QE’s youngest linguists put their newly acquired skills to the test in a high-speed House competition.
Teams from QE’s six Houses competed to translate five sentences into French and then five into German both quickly and accurately.
Each Year 7 form put forward a team made up of three or four boys. First place went to Pearce, with team members Ameen Elamin, Kyle Goldband, Tuhin Mitra and Nittant Moudgil scoring an emphatic victory.
Languages teacher and Head of Extra-Curricular Enrichment Rebecca Grundy said: “The competition was a ‘running translation’ which means that there is a text to translate, but split into sentences.
“They all got the first sentence at the same time and, as soon as they had translated it, they brought it to the teacher. If it was perfect, they got the next sentence, but if not, they had to go back and try again. The first team to finish the entire text was the winner –and that was Pearce, who won by quite a margin!
“They were allowed to use their text books to help, as the ‘vocab’ we used was taken from the Year 7 course, but the sentences were pitched to be extra-challenging, particularly in terms of grammatical structures.”
Here are a few examples of the challenges the boys faced:
- Translate: ‘He has long hair and blue eyes’. This tested boys’ knowledge of French adjective endings (‘Il a les cheveux longs et les yeux bleus.’)
- Translate: ‘In my free time, I read, but on Saturdays my brother does judo.’ Testing positioning of German verbs (‘In meiner Freizeit lese ich…’)
- Translate: ‘My brother is called Max and he has a computer.’ Testing the German accusative case (‘…er hat einen Computer.’)
Harrisons’ took the runner-up spot in the competition, which was organised by the Languages department, while Broughton and Underne shared third place.
“All the boys showed fantastic enthusiasm – but remained very well behaved – and so will receive a merit each,” said Miss Grundy.