Henley Student Wins Twice at The University of Sheffield’s Translation Competition

Aurora Tuckwell, a talented linguist who is studying Spanish, French and German at college, has recently won a translation competition organised by the University of Sheffield. She won both in the French and Spanish categories, winning a total of £50 of vouchers as well as the opportunity to attend a translation workshop at the University. Well done!  

Aurora’s entry for French: 

Often during the campaign I found you stupid. I listened to you, and thought: how silly. Thinking this was not right of me. Not very polite and quite conceited. But can we ever restrain a thought? Deprecating or not, a thought runs through me like a draft. I am as innocent of it as you are of the words that just pass through your mouth. You are not the author. You are spoken, you are thought. Through you speaks and thinks a condition, a social position, a situation, this story should be told.

They should work on the genealogy of your stupidity.

[…]

I could have made sure your babbling in the spring of 2017 did not reach me. I could have taken my avoidance techniques of this good-for-nothing president further, unprecedented as your editorialists have intensely claimed. I was free to ignore the televised debates; to shut off the channels that allowed the monotonous polyphony to penetrate my apartment; to cut the cables, to stop the sound.

[…]

And yet, we do not live in love and books. Alas, between reading and sleeping, society sometimes pulled me out and I came across you, mainly because you are everywhere in Paris, and that’s what you were talking about, it’s that noise that you wanted to increase. The campaign you had in your mouth, like attacks two years ago […]

Aurora’s entry for Spanish:

Language is a tree, and its fruit, words; this was said in similar terms at the end of the Middle Ages, during that chivalrous time in history between real and invented that is Victorian. Centuries later, we still cannot understand the intellectual depth of the roots of that tree and the infinite possibilities of the fruit it offers us. We become aware of its magnitude when we understand that language is the best tool that humans have been able to create and fortify; we appreciate its grandeur when we understand that storytelling alone can make us revive the anger of Achilles and that the perfect seduction is sustained in nothing but words.

When the development of oral and written expression is a commitment for all teachers, who teach it. When we accept that languages that do not change will be the next to fade out; when we respect that which has been passed-down in the same way we value that being newly created. When we realise that anyone who can deceive with words is capable of making false accounts and cheating laws. When we stop identifying linguistic care with being politically conservative and linguistic creativity with being politically progressive. When we understand that unravelling gender expressions is a personal choice that does not ruin language and that not altering it is also a personal choice that does not have to be an attack on feminism. When we understand that languages are the homelands they cover; when language is neither a cage nor a battering ram.

Then, our linguistic culture will be consistent with the immense capacities of our language. Then, and only then, will we be speakers to the trues heights of this giant tree that we ourselves have created.