For the fourth year in a row, Ffynone’ s language students took part in the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators, organised by the Queen’s College Translation Exchange, Queen’s College, Oxford University.
The competition
The competition runs across 4 levels in 7 languages, covering all year groups at secondary schools from age 11 to 18. The students have to translate poetry or a piece of fiction, unaided, from the foreign languages (French, German, Italian, Spanish, Mandarin, and more recently from Welsh and Russian) into English.
Challenges and Benefits
Beyond preserving the original meaning, the exercise challenges the translator’s understanding of the text in the foreign language, as well as their ability to express it effectively in English. Although a glossary is provided for each text, translating it will stretch your English language skills in new and challenging ways, as well as increase your vocabulary further. Winning entries need to strike a balance between creativity and accuracy.
Ffynone’ s involvement in the competition
The Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators keeps growing in popularity year after year. Over 22,000 students participated in the competition in 2025 across the UK, and the judges had to select area winners and commendations among almost 5,000 entries.
We are delighted to mention that Ffynone’ s language department has had winners and commendees in both French and German every single year for the past four years, when we first entered the competition.
This year, once again, many of our young linguists attempted the translations from both German and French, with one entry from Mandarin and one from Spanish. A few also submitted 2 translations from two different levels (Levels 2 and 3) in the same language. It is clear that for a small school such as Ffynone, our students’ interest in both French and German remains high and their enthusiasm does not seem to falter.
Success
We are thrilled to announce that this year again, our pupils have put the name of Ffynone House School on the map, as we have winners for Wales in German at Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3, and a commendation in French at Level 2. Here are the results of this year’s competition:
We are very proud to highlight that two of our students are past winners. Lilia was Wales winner for German Level 2 in 2023, and Fritz-Harry was Wales winner for French Level 2 in 2024. With such talented linguists, the future of languages at Ffynone is rosy!
Here are the winners and commendees for the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators 2025.
