Errores de traducción — Translation Errors

❌ "hace calor" → "makes heat" or "does heat"

✅ "it is hot" — hacer for weather is an idiom: hace calor / frío / viento / sol / lluvia.

Why: "hacer" in weather expressions is a fixed idiom with no literal English equivalent. It cannot be parsed as "to make" or "to do" in these contexts — the structure must be recognised as a whole and rendered as "it is [weather state]".

❌ "se habla español" → "it speaks Spanish" or "he speaks Spanish"

✅ "Spanish is spoken" — se-passive: the verb agrees with the grammatical subject (español, singular).

Why: The se-passive in Spanish has no "he/she/it" subject — the noun after the verb is the subject, and it determines singular or plural: se hablan idiomas = languages are spoken. English equivalent is always the passive voice.

❌ "comía" translated as "ate"

✅ "used to eat" / "was eating" — comía is imperfect (habitual or ongoing); "ate" is preterite (one completed event). Wrong tense = wrong meaning.

Why: Spanish has two past tenses that English often merges under "ate". Imperfect (-aba/-ía) = ongoing, habitual, or background past. Preterite (-é/-ó) = completed single event. AQA mark schemes specifically penalise tense confusion here.

❌ Leaving a gap because of one unknown word

✅ Translate everything around it. A partially correct sentence still earns key message marks.

Why: AQA marks are awarded per key message, not per perfect sentence. Leaving a blank earns zero for that section. An attempt with one unknown word omitted or approximated can still score if the surrounding meaning is correctly conveyed.