Spanish to English

Start by reading the text.

It sounds obvious, but start by reading the text. It's never very long, and it helps you understand what we're even talking about.

Spanish to English

Tenses on lock!

Identify the tenses next. It's so important to get the tenses right! You lose a lot of marks if your tenses aren't locked down. Take highlighters into the exam, and highlight your tenses as you read through.

Spanish to English

Break it down sentence by sentence.

Now you have the gist of the text, you can start to translate. Already, one big text isn't looking so big, but if you take it one sentence at a time, it's much more manageable.

​Acabo de escuchar un documental sobre el matrimonio que me molestó.

Spanish to English

Clean it up.

Once you've done a rough translation, you can go over it and see if it needs polishing up. Do we really say that in English? Have you 100% nailed all of your tenses? Have you left no gaps?
Remember: a guess is better than a gap.