Mr Joel Gerardo – MFL Teacher

Our students recently took part in the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators, a national competition run by The Queen’s College at Oxford University. Over 25,000 students entered nationwide this year, making the competition incredibly fierce and our school’s results a brilliant achievement.

Before reaching the national stage, teachers selected a handful of top entries from across the school to put forward to Oxford. While the competition was too tight for all of them to place, every single student chosen to represent our school did an incredible job tackling these advanced linguistic challenges.

North West Regional Winners (French Level 2): A huge congratulations to our L4 team, Freddie C and Archie I, who have been crowned the official Area Winners for the North West. They tackled Olympe de Gouges’ historical 1791 text, ‘Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne’, and reimagined it with a modern street/slang twist. The Oxford judges were highly impressed by how they successfully bridged 18th-century revolutionary rhetoric with 2026 urban French. Taking home the regional title is a fantastic result—Chapeau!

Special Commendations: The linguistic success continued across the department, with two more of our students receiving Special Commendations from the judges for navigating complex idiom and syntax:

German (Level 2): Well done to Evana M (L4) for earning a commendation for their translation of an extract from ‘Die Burg’, a young adult book by Gina Mayer. They did a fantastic job untangling intricate German sentence structures and compound words—Ausgezeichnet!

Spanish (Level 2): Well done to Kayla P (U3) for securing a commendation for their translation of ‘El fabuloso y espeluznante mundo de los sueños y las pesadillas’, a non-fiction book about dreaming by Eva Manzano. They captured the exact nuance of the original text beautifully—¡Enhorabuena!

Mrs J. Di Paola (German teacher), Mrs I. Morillo (Spanish teacher), Mr J. Gerardo (French teacher)