Stockwell Primary School

translator: sam holmes

Stockwell Primary School welcomed French teacher Sam Holmes to lead its Translation Nation project with a group of students from Year 5. Sam introduced the children to the concept of translation and international storytelling by reading a Portuguese story from Brazil, and playing a very popular game of multilingual Simon Says.

On the second day, the children shared stories they had brought in from home and proudly presented their home language story books in several languages, including Portuguese, Turkish and Arabic. The English speaking students provided valuable support to their hub teammates by helping them to produce descriptive and clearly articulated written versions of the stories in English. As an extra challenge, Sam asked the children to experiment with their stories by re-writing them as a diary entry, a newspaper article or a horror story. This encouraged the children to consider the numerous ways you can tell the same story, using register and language to change the style and tone.

To make the performance of their final translations really enjoyable, the children spent time making props and rehearsing their presentations during the third session. The audience response was very positive, and they particularly enjoyed all the funny scenes the children had included in their translations.

Translation Nation inspired the Stockwell students to take pride in their languages and cultures, as Sam, the project leader, commented, ‘The pupils were really excited by their role as interpreters and translators and enjoyed being experts in their languages’.

Audio files