The last kind of geometrical transformation we will look at is a fairly straightforward one. It is called geometrical translation, and it involves moving a shape from one place to another.

In order to specify clearly the translation we must specify the horizontal distance moved and the vertical distance moved (naturally in 3 dimensions we would need to give one more component – but we won’t think about this at iGCSE level).

We will specify the movement using vector notation which involve writing the numbers in a column with the horizontal movement on top.

Example

Let’s try this out below:

Exercise

Let’s try applying translations to shapes by completing exercise 9 on page 194 of the core textbook:

The answers are below: