Unseen Translation Practice: Historical Passages

The biggest question on the paper

Section B ends with a translation worth **50 marks** - more than everything else on Component 01 put together. You are given 90 or more words of Latin you have never seen, and you write it in English. It draws on the **full** Defined Vocabulary List and the full accidence and syntax, not the restricted lists used for the composition option. There is no dictionary. There does not need to be: any word outside the list is **glossed on the paper for you**, and the passage comes with a short line of context telling you what is going on.

Read the whole thing first

The strongest habit in unseen translation costs a minute and saves ten: **read the entire passage before you write anything**, and read the context line above it. You are not trying to translate on that first pass. You are working out what kind of story it is, who is in it, and roughly what happens, so that every decision afterwards has something to be consistent with. A student who starts at word one and grinds forward has no idea, at word forty, whether the sentence they are building makes sense in the passage. A student who has read it already does.

What comes first?

You turn to the translation. What is the best use of the first two minutes?

• Read the context line and then the whole passage through, without translating, to find out what happens
• Translate the first sentence carefully and perfectly before moving on
• Write out every word you recognise in a list
• Memorise the glossed words before starting

Four moves per sentence

Once you are translating, take each sentence the same way round every time.

Take a sentence apart

Put the moves in the order that gets a sentence right.

• Read the whole sentence through once
• Find the main verb, and note its person, number and tense
• Find the subject, remembering it may be carried by the verb ending alone
• Find the object and any phrases hanging off the verb
• Write it out in natural English, then read that back to check it makes sense

Which word is the main verb?

A sentence from the practice passage below. Tap the ONE word that is the main verb.

• dominus
• cibum
• et
• vinum
• petivit
• .

The words you are given

Halfway through the passage you meet a word you have never seen. What should you do?

• Check the glosses printed with the passage first: any word outside the Defined Vocabulary List is given to you there
• Guess from the root and move on quickly
• Leave a gap and come back at the end
• Use the dictionary provided

Latin order is not English order

The endings carry the meaning in Latin, so the words can sit in an order English would never use. You are marked on the English.

Match each Latin sentence to its English

A short passage, worked through

**Context: a master and his slaves at a country house.** This practice passage is about forty words, shorter than the exam's ninety, but the method is the same. *dominus in villa habitabat. servi in agris laborabant. dominus, qui saevus erat, servos vocavit. servi statim venerunt. dominus cibum et vinum petivit. servi cibum portaverunt, sed vinum non invenerunt. dominus iratus erat.* "The master was living in the country house. The slaves were working in the fields. The master, who was savage, called the slaves. The slaves came at once. The master asked for food and wine. The slaves brought the food, but they did not find the wine. The master was angry." Notice the tenses: *habitabat* and *laborabant* are imperfect, so "was living" and "were working", while *vocavit* and *venerunt* are perfect, so "called" and "came". Getting that distinction right across a passage is worth a great many of the fifty marks.

Complete the English

For *servi in agris laborabant*, the tense is _____, so the English is "the slaves _____ in the fields". For *servi statim venerunt*, the tense is _____, so the English is "the slaves came _____". A translation that gives both of those as "worked" and "come" has lost the _____.

Write it as English

Turn *servi cibum portaverunt, sed vinum non invenerunt* into natural English.

What costs you most?

Select the TWO things that lose the most marks on this question.

• Leaving gaps where a word or phrase was not understood
• Getting tenses wrong throughout, so a past narrative reads as present
• Writing the English in a different word order from the Latin
• Using the glosses printed with the passage

Fifty marks, and the clock

You are part-way through the translation with time running short. Work through the decisions.

• You reach a word you cannot work out and it is not in the glosses. What do you do?
• Your English for one sentence reads oddly, though every word is accounted for. What is most likely wrong?
• Five minutes left and two sentences to go. What is the best use of them?

Your turn: translate and explain

Translate the practice passage from step 10 into English in your own words, then explain two of your decisions.

• Give your full English translation of the passage
• Point to one verb where the tense changed the English, and say how
• Point to one place where you changed the word order from the Latin, and say why
• Say what you would do with a word that was neither in your list nor glossed