The words beneath the picture
Text C: an original fiction extract.
When Rosa offered to subtitle the old family video, her grandfather asked whether the computer could also make his jacket fit. On the screen, he was thirty years younger, standing beside a wedding cake in a suit too broad at the shoulders. Several relatives who would watch the restored recording no longer understood the language in which he had made his speech. Rosa understood it at home, but had never tried to carry a whole conversation into written English.
She began by typing a sentence for every sentence she heard. Soon the bottom of the picture was crowded with words. Her cousin paused the video to finish reading, then missed the next gesture when it started again. Rosa shortened the lines. Doing that meant deciding what could go. The little phrase her grandfather repeated before each joke looked unnecessary on paper, yet without it the speech sounded abrupt. She kept it twice and removed it elsewhere.
One afternoon her aunt read a draft and suggested making the speech more elegant. In Rosa's version, her grandfather called the cake a dangerous mountain. The aunt preferred an impressive achievement. Rosa played the passage again. Her grandfather was pointing to a knife which bent as he tried to cut the lowest tier. Behind him, the guests were laughing. The danger belonged to the joke, not a failure to find a complimentary word. Rosa left the mountain in.
The hardest part was a sentence broken by somebody calling from outside the frame. Her grandfather stopped, turned and laughed. He never finished it. Rosa's aunt remembered how it should have ended, but her grandfather said she was remembering a different wedding. They disagreed amiably until Rosa asked which ending she should type. Both looked at the silent mouth on the paused screen. Her grandfather said that the man in the video had not supplied either ending.
Rosa brought him the final draft on paper as well as on the laptop. He crossed out a word which made him sound angry with his new brother-in-law. He had been teasing him. In another place, he accepted an ordinary English phrase instead of the word-for-word version, because the literal words suggested something he had never meant. Then he asked her to leave a gap where the unfinished sentence stopped. The interruption belonged to the afternoon too.
At the family viewing, people laughed at different moments. Some followed the voice; others read the words. When the bent knife appeared, Rosa heard a cousin laugh before the cake had been cut. Afterwards, the aunt asked for a copy with larger lettering. Her grandfather watched the empty space beneath his unfinished sentence, then told Rosa to save the original recording beside her new version. He still wanted the computer to do something about the jacket.
You are Rosa. Write a letter to your cousin, who has offered to subtitle another family recording, explaining what the work involves.
In your response:
Base your response on Text C, developing its ideas in your own words. Write about 250 to 300 words. Up to 10 marks are available for reading and up to 10 marks for writing.
60 exam-style questions on CIE IGCSE English Language 4.5.1 Extended response to Text C. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.