Some students have been sending in their translation for the first passage in the booklet, an extract from one of Anna Gavalda's novels (see blog post below, September 4th). I will try to get them back to people before the class: I generally manage this, but it is not absolutely guaranteed.
If you receive your work back, you will see that it is marked by a system of negative points (points faute) in which you lose more for more serious mistakes, with grammar problems generally counting as worse than vocabulary problems, which in turn count as worse than register problems.
Someone asked me what the marking scale represents. It is of necessity rather approximate. When the agrégation translation papers are marked a whole team of markers get together and discuss in detail how many points should be taken off for (almost) every conceivable mistake. This takes a long time and a whole team of people and is obviously not possible for our practice translations. So all I can say is 1) the most important thing is to never make the same mistake twice, and in the case of grammar mistakes in particular make sure that the grammar book is thoroughly consulted and that you are sure you have absorbed the grammar point in question (grammar is hard). 2) The students who passed the agrégation with very little difficulty were, by the end of the year, getting around 30 negative points on a translated passage. Over 95 is definitely getting to be problematic.
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