Decoding and Translation Questions
How do you solve made-up language decoding questions?
Line up each unfamiliar phrase directly under its English translation, then find which unfamiliar word repeats across two lines that share an English word — that repeated word is the match. Work by elimination rather than guesswork, and don't assume word order carries meaning unless every other method has been exhausted.
What these questions actually test
These questions present a handful of phrases in an invented language alongside their English translations, then ask what a specific word means. They're not frequent — often only a handful per assessment — but they carry an unusually high error rate, because students assume the words must line up in order. Mostly, they don't.
There are two forms: a spaced-out version where the invented phrases sit directly above their translations, and a paragraph version dressed up as a short story, which hides the same structure inside ordinary-sounding prose. The paragraph form is more common and more often mishandled, because the first job — before any translating — is to strip the story back down to the same three-line, spaced-out shape.
Worked example
LUM WTAH AERD means WHO ARE YOU. WTAH IMN NAY means WHO GOES THERE. SHIM KO LUM means WHERE ARE THEY. Which word means YOU?
Line one and line two both contain "WHO" — and the only invented word that appears in both lines is WTAH. So WTAH means WHO.
Line one and line three both contain "ARE" — and the only invented word repeated between them is LUM. So LUM means ARE.
That leaves AERD as the only unmatched word in line one, against the only unmatched English word, YOU. AERD means YOU.
Order didn't matter here: "WHO" opens both line one and line two, but its invented equivalent, WTAH, sits in the middle of line one. If order mattered, it would hold the same position in both lines. It doesn't — which is itself useful confirmation that order can be set aside.
When the question is dressed as a paragraph
If the invented language is embedded in flowing prose rather than laid out cleanly, the first and most important step is to extract it: rewrite each sentence as an isolated, spaced line with its translation directly beside it. Skipping this step is the most common reason students run out of time or reason their way to the wrong answer — the paragraph form is built to make you solve it in your head, which multiplies errors.
Steps
- Rewrite paragraph-style questions into clean, spaced lines pairing invented words with their English translation
- Find English words that repeat across two lines, then find the invented word that repeats across the same two lines
- Continue eliminating matched words until only the target word and its translation remain unmatched
- Only consider word order if elimination alone doesn't produce an answer
This is one chapter of the Scholarship & Entrance English Assessment Guide. The complete guide — every technique, collected in one document — is available as a free PDF from the guide's main page.