How do I translate a sentence in English into French?

Ok, so let's take a typical MLAT french translation sentence - this one is from the 2012 paper. "How long have you been learning French at your school in England?" So, our first instinct as inexperienced translators is to translate a sentence literally, or word by word, taking each word apart and presenting it in its french equivalent. THIS IS A HUGE MISCONCEPTION and it's important to flag this up at the beginning of your learning process as a translator. Our first step is to enter the 'french mindset' - as silly as this sounds, it's really important to take steps to think in our target language when we phrase things. So, this particular sentence is in question form - therefore we need to think of how french speakers structure their sentences. Here I would ask the student how they would begin to do this, and if they were struggling, offer them a few solutions, i.e: "Depuis quand" would be an appropriate way to do so. This opening both nails the tone and the interrogative form of the sentence.  The next part of the sentence needs to continue within this interrogative format, therefore we'd need (and I'd allow the student to come up with the answer to this) an inversion of subject and verb: "apprends-tu"; so, that leaves us with "depuis quand apprends-tu". The rest is fairly straightforward: "le français dans ton école en Angleterre?" Therefore overall, the correct sentence is (again, leaving the student to answer this question and giving my own input if required) "Depuis quand apprends-tu le français dans ton école en Angleterre?" So, as you can see, if you translate this sentence word for word it doesn't make much sense in French. You always need to take a step back from the sentence, think about its overall meaning and then begin to translate it.