Modern Languages Personal Statementfor Oxford & Cambridge

What draws me to Modern Languages is the point at which language stops being only a system and becomes a question of voice, culture and interpretation. Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's withdrawal from translating Amanda Gorman into Dutch in February 2021 made me realise that translation is argued over not only in terms of accuracy but of representation. Until then I had treated translation mainly as a matter of finding the nearest equivalent and keeping the grammar intact. The debate pushed me to think harder about what faithfulness really means when a text carries social meaning as well as literal meaning. That question has stayed with me, and it is why I want to study languages through literature as well as through language itself.

My studies have given that interest a clearer shape. In French lessons, when we studied extracts from Camus' L'Étranger, I was struck by the fact that the novel circulates in English as both The Stranger and The Outsider, and that even the opening line can change a reader's judgement of Meursault. I began to see that translation is not something added after interpretation; it is one way interpretation happens. Since then, in both French and Spanish, I have paid more attention to syntax, rhythm and register, and to what a text expects its reader to understand without explanation. For my EPQ I compared the opening chapter of L'Étranger with three English translations and asked how far a translator can remain invisible. I used close textual analysis, tracking repeated words, sentence order and the handling of "maman" across versions. At first I expected the project to end with a decision about which translation was most accurate. Instead, it forced me to define what accuracy meant. A version that stays close to French syntax can sound awkward or falsely formal in English, while a version that reads fluently can close down possibilities that the French leaves open. The hardest part was avoiding judgements that one passage simply sounded "better". To avoid that, I built criteria around register, rhythm and narrative distance, then tested each extract against them. The project made me a careful reader because it showed me that translators do not just carry meaning across: they guide the angle from which that meaning is first seen. Studying Spanish has also made me more attentive to the force of grammar inside literature. Reading Lorca in Spanish, I noticed how forms of address, repetition and silence create authority and tension, and how quickly those effects can weaken in a more neutral English register. I had tended to treat grammar as scaffolding behind literature; I now see it as part of literature's force.

Outside formal study, my reading has helped me refine the questions I want to pursue at university. David Bellos' Is That a Fish in Your Ear? moved me beyond the idea that there is a single perfect equivalent waiting to be found. What I found most useful was his insistence that translation has to be judged by what it does in the receiving language, not just by word-for-word closeness. George Steiner's After Babel pushed that further. I had assumed that understanding came first and translation followed; Steiner made that sequence feel too neat. Jhumpa Lahiri's In Other Words mattered to me because it treats another language not as an accessory but as a way of thinking differently. I was especially interested in the possibility that a new language can alter what feels sayable. Volunteering at a weekly conversation club for adult ESOL learners has made these questions feel practical. What stands out is how often a hesitation is social before it is grammatical. People are often deciding not just what a phrase means, but how direct, polite, formal or risky it will sound. That has made me more alert to the fact that language is never only a code, and it has strengthened my wish to study how meaning changes between speakers, readers and cultures.