The Queen's College Record 2020

Our International Book Club gathered momentum as we welcomed celebrated
translators Marilyn Booth (Fellow at Magdalen) and Antonia Lloyd-Jones to Queen’s for
discussions of authors Jokha Alharthi (Oman) and Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), winners
of the International Booker Prize and Nobel Prize respectively. The Club’s efforts to
engage local readers who otherwise do not attend University events began to bear
fruit, with over 80 attendees across the two sessions, including many non-members of
the University.
In Michaelmas and Hilary, fifteen students from across the University were trained by
Old Member Gitanjali Patel (Portuguese & Spanish, 2008) and literary translator Rahul
Bery to become ‘Creative Translation Ambassadors’. Working in groups to design
workshops for primary and secondary pupils, the ambassadors were primed for action
just as school closures struck. Six of them managed to transfer their workshops
into virtual sessions hosted on the Queen’s YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/
queenscollegeox), and the chair of our student committee even produced a series of
video talks on studying languages at Oxford.
Reports and College Activities
That swift change to virtual programmes set the tone for Translation Exchange events
throughout the summer. Our Book Club became more ‘international’ than we had ever
expected, with participants and guest translators joining online meetings from across
the globe. The potential to recreate the warmth and vitality of an in-person discussion
– through plenary sessions as well as smaller ‘breakout rooms’ – was a welcome
surprise to us all, and led us to add an additional Book Club: one for UK Sixth Form
students. In July, 50 sixth-formers joined us online from across the country to discuss
The Island by Ana María Matute (Penguin Classics), translated into English by Queen’s
Spanish Fellow Laura Lonsdale. This initiative is one that we are now developing into a
regular fixture, in partnership with the college’s Outreach department.
During the summer term, sixthformers
were also busy entering
our brand new translation
competition for schools, named
in honour of the great translator
Anthea Bell OBE. We brought
forward the launch of the
Anthea Bell Prize for Young
Translators to June 2020, in
order to provide young linguists
with a creative outlet during
school closures. The 295
entries that we received from
teenagers across the UK were
testament to the excitement
and creativity that translation
can bring to language-learners.
Undergraduate Charlotte Murphy taking part in a short
film that formed part of the teaching packs for the
Anthea Bell Prize
College Record 2020 | The Queen’s College 61