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Just a short blog post today to celebrate the fact I’ve passed my MA in Translation Studies. Not only have I passed, but I have been awarded a Distinction – hurray! It feels like it’s been a long time since I began the course, way back in September 2015 and I don’t officially graduate until January 2020, but it feels amazing to have finished and to know that I can now move on to the next stage of my career in translation.

A while back I was invited to participate in an event organised through Inspiring the Future. Today was the day and so, armed with Harry Potter, Pokemon and Disney’s Let it go, I headed to a junior school in the inner city of Derby.

Going in, I knew that this particular school had a high volume of children with Asian and Eastern European backgrounds. What I recognise from this is the language skill base these children have to offer. I’ve often heard people say that “X child doesn’t speak English at home.” I’d like to challenge that perception and ask “well what do they speak?”

I spent my time circulating around three Year 5 classes (9/10 year olds) and the linguistic spread was astounding. Asking what languages the children spoke, we discovered Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Romanian, Polish, Greek, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Kurdish, Latvian, Swedish, Italian – what a mix!

We talked about what jobs we could do with language skills, discussing languages in a business setting. We looked at book translation, dubbing and subtitling – they particularly enjoyed Let it go in 25 languages. We also talked about interpreting in schools and hospitals, settings where some of the children already have experience of meeting interpreters, or indeed sometimes acting as interpreters themselves. A Google search had revealed that in Derby, the “in demand” languages were many that were sitting on the floor in front of me.

I hope that if nothing else, the children from today’s sessions leave knowing that their language skills are an asset to them. For the rest of the world, multilingual is normal. Here in the UK, language take-up in schools is dropping (another article about this was published just today). These children are our future linguists and should be cherished and encouraged. It’s not “just” a language they speak at home.

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This is an English-language mid-grade novel that introduces year 7 pupil Jaz to a new classmate, Nadima, who has recently arrived with her family from Syria.

At first Nadima doesn’t speak any English and Jaz wonders how they are going to communicate. Enter the mobile phone and emojis. By using emojis of various items and a thumbs up or thumbs down, Nadima and Jaz are able to communicate. With a positive “like” to chocolate, Jaz shares her chocolate with Nadima and so the friendship is forged.

Over the course of the story, Jaz makes several attempts to “help” her new friend, most of which blow up in her face. Lester cleverly weaves into her story acts that we might be tempted to do to “help”, for example, raising money for a particular family because they are “poor”. She explains through her narrative that Nadima’s family don’t want charity, they are proud people who want a chance to be respected in their new home.

I thought this was a really insightful story to help youngsters understand how they can help their new peers and to explain how some of the things we might want to do are actually inappropriate.

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