As part of our MFL (Modern Foreign Languages) theme ‘Poetry in NHEHS motion’ this year, we hosted three virtual poetry translation events in collaboration with Harrow School throughout March, where some of our Year 10 and Year 12 (Italian) students collaborated with students from Harrow translating poems. Ms Li (Mandarin), Mrs Spencer (French), Ms Barbosa (Spanish), Mrs Schindler-Smith (German) and Mr Guarniero (Italian) led the workshops with their counterparts from Harrow School.  As part of the programme, there was an in-house competition for the best translations, along the lines of the renowned Oxford University ‘Anthea Bell’ translation competition, to enable students to enjoy competing to produce the most accomplished translations and enjoy a huge sense of achievement and shared success once completed.

We had fantastic feedback from students at both schools:

Isabella Stumpfle, Evangeline Rudakevich and Amrit Mander, Year 10 NHEHS, said of the experience: “For three weeks, we participated in the in-house TE Anthea Bell translation competition with Harrow School. It was an inspiring and exciting experience and we met up online to translate  a poem, a short story and a concrete poem. It was great to see everybody’s enthusiasm. It was an excellent opportunity to use linguistic skills for developing language-learning with cross school collaboration. Not only did it exercise our translation skills, but we also learnt a lot about German history and culture. It was refreshing to work with new people and it was an overall great experience. We are excited to see what lies in the future with our school collaborations and language celebrations.”

The opportunity of a collaboration with NHEHS was much appreciated by Harrow students, who enjoyed the possibility of translating poems they had never studied before. They also liked the challenge of confronting themselves with pupils from another school. Here are the comments that a couple of them have written after the last meeting.

“Sessions were productive and the content was interesting to learn about.”  

“I enjoyed learning about the challenges that came with translating, being able to add your own stylistic points.”

Furthermore, Harrow teachers wanted to thank the colleagues of NHEHS who took the lead in the language groups and inspired the students so brilliantly. 

 Ms Li received the following email from a Harrow student:

“I thought this workshop was great in multiple ways. I got to learn Chinese in a unique way and it really triggered my brain to think about interesting things I have never done before. I learned a lot about the difficulties of translating different extracts into Chinese. It was a good experience.”

 As Mr Guarniero said, “We hope that such a positive experience can be soon repeated.. but face-to-face next time, hopefully!”