Lancaster was abuzz with the pleasure of hosting the Northern Regional Final for the Foreign Language Translation Bee on June 6th.

Organised by Routes into Languages East, which promotes the take-up of languages through cooperation between universities, schools and colleges in England, the competition aimed at Years 8 and 9 students is now in its 9th year. It builds on the work students did in Year 7 with the Routes into Languages National Spelling Bee practising and improving their foreign language skills in French, German or Spanish. The toolkit of sentences used by the competition has been updated in line with the new KS3 curriculum, with its emphasis on translation and grammatical manipulations to help prepare students for a range of skills vital to starting a GCSE language course: vocabulary, pronunciation, memory, verb conjugation, tenses and sentence formation.

The event included 60 students from 15 different schools across the North of England who were invited to participate in the regional final hosted by the Department of Languages and Cultures at Lancaster University. The regional finalists had distinguished themselves from a much larger initial pool of 2247 participants and had done incredibly well to reach this stage of the competition. These successful young linguists and their large number of accompanying teachers and supporters were welcomed to the regional final by Head of Department Dr Derek Hird along with the Routes into Languages East Project Manager Sarah Schechter. Prior to the competition, participants and their supporters were also able to experience a bit of campus life by taking part in Lancaster University campus tours.

The competition itself was incredibly strong and included many exciting moments, including a few tie breaks and even a dead heat. The participants had one minute to translate as many sentences as possible into their target language, demonstrating accuracy as well as astonishing speed in doing so. Their on-the-spot translations were chosen from a toolkit that included randomly selected sentences from the present, past and future tenses in their target language of French, German or Spanish. Ultimately, only the top 5 in each language got to go through to the national final in Cambridge later this month. Of these 5, the regional winners in each target language were ranked within the final later in the day.

As part of our hosting duties, DeLC also had the pleasure of providing a multilingual team of judges and callers for the competition, which included both students and staff. Everyone involved was extremely impressed by the level of skills the young linguists displayed as well as their infectious enthusiasm for language learning.

Congratulations to all who took part and good luck to those participating in the national final!