This exam tips covers Exam Tips & Common Errors within English to French translation: gold structures for GCSE French. Revise English to French translation: gold structures in Writing: 50, 90 and 150 Words + Translation into French for GCSE French with 15 exam-style questions and 15 flashcards. This topic shows up very often in GCSE exams, so students should be able to explain it clearly, not just recognise the term. It is section 4 of 4 in this topic. Treat this as a marking guide for what examiners are looking for, not just a fact list.
💡 Exam Tips & Common Errors
- Read the whole passage before translating — you may need information from sentence 3 to correctly translate sentence 1
- If you genuinely cannot translate a word, paraphrase — describe the concept without the specific word
- Check every past tense: is the auxiliary avoir or être? (movement/change-of-state verbs use être)
- Check adjective position — most adjectives follow the noun (un livre intéressant), but BAGS adjectives precede it (un grand livre: beauty, age, goodness, size)
- After ne… pas / ne… plus / ne… jamais, the article changes: du / de la / des → de before the noun (Je mange du pain → Je ne mange pas de pain)
- Reread your translation as if you are a French speaker — would it make sense to them?
❌ Common error: Translating "I am going to go to the shops" as je suis aller aux magasins.
✓ Correct: Je vais aller aux magasins.
Why it costs marks: "Going to" in English signals the near future (futur proche in French: je vais + infinitif). Confusing this with the perfect tense of aller (je suis allé = I went) loses the grammar mark for this sentence. The near future is one of the most tested structures in AQA translation tasks.
Practice questions for English to French translation: gold structures
On AQA GCSE French Paper 4, how many marks is the English-to-French translation worth in total?
How do you correctly translate 'I am 15 years old' into French?