By Jaan W and Juliette B, Year 9

Last week our German class took part in a fun and engaging German translation workshop where we were able to learn about our translation expert’s love for her languages, which inspired us to do our own translations.

We especially enjoyed how she shared her love for German with us, and how she could converse and teach us new phrases from her own experience in Germany. Our expert was also kind and open-minded which was helpful in learning new skills when translating our poem “One Day”.

During the translation workshop, we learnt how to change certain phrases and tweak different words to ensure the poem made sense in both languages while maintaining its meaning. For example, a line of our poem in German read, “Ich bin so furchtbar faul” which literally translates to, “I am so terribly lazy,” however in our rendition we altered the phrase to “My laziness consumes me”. This allowed us to preserve the significance and meaning of the poem while adding different English literary devices such as metaphors.

Another interesting aspect of translation that we discovered was the change in phrases between two different languages, and how the differences in word order could affect the entire flow of the poem. In our opinions translating certain descriptive phrases and similes was the most enjoyable because we had to replace them so that they would convey the same idea in English: which was seen multiple times throughout the text. Our poem was also based on the effect of technology on humans and the writer’s emotions. This is a very modern and prevalent topic which students our age could relate to, which made it less challenging to understand and made our translations personal to each of us. As we listened to everyone’s interpretation of the poem, we realised that although we were all given the same starting point, our ending translations were completely different. It was extremely interesting to see how one piece of text could be transformed into many different versions while remaining true to the original.

By the end of the workshop, we all gained a new understanding of poetry in different languages, a plethora of new vocabulary and an amazing experience.

Our French and Spanish (pictured right) Year 9 students also enjoyed their own translation workshops during the same week.