St Anne's Primary School

St Anne’s Primary School in London played host to Translation Nation with the help of translator, editor and teacher Sarah Griffin-Mason.

Children from Years 5 and 6 took part in the project and were lucky enough to be joined by eleven parents on the second day to share stories in their home languages, including Amharic, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish. The children did a fantastic job of interpreting the stories for the rest of the class, in fact many of the bilingual children said they often act as translators for family members and the group discussed what an important and useful skill this could be.

As the Translation Nation hubsters started working on their translations they began to notice the similarities and differences between their languages. Sarah thought the children showed a great instinct for what makes a good story and were able to add humour, rhyme, actions and even song to their translations before presenting them to an assembly of parents, teachers and students.

The children were very happy to read out loud in their languages in front of the audience and the staff commented on how much their confidence had improved. The audience voted the Spanish story, The Rainbow and the Chameleon, as their favourite translation.

At the end of the project, the children at St Anne’s were very proud of their achievements, and hopeful that Translation Nation would return to their school again soon. In the meantime, the teachers plan to organise more world literature and multicultural events in the future.

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