The College Record 2022

Reports and College Activities
We had held a small in-person workshop in Michaelmas Term – on the German
poet Nora Gomringer, with her translator Annie Rutherford – but this Ethiopian event
was our first major live event since the pandemic began, and the buzz in the room
throughout the performance and drinks reception proved that a return to the stage
was the right decision.
We preceded this performance with a translation workshop, too, where university
students worked together with poets, professional translators, Oxford residents and
members of the Ethiopian diaspora. The power of translation came to the fore when
one participant, who had travelled over eighty miles to attend, gave the caveat
that she was “not a poet” before reading out her translation of the short poem –
we should manage our expectations, in other words. She went on to read out a
moving, powerful, creative rendering of the original. Translation makes writers of
those who would not otherwise write, and this is what we see time and again in our
schools’ workshops.
These workshops, by the student Creative Translation Ambassadors that we train
every autumn, were back in the classroom for the first time since 2019. Selected
from Oxford’s undergraduate and postgraduate community, 18 Ambassadors codesigned
and -delivered workshops in six languages in eight local state schools.
We also began to collate the data from our research project on the impact of these
workshops, which show that even these relatively short interventions can transform
a pupil’s view of language-learning: from ‘boring’ to ‘interesting’, from ‘difficult’ to
‘enjoyable’ and ‘creative’.
My favourite response of all came from a teacher in Lancashire, who reported that,
during a Year 8 Spanish lesson using our teaching resources, a 13-year-old student
had remarked, “This feels important”. That particular lesson involved translating a
prose extract about migration within South America: our resources routinely bring
matters of historical, social or political import into the classroom through literature
in this way, as well as foregrounding youth culture, street art, instapoetry and more.
The language-learning experience needs to reflect the pupils’ interests – the things
that are “important” to them – even while their language skills may be relatively limited.
And our work with creative translation shows that we don’t need to wait until A Level/
Highers to introduce authentic, engaging, inclusive culture into the curriculum.
Inclusion has been central to our work on the Anthea Bell Prize this year, through
our project on ‘Inclusive Outreach through Translation’ with the MML Faculty and
several other partners. With support from Oxford Humanities ‘Culture Change Fund’,
we established a new collaboration with the Institut français and Goethe-Institut in
London, to develop, test and publish authentic creative translation resources that
explore equality. These will be tested in schools in autumn 2022, and soon after
made available to the 1000+ Modern Languages teachers who have registered to
receive our resources and lesson plans.
54 The Queen’s College | College Record 2022