The Lost Translation Challenge
You are a teenage language detective competing in an international translation competition. Your choices determine whether you solve the mystery of the missing sentence transformations and win the championship.
A free Story Adventure for Teens at CEFR B2 level. Topic: key word sentence transformations (Remix).
Story
- The annual International Language Championship has arrived, and you've qualified for the final round. The competition requires contestants to transform complex sentences while maintaining their original meaning—a skill that demands both linguistic precision and creative thinking. You're in the…
- Ms. Chen leads you to a quiet office where she shows you her notes about the transformation patterns. She explains that most transformations involve changing active voice to passive voice, converting direct speech to reported speech, or restructuring sentences using different grammatical…
- You gather three other top competitors in the hallway and explain the situation. They are initially skeptical—after all, helping you also means helping your rivals. However, one competitor named Ahmed, who specializes in grammar analysis, becomes interested. He argues that if the championship is…
- You request to see the official competition rules, which Ms. Chen retrieves from her folder. You read carefully and discover an important clause: 'Contestants must complete transformations independently during the examination period. Assistance from teachers or other competitors is prohibited…
- You spend the next two hours working methodically through the transformation patterns. You create a spreadsheet organizing sentences by complexity level and transformation type. For active-to-passive transformations, you establish a consistent formula: identify the object, make it the subject,…
- You call the international coordinator's office in Singapore. After a brief wait, you reach Dr. Patel, the competition director. You explain the situation, and she responds with relief—she has been trying to reach the local organizers all morning. Fortunately, she has the complete backup files and…
- Your team works efficiently for the next ninety minutes. Ahmed handles voice transformations with impressive precision, identifying patterns in word order and auxiliary verb placement. Another student, Maria, focuses on reported speech and masters the tense-shifting rules quickly. You coordinate…
- Your team works for sixty minutes and produces approximately fifty transformations. Before presenting anything, you decide to have Ms. Chen verify each one against her partial documentation and her understanding of the rules. This process takes longer than expected—Ms. Chen discovers several errors…
Vocabulary
- qualify
- transform
- maintaining
- precision
- mysteriously
- reconstruct
- linguistic
- documentation
- systematically
- generate
- construction
- coordinator
- backup
- skeptical
- specializes
- collaboration
- interests
- hierarchical
- coordinate
- specialization
- clause
- independently
- prohibited
- unfair advantage
- ethical
- boundaries
- identical
- methodically
- spreadsheet
- complexity
- formula
- relocate
- periodic
- inferred
- relief
- appropriate
- advantage
- preparation
- efficiently
- auxiliary
Printable worksheet
This Story Adventure comes with a free printable worksheet: 2 parts for students to do after the game, and an answer key for the teacher. It prints at three levels (Support, Core and Challenge); this is the Challenge sheet. Sign in free to print the whole sheet.
What's on the worksheet
- Remember the story · Answer in a full sentence.
- A new ending · Write a new ending for the story. Use three story words.
Part 1: Remember the story
Answer in a full sentence.
- Why does Ms. Chen approach you specifically?
- What are two of the transformation types Ms. Chen mentions?
- Why do the other competitors eventually agree to help?