Eight minutes left: literal translation versus the inference question
A candidate in a mock examination has eight minutes left. Section E carries 6 marks: a four-sentence passage to translate into Malayalam (4 marks) and one inference question (2 marks) on the same passage. The passage describes a grandmother who "kept her door unlatched" and ends, "Nobody ever asked her why." One sentence refers to "the harvest supper", an event with no exact Malayalam equivalent, and the candidate has written it in English inside the Malayalam sentence. Her drafted translation renders "kept her door unlatched" as a passive construction, which reads awkwardly, and she has not yet attempted the inference question. She asks whether to polish the translation or attempt the inference question, and what to do with the untranslatable noun.
1. Allocate the eight minutes and justify the allocation by marks rather than by preference.
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Marks per minute. Six marks in eight minutes is about 1.3 minutes per mark: roughly four minutes for the translation and two and a half for the inference, leaving ninety seconds to check.
Where the marginal marks are:
- Polishing sentence one of the translation yields nothing extra; accuracy marks are already earned once the sense is right, and further polish is invisible to the marker.
- The inference question is worth 2 marks and is currently worth zero. Two marks is a third of the section, larger than any refinement available in the translation.
Order of work: attempt the inference question first, briefly (about three minutes), because it is a single short answer with a fixed shape: a claim about the grandmother, plus the textual detail that supports it. Then return to the translation and correct only the two visible faults - the passive construction and the English noun - which takes about a minute each. Do not rewrite sentences that already read correctly.
Principle to teach: in the final minutes, buy unattempted marks before improving attempted ones.
2. Decide how to handle "the harvest supper" and "kept her door unlatched" in the translation.
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The untranslatable noun. Three viable strategies:
- Transcribe with a short in-line gloss - keep the term and add a two- or three-word explanation in Malayalam at first mention. Cost: nothing in a 4-mark item; the gloss shows the translator noticed the gap.
- Generalise to a functional equivalent - a phrase meaning "the feast after the harvest". Safe, slightly flattens local colour, but keeps the sentence readable.
- Omit the phrase. Never: omission loses meaning and usually an accuracy mark.
Recommendation: transcribe with a gloss on first mention, then use the transcription. Leaving the English word bare, as the candidate has done, reads as an unfinished sentence and is the one option a marker can penalise.
The passive construction. English passive ("the door was kept unlatched") is grammatical in Malayalam only in restricted contexts; the natural move is to recast with the grandmother as subject and an active or experiencer verb, so the sentence says what she did or chose rather than what was done to the door. That single recast also strengthens the characterisation the inference question is about - the two parts of Section E are reading the same detail from different angles.
3. Show what a full-mark inference answer to "Nobody ever asked her why" looks like, and why restating the line scores zero.
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Why restatement fails. The question asks for an inference, so an answer that repeats the sentence supplies no new proposition; the marker has nothing to credit. Candidates often restate because it feels safe, and it is the commonest way to lose an easy 2 marks.
Shape of a full-mark answer: a claim + the detail that licenses it + a one-line consequence.
Model (English gloss of the intended Malayalam): "The line implies that the family took the grandmother's openness for granted - she left the door unlatched so that anyone could come in, and the household never thought it worth asking what she was waiting for. The silence is therefore a comment on the others, not on her: they benefit from her readiness without noticing it."
Why it scores: it converts a bare statement into a proposition about the family, anchors it in the given detail (the unlatched door), and draws a conclusion about the story's attitude. Both marks are earned by the claim and its support; length is irrelevant. The translation of the same detail and this inference answer should be consistent - the recast active sentence and the reading of her choice must not contradict each other.