On the morning of the 17th March, a group of GCSE and IB Russian students travelled to the City of London School to take part in the first ever Russian creative translation workshop run by the Queen’s College Translation Exchange (Oxford University) that awards the Anthea Bell Prize.

The idea of the workshop was that students work together to translate a literary text from a language and produce a creative response and translation in their own style. In our case, we were exploring Russia's influence on other languages, particularly Ukrainian. The session was led by Nathan Jeffers, a writer and translator of Russian into English.

We were given a text in Surzhyk, which is a mix of Russian and Ukrainian - Surzhyk ironically being a type of flour made of two grains (wheat and rye) - and a glossary to help. In the first hour, students from Bexley Grammar School, Westminster School and City of London School were told to translate it as best they could literally to get the meaning across. The text itself was interesting; it was about a person remembering his childhood. However, a quirk of the text was that there was no punctuation, and some cyrillic letters like ‘и’ were replaced with latin ‘i’s, and it was strange and chaotic all round, but it was understandable.

In the second part of the session, the students were told to retranslate it, but this time creatively and add their own spin to it. We had a 10-minute brainstorming session where we all gave ideas on what we could do; I chose to do a spin on English intermixed with Polish poetry, to give it a sense of chaos, similar to the original text but with my own theme. One person wrote the translation as an interview of the character that remembered his childhood, while another BGS student wrote it in an American Texan Accent.

All in all, it is an experience that I think more people should have as it was incredibly fun and entertaining, hearing people's responses to the chaotic text that was ‘ChildHood’.

Aries Maksym, Year 12