Latin Paper 1 translation

[KPK]

Hi,

 

Is IB Latin (SL/HL) paper 1 translation similar to AP Latin translation?

 

AP Latin translation exam paper  ask student to  "Translate the passage above as literally as possible".

What is the expectation of IB Latin paper 1 tanslation?  Literally word by word or overall meaning of the setence?

 

It is very difficult to find any meaningful information about Latin exam expectations.

 

Thank you.

Edited March 8, 2015 by Kamal Pradeep

[flinquinnster]

I am far from a Latin expert, but I did do SL Latin in 2013. If you've looked at a past paper, you'll see that they often (though not always) have the instructions:

"Translate into English the section of the passage indicated between the asterisks. A translation of the rest of the passage appears on the facing page."

 

So, this isn't really useful in terms of providing guidance on the type of translation you should give. However, the syllabus/guide does give a bit more guidance:

 

A successful translation is likely to demonstrate the following.

• It makes sense in English, French or Spanish
• Suitable punctuation, phrasing, syntax and grammar are used
• It incorporates standard word order and grammar usage
• An attempt is made to capture the style and tone of the author

This is still quite vague, but basically you should be aiming to translate as closely as possible to the text, but changing things such that it sounds smooth/makes sense in English. The way I interpreted it was that you should go as close as possible to a word-for-word translation, but making small changes to word order/simplifying certain constructions such that it makes sense in English. 

 

The reason why I go for more of a literal approach: I'm not sure if they actually give you this information, but P1 is marked out of 135 (at least when I did it in 2013). They assign either 2 or 3 marks to each word. Therefore, you are getting marks based on each word, not on overall meaning - so you benefit the most by sticking as closely as possible to a word-by-word translation. Unless they've changed their approach (which, frankly, is entirely possible) the marking is generally not done holistically - so you don't want to stray too far from the literal translation. You want to make sure that all the key grammatical elements of the word (e.g. number, gender, tense etc.) are clear and haven't been warped too much - apart from when it needs to to make sense in English.

 

Hope that helped! It is possible that they have changed their marking approach since I did my exams, but hopefully not by too much.

[KPK]

Thank you very much.

This is really good information.