Case Four / classical education
Translation loss is old. It is in the texts. It is also in the way we teach them.
Every translation loses something. The question is whether we admit it. In classics, we usually don't. Students read Fagles and think they are reading Homer. They read Rieu and think they are reading Virgil. The translation becomes the text. The interpretation vanishes.
The Latin word ministeria means service, duty, attendance. The work of someone present and unseen. That is also what interpreters do. They are in the room, then absent from the record. Classics has been teaching that disappearance for a long time.
An A-Level unseen asks a student to move meaning across languages. Then the mark scheme treats that movement like a fixed transfer. There is a right answer. The choices disappear. Students leave school having studied classical texts without being taught what a translation is.
The fix sits in the curriculum. OCR and other exam boards should teach translation as interpretation, then examine it that way. Students should know whose reading they are reading.
The argument starts with one classroom word: ministeria. The larger problem is the habit of treating a translated word as the word itself.
Case Four / downloadable briefing
The formal case for curriculum reform: what OCR should change, and why.