Outreach

Shadow Heroes is an education initative that supports young people in embracing all sides of their linguistic and cultural heritages. They run translation workshops that explore issues of representation, self-expression, colonial history and the power of language. 

Find out more about their work, in this article, written by Shadow Heroes Co-founder and Director Gitanjali Patel, and Communications Manager Jessie Spivey.

The Queen’s College Translation Exchange (QTE) was founded by Charlotte Ryland in 2018. It is based at Oxford University but open to everyone, with a particular focus on young people. Their mission is to enrich and ultimately transform the teaching and learning of languages across the UK through creative, intercultural experiences for people of all ages. Professional translators and university language students are central to all their programmes.

QTE’s flagship programmes are the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators and the Creative Translation Ambassadors scheme. Launched in 2020, to date the Anthea Bell Prize has engaged over 500 schools and 10,000 young people in creative translation activities. QTE trains students from universities across the UK to design and deliver translation workshops in schools, following the ‘Translators in Schools’ model developed by the Stephen Spender Trust.

QTE also runs virtual book clubs and translation workshops, which are open to all.

Project World Kid Lit is a campaign that celebrates children's books in translation, and is run by a group of volunteers. The World Kid Lit website contains a wealth of useful resources for those interested in the topic, including recommendations for books that can be used in schools. 

World Kid Lit Month, which takes place in September, is a month to celebrate world literature for kids and teens, especially fiction and non-fiction translated to English from other languages.

Creative Translation for All

The Stephen Spender Trust has been running creative, multilingual translation workshops in schools since 2010, with a particular focus on ‘heritage’ and ‘community’ languages and those taught in schools. Their first programme, Translation Nation, brought translators together with hundreds of primary school children in East London to share, translate and perform oral tales gathered from parents, grandparents and neighbours. Since then, SST has trained over 150 translators and teachers, run workshops for over 8,000 young people, and worked with 130 schools across 35 languages through their Translators in Schools, Big Translate and Creative Translation in the Classroom initiatives.

The annual Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation is a major prize for as-yet-unpublished translations. Anybody can enter, and entries in their youth categories have doubled every year since 2018.

SST trains translators to design and deliver workshops and virtual resources, and creates opportunities for them to work in schools and community groups through partnerships with arts, educational and cultural organisations. Their Multilingual Creators programme, launched in 2021, partners with the National Centre for Writing, New Writing North and Comma Press to train translators to run workshops in and around Newcastle, Greater Manchester and Norwich.

SST’s vision is of a cohesive, outward-looking society. They believe that the key to that cultural shift lies in a multilingual education for all, with its life-changing power to raise aspiration, inspire empathy and build bridges between communities.

The charity is not endowed and has no core funding, so relies on grants from trust and foundations and on donations from individuals. All support, including the £9 entry fee for the Stephen Spender Prize, goes directly to SST’s work with young people.

Business Language Champions aims to promote modern foreign languages and cultural cohesion by demonstrating to young students the importance of language skills in the workplace. By bringing schools and international business people together they inspire more young students to continue with their language learning through to further education and then beyond into language-related careers.

Inspiring the Future connects schools and colleges with appropriate volunteers from a range of sectors and professions that match their particular requirements. Activities can take place in school to connect with volunteers from the local community, or virtually.