing”, which was led by Dr Juliana Buriticá Alzate, Lecturer in Contemporary Japanese Literature at the University of Oxford. The final event of the residency was a beginners Japanese Translation Workshop at Oxford Translation Day 2023, hosted by the OCCT, in which Japanese speakers and non-Japanese speakers alike translated a short story from Matsuda’s collection The Woman Dies, whose title story was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award in 2019.

As part of the joint residency, The Queen’s College Library also held a small exhibition, showcasing books and translations by Polly Barton and Aoko Matsuda, and suggesting some related titles for those who had enjoyed reading their work. The residents also spent time working together to create two audio-visual guides to Where the Wild Ladies Are, which are available for free for use by schools and adult book clubs and community groups. For those who feel inspired, the schools resource features a creative activity based on the Telling Japanese Ghost Stories Workshop. Both resources can be found on the Queen’s Translation Exchange website here.

The Queen’s Translation Exchange is very grateful to the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the Daiwa Foundation, The Queen’s College, Oxford, the Stephen Spender Trust, and TORCH, whose generous support made Polly Barton and Aoko Matsuda’s joint residency possible. We are also grateful to Daunt Books, the Taylor Library, Pembroke College, OCCT, and St Anne’s College for hosting events during the joint residency. We would like to thank the amazing translation residents – Polly Barton and Aoko Matsuda – for delivering such an inspiring and engaging programme of translation-related events. We hope we can welcome you back to Oxford soon!

The Queen’s College Translation Exchange (QTE) is an outreach and research centre based at The Queen’s College in Oxford, which seeks to promote translation and international literary culture by providing shared literary and multilingual experiences for people of all ages and backgrounds. To find out more about the Queen’s Translation Exchange and our upcoming events and activities, visit our webpage here or join our mailing list here.

Saqi Books kindly offered review copies of Tawfik al-Hakim’s classic Diary of a Country Prosecutor, first published in 1937 and newly rereleased, to participants of our International Book Club for Schools. We are committed to exposing young people to the diversity of world literature, and affording them the space to express their critical responses. Opinions expressed in these reviews are of the student author alone. Tracey Owusu Frimpong (Year 13) wrote the following review for The Translation Exchange:

The text itself is an unsolved criminal case, where the indisputable delinquent is the 1920s Egyptian judicial system, and whose victim is the uneducated rural fellahin. These peasants have no care except God’s, which is not transmitted justly through the hands of earthly powers. Such a case remains unsolved as there is no punishment for a corrupt system which does not honestly seek justice. Rather, it seeks to quickly honour the impracticalities of legal administration through selfish means, having boxes ticked off whilst countless men and woman die or pay for sins which they have not committed. A poor old man is punished with a month of hard labour for feeding his family with the untaxed wheat that he himself grew. Amid anguish, a wounded man ends up ‘expired’ during the process of unnecessary detailing of his attire. Even a poisoned woman who is basking in her own ‘vomit and excrement’ would not be left alone until at least a name came out of the lips of her suffering body. Moral aptitude is trumped by legalistic rules which the common countryside Egyptian would not understand, making those in the higher courts richer and more influential. Through dry-wit humour, the novel’s protagonist – the countryside ‘prosecutor’- criticises this miscarriage of justice through a series of personal diary entries. This is the essence of the matter in Tawfiq al-Hakim’s partially autobiographical Diary of a Country Prosecutor.

I often found myself thinking that al-Hakim’s deadpan comical style perfectly reflects the known quote ‘if you don’t laugh you will cry’. There is surely a seriousness appreciated by the prosecutor in his work whilst recognising the barbarisms of legal expectations. I chuckled when the prosecutor stated that ‘God willing’ he would be more careful in writing out a murder case in at least twenty pages, instead of the mere ten which actually allowed him to catch the murderer! Furthermore, the constant use of prophetic Mawwal song spouted by the seemingly lowliest and insignificant vagrant ‘Shaikh Asfur’, presents an ongoing irony: the ostracised part of Egyptian society will still be ignored even if they have a valuable voice in a matter. This notion becomes cataclysmic throughout the text’s most major murder of Kamar al-Dawla Alwan, with the young ‘beauty’ Rim being the clearest yet least regarded suspect of the officials.

As a translation of Modern Arabic literature, I believe that Abba Eban has provided an accessible interpretation of the original text in his English edition. As an amateur in this particular literature, I found myself meeting the author in his home country, sensitive to the cultural and religious milieu of rural Egypt. The ease in reading and understanding the text with the glossary of Arabic terms such as ‘ma’mur’ and ‘galabieh’ supported by P.H. Newby’s insightful foreword, solidifies Diary of a Country Prosecutor as a text to be recommended.

The founding director of The Queen’s Translation Exchange, Dr Charlotte Ryland, has been making the case for a culture-based approach to language learning through her work at the Exchange, as well as in her capacity as Director of The Stephen Spender Trust. More recently, Dr Ryland has been sharing her views on the need for a new, inspiring and effective model of language learning and teaching in several publications, including an op-ed in The Bookseller. Find a round-up below:

The Language Paradox

The Bookseller, June 2nd 2023.

Nurturing a new generation of internationally minded readers and translators to fix a contradiction.

“Partnerships between translation and education can bring this dynamism into our schools, inject culture and creativity into the learning experience, make the Literature curriculum more inclusive, and nurture a new generation of readers open to and excited by international literature.”

Read the full article here.

Eyes on the Prize

The Linguist Spring 2023, Chartered Institute of Linguists, p10–11.

How can translation awards for language learners inspire a new generation of linguists? Having just been awarded the CIOL’s prestigious Threlford Cup for the promotion of languages, Charlotte Ryland takes a look at the work of the Stephen Spender Prize, now open for submissions.

Read the full article.

Revitalising Modern Languages: Content, Culture and Community

The Oxford Magazine, 5th Week Trinity Term 2023, following a speech made at the Moore Society, St John’s College.

READ THE SPEECH

My view is that we have to show our young learners that they are part of a community of linguists, which spans generations and continents, from the moment they learn their first word in another language.

That engaging in other languages and cultures isn’t just some esoteric thing that happens at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon with their French teacher, but is a mindset and a way of life that can stay with them throughout their lives.

Read the full speech. [Oxford SSO Log-in required to read]

I had the privilege of joining the Queen’s Translation Exchange (QTE) during my third year of studying Spanish and Russian at the University of Oxford. I took part in the Creative Translation in Schools project, and shortly after, I joined the QTE committee and volunteered to write articles for its budding blog page. This unique experience of working for an organisation that was purely focused on celebrating and encouraging the study of languages helped me to realise that I wanted to pursue a similar goal in my own career. The experience was particularly influential because it showed me that there was both a need and a desire for language-focused organisations, despite the constant messaging in society that the study of languages in the UK is in decline and gradually becoming less relevant in an AI-driven world.

The events that the Queen’s Translation Exchange hosted – translation workshops, an international book club, writers’ residencies, and even a ‘translation slam’ – showed me that establishing an organisation solely dedicated towards raising awareness of translation and language studies was neither a futile nor an unachievable goal. In short, being part of the Queen’s Translation Exchange inspired me to establish my own language-focused business, LinguaTute. LinguaTute is an online hub for language education, which offers private language tutoring, Oxbridge admissions mentoring for language applicants, a language-themed blog, and online courses on language-related topics.

Another reason why I founded LinguaTute was to raise awareness of the breadth and range of language studies. Many people don’t realise just how diverse translation, and approaches to translation, can be; many don’t view international literature in the same way, nor as analytically, as they view English literature; many have never even heard of ‘linguistics’; and most don’t realise that the study of languages can be so much more than simply learning textbook phrases such as ‘where is the library?’ and ‘I like to play football.’

What I loved about working with the Queen’s Translation Exchange was that it filled a gap in education that has existed for far too long: the language gap.

What I loved about working with the Queen’s Translation Exchange was that it filled a gap in education that has existed for far too long: the language gap. We don’t celebrate languages in the same way as we do STEM subjects – but we should – and in order to do this, we need to provide accessible resources for everyone to learn just how much the study of languages has to offer, and how important it is – not just in our day-to-day lives, but in the lives of all those who have come before us.

LinguaTute, following in the footsteps of the Queen’s Translation Exchange, aims to provide these resources and opportunities, encouraging students to explore the study of language beyond the classroom and beyond the curriculum.

My ambition for LinguaTute is for it to become an accessible network of support, platform for events, and database of resources for anyone interested in learning more about the study of languages. I am proud to say that our very first online course is now available to book; this is a French literature course taking place in Summer 2023. More information about this course can be found here.

By Daniel Rees (St Anne’s College, MSt Comparative Literature and Critical Translation).

One stunning aspect of being alive in the 21^st century is the sheer amount of translated fiction available to us. Books from all around the world seemingly just appear in Waterstones or Blackwells ready to be enjoyed in the language we happen to speak and read. Oftentimes the fact that an author may not have composed a work in the language, in which we are engaging with it, does not cross our minds. In the field of translation studies this phenomenon has been described by Lawrence Venuti as the ‘Translator’s invisibility’. He, alongside many others, points it out as a problem: if the success of a translation is determined by a reader’s inability to parse it as such, we as a reading culture are discouraged from observing translation as itself a valid area of study and are thus blind to the practices that shape it. Polly Barton’s residence at The Queen’s Translation Exchange, subtitled ‘The Visible Translator’, aims to address this phenomenon by centering the translator herself.

In the residency’s events, Barton has been openly and candidly discussing her work as a translator: from the minutiae of the craft and the socioeconomic realities of the occupation to the philosophical implications of professionally standing at cultural borders. In one of the events I attended – a conversation between Barton and Oxford’s Dr Juliana Buriticá Alzate – the discussion began at a place where the translator is forced into visibility: their profession. As a commercial endeavour translation is embedded in the modern publishing industry, which translators mostly rely on to make a living. This fact exerts certain regulatory pressures on the occupation that readers are often blind to. The discussion between the two translators brought to mind an earlier exchange I had had with Barton.

During a talk about her translation of Mieko Kanai’s Karui Memai (to be published in May of this year as Mild Vertigo) I was able to glance at an extract published in The Paris Review, which was passed around during the session. While reading over it I noticed that the units of measurement in the passage confounded me. The narrative follows the stream of conscious of a Japanese housewife and the section I was reading at the time dealt with her move into a new apartment and her internal musings on this. Her thoughts whizz through a variety of features about the space before settling on the knick-knacks that daily living accumulates. It was in the discrepancy between these two that I noted an editorial curiosity. The floor space of the apartment in Barton’s translation is described in a long section, which interrupts the flow of the passage with a series of measurements:

in terms of the size of the apartment—the open-plan room was about twelve tatami mats large, and then there was a six-mat room with tatami flooring, a three-mat utility room off the kitchen, and two rooms eight mats and seven mats in size with Western-style flooring—she couldn’t help but feel it was somewhat luxuriously spacious for a family like hers.

The striking feature here is that the very common unit for floor space in Japan the tatami mat (jou) is preserved despite being most likely incomprehensible to most readers of The Paris Review (for reference 1 tatami mat is about 1.653 m² or 17.79 ft²). I commended the boldness of this editorial decision in the back of my mind and read on to find the following passage giving the dimension of a home training device cluttering up the luxurious space:

it hadn’t been all that expensive but weighed sixty-six pounds and two ounces and was three feet and nine inches wide, five feet and three inches deep, and four feet and ten inches tall.

The frantic enumeration is made to mirror the earlier passage, where the switching of scale creates a dizzying effect. For me, however, the switching of a different type of scales had created dizziness. The translation had gone from accommodating the most Japanese of measurements tatami mats to using the least common type of measurement in Japan. After the 1868 Meiji Restoration the country switched from traditional measurements, such as normed tatami mats, to the metric system, making imperial measurements very rare. Consulting the free sample of the eBook in Japanese on Amazon, I found that my intuition was correct: the original passage used kiro and senchi, the Japanese equivalents to kg and cm. And not only that, but the imperial conversions made the device less voluminous by about 1cm³! Now the loss of 1cm³ in translation is perhaps not that much, but it is a very easily quantifiable way of illustrating that translation does not imply equivalence. Instead in translation equivalence can perhaps be understood as something the translator must create following a formula where legibility is inversely correlated with accuracy.

Coming from the tatami mats of the earlier passage, the formula here seemed entirely inconsistent. Why leave ‘cm’ on the cutting block when ‘tatami mats’ were allowed to stay? Meeting the translator herself, I was able to ask this question. Barton told me that the editorial guidelines of The Paris Review had required the use of imperial measurements, hence why the metric units were converted. However, apparently, the unit of ‘tatami mat’ was ironically illegible enough that it passed as a Japanese-ism that did not require translation, or so the editor thought. It was not parsed as a unit of measurement worthy of translation, but rather as a foreign element in an exotic story.

I want to suggest at this point that the visible translator can remind us of a translatedness inherent to our own perception of the world. Neither we nor the editors of The Paris Review inherently experience the world or our rooms in tatami mats or cm². Instead such units are created and passed on by us and, out of a mixture of necessity, convenience, and bias, we create narratives of normativity around them. The translator finds her task in mediating between these different realms of normativity. They stand at the intersection and have to strike the right balance between making readers comfortable and uncomfortable with the translatedness that is inherent in their perception of the world. On more than one occasion, Barton illuminatingly spoke of the process of appropriating the other for the sake of one’s own comprehension and all the pitfalls and difficulties that arise from it.

I want to end on another anecdote from Barton’s talk with Dr Alzate. The two speakers had moved on from the idiosyncrasies of the profession and began discussing the appropriation of the other through a gendered lens in translingual contexts. They spoke in particular of one illustrative passage from Aoko Matsuda’s short story ‘Enoki’, which both had translated from Japanese. The narrative tracks the consciousness of the Chinese Hackberry known as chibusa enoki (trans. ‘Breast Hackberry’) in Japanese folklore. The tree is characterised by nubs that grow at its base that are said to have the appearance of female breasts and ooze sap. The passage I am thinking of occurs after the tree, here only referred to as Enoki without the gendering chibusa, ponders its own disgust at the humans’ characterisation of its nubs as breasts:

After years mulling over her inexplicable sense of disgust, Enoki concluded that what she truly objected to was the way in which humans used their own yardsticks to affix meanings onto things that had nothing to do with them. They did this to objects around them, and even to elements of nature.

Barton pointed out that the beauty of the passage lies in its fabular nature of revealing by estranging, while simultaneously critiquing the exact human capacity that enables such familiarisation of the other. Exactly because we have made the tree familiar can we make it tell us that that familiarisation is problematic, thereby striking a very delicate and very human balance. The comparison to the translator here also seems apt: at once enabling and problematising transcultural exchange.

The two translators then brought this to bear on language, which itself is the category that is deconstructed and then reconstructed in her craft. It blends with other elements through which we see the world, such as gender, capital, and nations. Dr. Alzate spoke in particular of the knotty example of grammatical gender and how the complexity of a tale, such as ‘Enoki’, is enhanced in translation. Languages such as Spanish (into which Dr. Alzate translated the short story) give us ‘the tree’ or ‘the hackberry’ as ‘el árbol’ and ‘el almez’ implying an association with masculinity through the language itself. The story in Spanish translation thus has to bear this additional weight of signification, which the translator must consciously engage with.

All this is to say that making the translator visible does not merely affect those of us interested in translation, but rather affects the ways we all speak with one another. Throughout the residency, Barton, alongside the wonderful team that have chaired, organised, hosted, and generally enabled the events, has been exploring how everyday language offers knotty and problematic ways in which individuals relate to one another. When I measure a room in the US, it is not equivalent to measuring a room in Japan. When I make a hackberry speak in Spanish it is not the same as when I do so in Japanese. ‘The Visible Translator’ makes apparent the translation that we are all engaged in constantly. She speaks in a voice that has the power to estrange us from our own.

This piece has also been published by TORCH. Polly Barton’s Residency forms part of TORCH’s Humanities Cultural Programme.

Bibliography

Kanai, Mieko. 2022. “Tap Water.” The Paris Review Issue 242, translated by Polly Barton. https://theparisreview.org/fiction/7950/tap-water-mieko-kanai

Matsuda, Aoko. 2020. “Enoki.” In Where the wild ladies are, translated by Polly Barton: 171-180. London: Tilted Axis Press.

Venuti, Lawrence. 1986. “The Translator’s Invisibility.” Criticism 28(2): 179–212. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23110425

Welcome back to the Creative Translation Digest from the Stephen Spender Trust and the Queen’s Translation Exchange.

After a busy start to the year, we’re delighted to be able to share some exciting news with you. The Stephen Spender Trust has been awarded the prestigious Threlford Cup by the Chartered Institute of Linguists, “the world’s greatest trophy for fostering the study of languages”, which was first awarded in 1935. And as one Prize closes, another opens: The Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators closed at the start of April, with results to be announced very soon, whilst the Stephen Spender Prize opens for submissions on the 12th May. Find out about the Prize and more in this newsletter.

Stephen Spender Prize 2023 opening for entries 12th May!

We’re delighted to inform you that the 2023 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation will open for entries on Friday 12th May. The deadline for submissions will be midnight (UK time) on Friday 14th July. This year’s prize sees a host of exciting changes, to make it easier than ever for you and your students to participate.

All-new categories for 2023
Dedicated strand for Schools
Following close consultation with teachers, this year we are thrilled to announce a new strand of the Stephen Spender Prize especially designed for teachers submitting entries on behalf of pupils. Open to all schools in the UK and Ireland as well as British Schools Overseas, the Schools Laureate Prize features additional age categories from KS1-5, including a new category for primary pupils; a range of new commentary formats to enable pupils to showcase their different creative skills; and an expanded selection of suggested poems that will ultimately cover dozens of languages.

If your students would like to submit their own entries to the prize, they can also still enter individually by submitting to our new-look Individual Youth Entry strand. Both strands will be judged by world slam poetry champion Keith Jarrett. Watch his video message to students on the SST YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/CVyQkf-jNtQ

Ukrainian Spotlight
Alongside the multilingual schools and individual youth strands, in 2023 we are celebrating poetry from Ukraine with the Ukrainian Spotlight prize. The Spotlight will be judged by Ukrainian-American poet and translator Nina Murray, who has recorded a special introduction for entrants here: https://youtu.be/r2Gia2TL9h0

Free translation competition for Teachers
We are encouraging teachers to try their hand at poetry translation with our new, free-to-enter Teacher Laureate Prize, open to all teachers at schools that have entered students for the 2023 Schools Laureate or Spotlight strands. We will also continue to award Outstanding Teacher Commendations to teachers and/or language departments who show exceptional engagement with the Prize.

Stephen Spender Prize teacher drop-in sessions
To answer any queries you might have about the prize, throughout the prize window the Stephen Spender Trust team is organising a series of informal Zoom drop-in sessions for teachers. The first of these will be on Tuesday 16th May from 4pm to 4.45pm, followed by fortnightly drop-ins at the same time on 23rd May, 6th June, 20th June and 4th July.

The Zoom link for the first session is: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86177152113?pwd=WlM4N0ZpM1RVY3B6QUJzeDJWd2sxUT09.

The links for the remaining sessions will be shared in our upcoming prize mailings to registered teachers. If you haven’t signed up already, there’s still time to register here to receive classroom inspiration and activity ideas throughout the submissions period.

Inside poetry translation with the 2022 Stephen Spender Prize winners: QTE blog interviews
As inspiration for budding 2023 entrants, the QTE team has published a fascinating series of blog interviews with the winners and commendees of last year’s prize. All of the interviews can be found on the blog homepage here.
Considering entering the Prize for the first time? Read an interview with a First-time Entrant commendee, Lupe Núñez-Fernández !

Resources

Do you want to get more students reading and reading widely? Browse QTE’s DIY guide to setting up an International Book Club in your school, including eight recommendations, reading notes and advice.

An English or Spanish teacher looking for more creative translation activities for your pupils? QTE has published an open access creative translation resource from Spanish for teachers and students, perfect for an end of term activity!

Featured News

Stephen Spender Trust awarded the Threlford Cup for ‘fostering the study of languages’.
The Stephen Spender Trust has been awarded the Threlford Cup by the Chartered Institute of Linguists! Read an interview with Dr Charlotte Ryland about the importance of SST’s work and the response from the community.

Think Like a Linguist programme launched in Rochdale
A pioneering new languages outreach programme, harnessing the knowledge of expert educators at two of the world’s leading universities, aims to change how students think about language learning, starting in Rochdale. Find out more about Think Like a Linguist, run by QTE, SST, Languages departments at Oxford and Cambridge, and Hollingworth Academy in Rochdale.

Other Opportunities

Get your pupils excited about the Stephen Spender Prize with a poetry translation workshop led by a professional translator. During the workshop, pupils will produce translations they can use to enter to the competition. Available in 11 different languages, including Ukrainian — our 2023 Spotlight language.

Thank you for working with us to make language-learning more creative, authentic, inclusive and sustainable. Please get in touch with any questions or if you would like to get involved.

Viewing archives for QTE

Mandarin workshops and Creative Translation with the Queen’s Translation Exchange

Raising the profile of Languages in schools

The Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators – A Student View from Oxfordshire

Routes into policy careers for linguists

The Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators – a student view from the Midlands

Languages and policy engagement at Oxford: an act of translation

Epic Annette: Anne Weber and Tess Lewis in Oxford

Epic Annette: an evening of translation and resistance at Queen’s

‘What is being written elsewhere…’

QTE Review of Books: Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns

The Visible Translator: telling Japanese ghost stories

QTE Review of Books: justice in an Egyptian classic

QTE Director makes the case for culture in language learning