Assessing a Translation Against the Latin for Examination Marking
A student produces a translation of a prescribed passage and asks a peer to mark it using examination criteria. The peer gives full marks for fluency but ignores two errors: imperavit rendered as 'he ordered' when the Latin is imperavit ut... with a subjunctive (correct), and non dubito quin rendered as 'I do not doubt that' (acceptable) versus a literal 'I do not doubt whether' (wrong). The peer also overlooks a missed ablative absolute. The student must learn to self-mark against the Latin, not against how natural the English sounds.
1. Explain how a candidate should self-mark a translation against examination criteria, using the three issues in the setup.
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Self-marking must proceed clause by clause against the Latin, not sentence by sentence for English fluency. First, imperavit ut... + subjunctive is a command construction; 'he ordered that...' is correct and the subjunctive is expected, so this is not an error. Second, non dubito quin takes a subjunctive and means 'I do not doubt that...', so 'I do not doubt that' is correct; 'I do not doubt whether' is wrong because quin after a negative verb of doubting asserts the content, not a question. Third, the missed ablative absolute is a genuine error: the candidate must identify the participle + noun in the ablative functioning as a subordinate clause and render it ('with X having been done' / 'when X had been done'). The exam awards marks for accuracy of constructions, so the student should list each construction, check the rendering, and only then assess fluency. The peer's full marks were unjustified because two constructions were not checked.
2. The student wants a checklist for the final 5 minutes of an exam. Design a short checklist and justify each item by reference to common loss of marks.
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A practical checklist: (1) Check every subjunctive - identify indirect questions, purpose, result, and cum clauses; candidates commonly render subjunctives as indicatives and lose construction marks. (2) Check every participle - ablative absolutes, passive periphrastic, and deponent forms are frequent sources of error. (3) Check ut/ne, quin, and dum - these signal specific constructions that must be rendered correctly. (4) Check word order for emphasis - Latin word order carries emphasis, and a translation that ignores it may miss nuance marks. (5) Re-read the English for sense - if the English is incoherent, a construction has probably been misread. Each item targets a construction the exam routinely tests. The student should justify the checklist by noting that fluency alone does not earn construction marks; the exam rewards demonstrable recognition of Latin syntax. Five minutes is enough to scan for these five markers if the student has practised the routine.