By Jack Franco
My experience with languages, as is the case for many of us, is personal. I grew up bilingual from birth: Italian behind closed doors and English outside. I studied French all the way to A-Level in a London comprehensive, before graduating with a BA in Philosophy and French in the summer of 2022. During my time at Oxford, I volunteered frequently with the Queen’s Translation Exchange (QTE), both as a book reviewer and as part of the first cohort of Creative Translation Ambassadors, undergraduates who deliver literary translation workshops in local schools. I immediately felt that QTE’s methodology was, with enough support, a winner. I was delighted to take up the role of Programme Coordinator to play my part in ensuring school students could access an enriching languages education, which is steadily returning to its former position as the preserve of the privileged. Uptake of languages has fallen drastically everywhere with independent schools as their only slightly safer havens.
Throughout this extremely busy year at QTE, it has been clearer than ever that a hands-on, genuinely humanistic approach to promoting languages – driven by a belief that access to linguistic exchange is intrinsically enriching as well as a social justice issue, is the only one that works. What does this mean in concrete terms? It calls on us to reject a solely utilitarian mindset, based on proficiency and graduate outcomes, and instead to tackle structural problems in languages pedagogy with a coherent and sustainable alternative. At the core of this alternative vision is translation, a complex act that is the common denominator for all encounters with language.
We have a serious motivation issue in language learning not just among students, evident in the precipitous decline in exam entries, but also among teachers, as seen in the recruitment and retention crisis. The content of the GCSE as well as the A-Level curriculum is for the most part devoid of any authentic cultural material, creating a stifling climate for students and for the teachers charged with delivering the content. QTE is trying to address this strategic error head on with a model of literary translation in the classroom that benefits both teachers and students. Creative Translation moves from the literal to the literary, using our ‘Decode-Translate-Create’ method. Students are first introduced to a text, usually poetry, via a series of images or discussion of general notions, before being given the text itself, with one catch: the text comes with a glossary, whose completeness depends on the classroom’s level. This allows the students to first develop a ‘literal’ word-for-word translation, come to the visceral and logical conclusion that such a translation is unsatisfactory, and then embark on a literary, idiomatic, freer – or ‘creative’ – rendering.
In response to the MFL teacher retention crisis, our Creative Translation workshops in schools showcase an overlooked solution: value and use the skills that our languages graduates have gained during their studies. Namely, intimate knowledge of a foreign culture and language in the form of literature, history, visual art and the lived experience of a year abroad. Currently, school curricula force language graduates who become trainee teachers, especially those graduating from courses such as those at Oxford, to abandon much of the training by which they came to love and learn languages. This is inefficient at best, and a depressing experience at worst. Creative Translation allows teachers to cultivate and rediscover their languages of study and objects of passion, whilst providing their students with rigorous instruction in grammar and vocabulary. QTE works to restore the connection between higher education and the school sector, where best practice and a common understanding of the benefits of language learning are shared. If teachers are motivated, their students stand to benefit, and are more likely to carry on studying the subject through to GCSE and beyond.
A PGCE student in Wales had the following to say about QTE’s creative translation model:
It inspired me to look at the translation of interesting culturally significant literary texts as not only accessible to university-level students, but also secondary school pupils. It made me think that this kind of workshop could offer a new and fresh angle for encouraging learners to pursue languages at A-level and beyond. I look forward to experimenting with this approach to translation in my future practice...
The primary benefactors of engaged teachers are their students. This year saw the third edition of the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators. Well over 15,000 students across the United Kingdom, the majority from state schools, and including Ministry of Defence schools as far as Cyprus, took part. Competition texts for French, to take one of our five languages, included poems by Victor Hugo and Marguerite Yourcenar – likely considered too difficult for teenagers. Yet Creative Translation is accessible and inclusive by design, since texts are scaffolded according to level by glossaries and contextual information. Teachers reported that
The resources were excellent. They were a great complement to my lessons. What is more, I could see the positive impact it has had on two of my students, whose grammar improved during the two terms that they translated the past competition tasks.
It has been amazing to see how the little club we ran for this competition last year has made such a difference...
QTE’s work, in collaboration with the Stephen Spender Trust, empowers teachers by valuing their skills and passion. Equally, our work focuses on another blind spot: replacing the myth of a monoglot Britain with the multilingual reality of British society. The UK has a wealth of linguistic ‘assets’. Though the picture is changing, languages such as Polish and Bengali are still considered more suitable for the home than the classroom. Our social fabric suffers, as does the country as a whole on the international stage. Once again, it is a matter of making use of the resources we have by creating sustained and sustainable engagement in language learning. QTE programmes encourage learners to express their personal relationship to languages, identity and interests at the start of any exercise. In this year alone, we featured workshops in Japanese – thanks to our translator-in-residence and TORCH Visiting Fellow, Polly Barton – as well as Czech, Korean and Ukrainian. Translation, given its immanent power to urge comparison, critique and self-reflection is an effective method for valuing our multilingual students academically and socially. We see the positive effects, both cognitive and academic, of creative translation workshops for students focusing on English Language and Literature, where Creative Translation grows appreciation for the literary as well as the literal.
Dr Charlotte Ryland, the Director of the Translation Exchange, speaks of our mission as building a transnational and intergenerational ‘community of linguists’, in which school pupils feel that they play an active part. On my year abroad, I was a teaching assistant in a challenging middle school in Marseille’s 13tharrondissement, where I was only too happy to keep students occupied with a creative translation into French of William Blake’s The Tyger. Their rendering was beautiful; personal, and thoughtful. Whether I realised or not at the time, this was the ‘community’ under discussion all along. An Oxford undergraduate, exporting a method originally tested in English state schools, to the famously multilingual city of Marseille. Why not train all Year Abroad students on teaching placements to deliver a workshop?
Cultivating and nurturing this community is an incredibly practical matter that can yield mutual benefit in a real translation exchange. Booksellers and publishers work together on our International Book Clubs. From this year, we hope to have doctoral students moderate these Clubs, further embedding languages outreach in the academic community. We can raise the profile of translators in the public sphere, and showcase the different doors that languages can open. We can strengthen what are now tried-and-tested methods by connecting undergraduates and graduates with the secondary sector through our Creative Translation Ambassador programme. These projects give linguists confidence and inspire younger generations, allowing us all to make a renewed, evidence-led and self-confident case for languages to business, policymakers and society at large. It is a great pleasure to be a part of this community, and I look forward to watching it develop with the University of Oxford at its heart.