The faculty is partnering with the Queen’s College Translation Exchange and Stephen Spender Trust on an innovative project that aims to make Modern Languages outreach more inclusive. Inclusive Outreach through Translation has won funding from the brand new ‘Culture Change Fund’ in the Humanities Division. It will bring together colleagues at Oxford and beyond, as well as teachers and pupils from across the UK, to develop and test translation activities that explicitly seek to include and appeal to the broadest range of young people according to ethnicity, socio-economic background, gender and sexuality. The project involves partnerships with the Oxford University Department of Education, St Mary’s University, Twickenham and the new Special Interest Group on Decolonising the Modern Foreign Languages curriculum (Association for Language Learning) – ensuring that trainee and established teachers are closely involved from the outset.
Charlotte Ryland, Founding Director of the Translation Exchange, explained: “Numbers opting for languages at school and university continue to decline, yet there is great energy and inspiration within the translation and international literary community. This project will harness that energy in order to develop, test, evaluate and publish a set of pilot resources and guidelines for inclusive outreach. Everything will be published open-access and shared with other universities, outreach organisations, and languages advocacy organisations. The learning will feed immediately into our new Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators, which we’re running for the first time this year with over 600 schools participating. We’re confident that the rich, creative act of translation is a perfect way to make language-learning as relevant and inclusive as possible.”