German joy for Perse pupil in translation competition

Benjamin (Year 8) demonstrated a talent for translation after becoming regional champion in an illustrious language competition.

He won the East region Level 1 honours for German in the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators, organised by The Queen’s College, Oxford and inspired by the late renowned literary translator to encourage youngsters to dive deeper into modern foreign languages.

Having only studied German since last September, Benjamin was surprised to have been named the regional winner.

He said: “There was a German poem called Grashüpfer, or Grasshopper in English, and we were given the vocabulary we would need to translate it, but it’s not about making a literal translation.

“It was useful to think about the literal translation first, but then aim to realise the message they were trying to convey in the original German.

“The poem was all about animals representing people and I tried to work it into the English translation around that to make it as close to the German as possible.

“It was a very interesting experience because in class although we do translation all the time, this needed to be figurative rather than literal.”

Benjamin said he had enjoyed learning German having visited the country and wanting to know more about the culture.

He added: “I’ve also found German is a very interesting language. It has a lot more different cases than English, French and Spanish, but there’s also a very logical order to sentences.”