Raising EAL pupils’ self-esteem

Parental engagement, improved literacy, and a big boost to EAL pupils’ self-esteem; the Translation Nation project fizzes with creative potential, reports Joe Carter...

Yes, she won’t forgive me, and she can’t forgive me. And the most awful thing about it is that it’s all my fault – all my fault, though I’m not to blame.” These two lines are from the opening page of Anna Karenina, as translated by Constance Garnett. If you put the original Russian into Google Translate, however, the result is not so elegant: “Yes, she will not forgive and can not forgive. And the most awful thing that blame me, blame me, not my fault.” It’s possible to understand the thrust of what is being said, but it’s hardly the stuff of great literature.

Garnett has taken Tolstoy’s Russian text and converted it into English, but it is not a wordfor- word substitution. A literal translation might reproduce meaning, but everything else is likely to be missing: nuance, humour, music, tone, colouring… exactly what made the work worth translating in the first place.

To be an accomplished translator requires creativity and cultural sensitivity – two skills that underpin the Translation Nation programme developed in partnership by the Eastside Education Trust and the Stephen Spender Trust. First trialled in London in 2010, the project is a celebration of the languages spoken in primary schools in England. It asks children who speak an additional language to bring in stories provided by their parents and then work with their peers, under the guidance of literary translators, to translate these into clear, vivid English.

“Studying translation can feel a little dry, but with Translation Nation we wanted it to be something vibrant that would capture the linguistic joy of experimenting with nuance and register,” explains Rakhee Jasani, arts development director at Eastside Education Trust. “We live in a very mobile world and there really is a sense that everyone is translating from one culture to another every day,” she continues. “This is particularly true of children in London primary schools. They navigate between a number of different cultures and languages. But in many cases there isn’t a real celebration of those languages.”

A chance to shine

Presented with such a clear and passionate brief, the schools approached to take part in Translation Nation did not struggle to see its potential. At Sparrow Farm Juniors in Hounslow, 33 different languages are spoken by the pupils, ranging from French and Polish to Urdu and Punjabi. For headteacher Linda Thomas, here was a chance to draw on the talents of EAL pupils, to give them the opportunity to lead, instead of playing catch-up. “It’s a bit one sided,” she says, reflecting on the nature of dayto- day lessons. “They’re always working in English and having to fit in with the way we teach. This project offered something a little bit different. It made EAL pupils the stars of the show – they were able to shine as they shared words from their first language, or helped other children to translate words into English.”

A similar story is told by Simon Dickinson, Y5 teacher at Stockwell Primary in Lambeth, where around 40 per cent of pupils at the school are from the Portuguese community, and many other additional languages are spoken. Having taken part in Translation Nation for the past two years, he is convinced of its value. “EAL pupils get the feeling of being a leader,” he says, “rather than someone who is struggling, or perhaps marginalised.”

Celebrating the community

Although the way in which Translation Nation is delivered varies slightly in each case, the project is commonly run over a total of three days and opens with a whole school assembly, held by a visiting languages specialist who is responsible for scaffolding children’s learning. A smaller group is then chosen to take part in further workshops, with pupils splitting into teams including EAL and English speaking pupils to translate a story, which is then performed to an audience on the final afternoon.

An important part of this process is sourcing authentic stories from different cultures.

Children are encouraged to ask their parents and grandparents to teach them a story from their own culture – written or spoken in their native language – which they can bring into school to be translated. “We got a very good response,” reports Linda Thomas when asked how parents reacted to the project. “An Algerian mum said that her son was not fluent enough in French to speak it naturally, but they both worked so hard on their story that it opened up a whole new relationship in valuing their language.

“Children brought in lots of different traditional tales,” Linda continues. “There was one story, The Magic Stone, that had been passed down through generations of an Urdu speaking family without ever being written down. After the final performance, there was a big cheer from the audience when this was voted as the winner.”

Linda’s account of parental engagement is paralleled by Simon’s experience at Stockwell. “There was clearly a sense of pride from the parents who visited our class assembly and saw their stories being performed,” he says. “It meant a lot to them. We had parents picking up their children in the playground and telling me how pleased they were.”

Building core skills

Paving the way to the final project were many shorter activities in which children would experiment with speaking in a variety of registers, interpreting body language, and matching proverbs from different cultures. The last of which, as Simon Dickinson found out, helped to put the process of translation into context: “The children are discovering the oddities of language and that you can’t always literally translate things from one language to another, because there’s a cultural depth to each saying.”

But Translation Nation should not be mistaken for a purely cultural exercise or a lesson in MFL. In many ways it is a literacy project. In searching to keep the spirit of a story alive as it is transferred from one language to another, children have to stretch their creative writing skills to the limit. “It becomes a process of redrafting work,” suggests Eastside’s Rakhee Jasani. “Working in small teams, the children would negotiate with each other about what might be the best word to use in each instance, and how this might change the meaning of a sentence or the story. It really developed their literacy skills. Although the focus was on translation, this was a way into exploring so much more.”