how to translate a GCSE Spanish sentence without dropping marks

In a writing task you can steer round anything you are unsure of. Do not know the word for "cinema"? Talk about the beach instead. Shaky on the imperfect? Write it all in the present.

Translation removes that. You are given the sentence and you have to produce that sentence, so it is the one question that finds out exactly what you know. Which also makes it the most predictable question on the paper — the marks go missing in the same three places every year.

into English: say it in English

Translating into English feels like the easy direction, and marks still go astray, almost always for one of two reasons.

A Spanish word left in. If you genuinely do not know it, put down the most sensible English word the sentence will allow and move on. A wrong guess costs what a blank costs, and it sometimes lands.

A tense quietly changed. Iba is "was going" or "used to go", and writing "went" for it drops the mark even though the sentence still reads fine. Check every verb against the Spanish before you finish.

Then read your English back on its own. If it is not a sentence an English person would say, it is not finished. Me duele la cabeza is "I have a headache", not "the head hurts me".

into Spanish: where the marks actually go

This is the direction that is marked hardest, because there is a right answer and you either produced it or you did not. Three things account for most of what is lost.

the tense

Read the English verb properly before you write anything.

• "I play" — juego
• "I played" — jugué
• "I used to play" / "I was playing" — jugaba
• "I have played" — he jugado
• "I am going to play" — voy a jugar
• "I will play" — jugaré
• "I would play" — jugaría

English hides its tenses in little words — have, was, used to, would — and they are easy to skim past when you are busy hunting for the vocabulary. Underline the verb in the English first.

the agreement

Every adjective has to match its noun for gender and number, and Spanish puts most of them after the noun.

Una casa blanca. Unos coches rojos. Las chicas españolas.

Nationalities and colours are the ones that turn up, and they are the ones that get written in the masculine singular out of habit.

the words that are not there in English

Spanish needs several things English does without, and leaving them out is a lost mark every time.

• The article in front of a general noun. "I like chocolate" is me gusta el chocolate.
• The personal a before a person. "I see my brother" is veo a mi hermano.
• Hay for "there is" and "there are". One word covers both: hay un problema, hay muchos problemas.
• De for possession. Spanish has no apostrophe-s. "My sister's house" is la casa de mi hermana.

And one that goes the other way: Spanish leaves out subject pronouns, because the ending already says who it is. Hablo español, not yo hablo español. It is not wrong to include it, but a translation stuffed with yo and nosotros reads as English wearing a disguise.

the sentences that are traps

Anything with "like". Gustar works backwards — the thing being liked is the subject, so the verb agrees with it, not with you. Me gusta el fútbol but me gustan las películas. The same applies to encantar, interesar and doler.

Anything with "for" and a length of time. "I have been learning Spanish for three years" is not a past tense in Spanish. It is the present: aprendo español desde hace tres años. You still are learning it, and Spanish says so.

Negatives. The no goes in front of the verb: no como carne. And a double negative is correct Spanish, not a mistake — no como nunca is perfectly normal, where English would refuse.

the four-point check

Do this before you move on. It takes twenty seconds and it catches nearly everything.

1. Verbs — right tense, right person, on every single one.
2. Adjectives — gender and number, matched to the noun each belongs to.
3. Nothing dropped — every negative, every plural, every little word like "always", "never", "very", "also". These are the pieces of meaning that vanish when you are concentrating on the hard vocabulary.
4. Read it back as Spanish — not as a decoded version of the English. Word order, articles, no stray pronouns.

Almost every lost translation mark is a tense, an agreement, or something left out. Checking for those three is worth more than knowing three more words.

how to practise it

Not by reading Spanish. Reading it and understanding it is the other skill, and it is the one that is already comfortable.

Take short English sentences, write the Spanish, then check word by word against a correct version — not "did I get the gist", but is every ending right. It is tedious for about four sentences and then it starts finding the same three mistakes over and over, which is exactly the point: they are your three, and now you know what they are.

langrevise sets your board's translation question and only that one: 932 short two-mark sentences on AQA, 50 ten-mark paragraphs on Edexcel. Either way they are built from your own board's vocabulary list, the one your exams are set on, and marked instantly so you find out while the sentence is still in your head. If tenses are the thing costing you, start here.