South East

Thea Bradbury from Kendrick School in Reading recently took part in the European Commission's prestigious Juvenes Translatores (Young Translators) competition. Her efforts saw her become the 2011 winner for the United Kingdom. Read on for her account of the experience:

I really, really never expected to win the Juvenes Translatores competition. I entered it for fun, and forgot about it immediately afterwards, and was therefore astonished when the news came through that I would be travelling to Brussels for the award ceremony at the end of March. As the translation we’d done was itself was fairly short - we’d had two hours to translate a single A4 page - I assumed the ceremony would be correspondingly low-key. I was wrong.

The Brussels trip lasted three days, and evidence of my underestimation started long before we even reached the ceremony: I have never seen a car so shiny as the one which collected us from the station upon arrival. Clearly metal polish is where all those taxes that the Daily Mail complains about are going. The excitement continued as we were taken to our hotel, near the central Grand Place, and immediately given a box of chocolates by the Juvenes Translatores team (chocolate would rapidly turn out to be the defining theme of our visit).

We met for dinner that evening in the hotel restaurant, where all 27 winners were cruelly torn from the bosoms of their respective families and seated in a line, thereby forcing them to make stilted getting-to-know-you small talk with each other (I imagine things were still more awkward for the parents, who had to do the same). To my dismay if not surprise, English turned out to be the common language, thereby robbing me of the opportunity to practise my French and German. Fortunately, the arrival of the food broke the ice; the idea of ‘death by chocolate’ is apparently something every culture has in common. Things got even livelier later on, when we reconvened upstairs to listen to music and, at my instigation, to teach each other swearwords in our respective languages.

The next day was that of the ceremony, and I realised how badly I’d underestimated its importance when we arrived at a European Commission building adorned with not one, but two giant Juvenes Translatores posters. Inside, the room was filled not only with the parents and teachers I’d expected, but also with a vast assortment of translators, directors and dignitaries. As we waited for proceedings to get underway, we winners doodled on the official Directorate-General for Interpretation notepaper provided with official European Commission pencils.

The ceremony itself involved speeches by Androulla Vassiliou, the Commissioner for Multilingualism, and Rytis Martikonis, Acting Director-General of the Directorate-General for Translation, as well as a Swedish translator who told us about her travels in Mongolia. Whilst these were all extremely interesting, I have to admit that it was the interpretation that fascinated me the most. Just two English interpreters handled around ten different languages, not pausing at all when the speakers switched midflow from, say, French to Greek. Confusingly, the slight time lag between speech and interpretation meant that half the audience often started clapping before the other half had heard the end of a speech.

Along with the winners from Cyprus, Italy and Romania, I had volunteered to speak about my involvement in the contest and interest in languages. I did so in German, in order to illustrate a point about the notorious English laziness when it comes to learning other languages. It was whilst speaking that I discovered another intriguing side-effect of interpretation: when a speaker makes a joke, the laughter is staggered.

After the ceremony came a buffet, composed in no small part of the ubiquitous chocolate (which I was by now beginning to suspect actually constituted a food group in Belgium), followed by an photo session and a visit to the European Parliament visitors’ centre. However, the highlight of the trip for me came the next day, with our tour of the Directorate-General for Translation. Not only did we have the chance to speak to translators in the relevant departments and ask them questions; we were actually shown the documents that they use every day. Whilst not all of these documents could be said to be politically incendiary (agriculture was quite a big concern), they gained a certain glamour from their position at the beating heart of the EC. My nerdy little soul was also made joyful by a glimpse at a translator’s toolkit, ranging from up-to-the-minute internet vocabulary databases to the more traditional recourse of a really massive dictionary.

Soon enough, our visit was at an end and it was time to head back to the station and to our respective countries. The DGT had one last gift for us, however (besides more chocolate): a book each, in the language from which we translated during the contest. We winners parted with mutual sadness and promises to start a Juvenes Translatores Facebook group.

Throughout our visit, I was constantly amazed by the generosity and helpfulness of the Juvenes Translatores team and everyone else I encountered, and by how much they cared about encouraging and inspiring us winners. The visit crystallised my determination to become a translator, and I can think of no better aspiration than to work alongside the people I met during my too-short stay in Brussels.

The Routes South team would like to congratulate Thea for her wonderful achievement! For more details about the competition, click here.

Free Screening of My DDR T-Shirt

Students and teachers are invited to a free evening screening of Ian Hawkins’ remarkable film “My DDR T-Shirt” (German with English subtitles).There will be a Q&A with the director afterwards.

“My DDR T-Shirt” is an interview film about people’s experiences with communist East Germany. When Hawkins went to Berlin in 2005, he like many tourists bought a t-shirt with communist symbols on it; to him it seemed a funny souvenir. Yet the t-shirt became more than a matter of fashion: What did the communist symbols actually stand for? What did they mean to people? And do they still mean something? To find an answer, Hawkins met people from both sides of the Iron Curtain and recorded their opinions and life stories. “What does the DDR t-shirt represent to you?”

The film offers a perfect opportunity for your students to learn more about life in divided Germany through the eyes of a British filmmaker.

The screening details are:
Thursday, December 2 2010
University of Reading, Whiteknights Campus
Palmer Building 102
6.30 p.m.

Click here for the event flier.

If you would like to join us, please contact Gillian Williams - german@reading.ac.uk

The event will run as part of the CEGS (Centre for East German Studies) event series, and is organised by Stefanie Ochel, Lektorin on behalf of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and Dr Ute Wölfel, Director of CEGS.
 

Coming soon! This hands-on activity is designed for year 12 students to support their language learning and to encourage them to take up languages at degree level. The interactive session will be delivered by a current language ambassador, who has recently returned from their own year abroad.

The date for this activity has not yet been confirmed, so please keep checking the events section to find out more.

For further information contact A.Wigham@reading.ac.uk
 

The National Year 7 Spelling Bee was officially launched today, so it's time to get your year 7 students spelling! The competition is open to all year 7 students studying French, German and/or Spanish. There are four stages of the competition: class, school, regional final and national final, with word lists provided in each language for each stage.

For more information and to download a teachers' pack and the word lists, please click here.

To register for the competition, please contact Clare Forder.

Oral examinations in Modern Languages fill many students with dread. However, Cams Hill School in Fareham has found a way of making them seem less intimidating for their GCSE candidates by organising an intensive revision workshop to help pupils make final preparations for the speaking test.

On 22 April, undergraduates in Modern Languages from University of Southampton visited Cams Hill to help with the workshop by giving the young learners extra practice in small groups for oral in French, German or Spanish. And indeed, the university students clearly knew what the GCSE candidates had in store. Will Travers, first year undergraduate in Management Science and French commented ‘Three years ago I was studying GCSE French. This made it easy for me to relate to the students.’ Indeed, working with undergraduates clearly has benefits for the younger learners, for as Ella Dove, first year in English and French, commented ‘Conversing with those who have recently been in a similar position within their own academic studies allowed Cams Hill pupils to express themselves openly and confidently, in a manner which they would perhaps not otherwise have been able to achieve in a more formal classroom setting.’

It was not only the pupils who gained from the experience. Chris Harper, first year student in German, pointed out ‘The students got a chance to see if teaching was something we'd consider as a career.’ Dr Ian McCall, Senior Lecturer in Modern Languages, who liaised with Cams Hill for the workshop, commented ‘Routes into Languages South is delighted to have provided the undergraduate helpers. Hopefully they will have inspired the pupils to continue with their language study beyond GCSE by communicating their own enthusiasm for languages to them.’

Over 100 students, with 17 teachers, drawn from 15 schools across the Solent region, gathered at the University of Southampton on 22nd March to take part in the Solent-EBP Language challenge. Solent EBP (Solent Education and Business Partnership) organises the event on an annual basis, as part of a well-established programme that brings school students closer to the world of work.

The four members of each team, all in years 9 and 10 of their secondary education, had a range of tasks to perform using French, German or Spanish, culminating in a group presentation to a panel of judges who took the role of representatives from a foreign tour operator. The students made their pitch in the hope that their fictitious company would be commissioned to provide a tour package that would tempt cruise passengers to explore Southampton and the surrounding area at the start or end of their holiday.

Prior to the presentation, the students were busy devising their company logo, planning the itinerary, filling gaps in the information they had been given through simulated telephone conversations in the foreign language, and designing the poster they would use to support their presentation to the judges. Local volunteer business linguists were drawn from local solicitors (Blake Lapthorn), accountants (Price Waterhouse), as well as Southampton City Council, in total 10 businesses support the Challenge.

Events at the Challenge, which had been organised independently of the Routes Into Languages project, were filmed using funding allocated to the Southampton Solent University; as one of the outer circle in the southern Routes consortium, SSU had been invited to devote its budget to a version of the “Languages on Film” project first piloted at Brighton University.

Solent EBP works in partnership with CILT’s ‘Business Language Champion’ programme. Raz Hussain, the BLC South East Regional Manager, felt that a film was an important ingredient in documenting, celebrating and promoting the students’ achievements to potential future business sponsors. The Routes network was thus able to complement established work undertaken by a different set of partners in a remarkably fruitful way, making good use of links that had already arisen between local schools, businesses, organisations and the city’s two universities.

Southampton Solent University was represented at the event by members of the language teaching team, the technician Instructor with responsibility for the Language Centre, one of the University’s enterprise consultants, and last not least, a university alumna, now a business ambassador from a local firm of solicitors.

The next step is to renew SSU involvement in 2011 by producing a similar film record using purely internal resources, and with input from SSU students. These are some of the ways of linking the Language and Enterprise Challenge to the Southampton Solent’s (Institution-Wide Language Programme) that are envisaged:

Students will perhaps be able to undertake interviews for the film on the day of the event in the foreign language and devise subtitles for public promotion, and also incorporate their input into the portfolio of language tasks that they perform as part of their assessment.

The Overall Winning Team came from Thornden School, Eastleigh, however the individual language winners were: Spanish – Kings School, Winchester; French – Cantell School, Southampton; German – Perins School, Winchester. Perins were also Highly Commended for their French-speaking team.

Tourism South East kindly donated their ‘Welcome Host’ prize to the winning team, and Liz Mizon, Mayor of Southampton, presented the prizes.

And the students’ reaction? Asked if she would be continuing with languages after leaving school, one participant from St Anne’s School, Southampton said:

“Definitely - today has been a great opportunity to work with the Business Volunteers to see what we can aspire to if we continue with our languages”.

The film of the event can be viewed here.