Translation Paper 2: olim Hercules cum novem vaccis pulcherrimis Romam iter faciebat.

The first job is to spot the verb in the sentence - usually, it is located at or near to the end of the sentence. Here, it is "faciebat" - parsing it we get to a 3rd person singular imperfect verb and so its meaning is 'was making'. After this, we find the subject and object of the verb: "Hercules" and "iter" respectively. We note that Hercules is capitalised, so it is a name. We make translate it by putting it in the nominative case: "Hercules". "iter" is the accusative, and we note that it is in the idiom here "iter facio" - I make a journey. Hence, the basic meaning of the sentence is "Hercules was making a journey". We now come to the remaining words of the sentence. "olim" at the beginning and "cum novem vaccis pulcherrimis Romam" in the middle. We note that 'Romam' is another accusative in the sentence - its function cannot be the object accusative, so it must be something else. Given that it is a place, it could be an accusative of direction. Hence, we get to "Hercules was making a journey to Rome" - accusative without a preposition because it is a town or small island, which is the requirement for direction to be expressed without a preposition. The word at the beginning "olim" is just a matter of knowing vocabulary, 'once'. And the final words of the sentence are an example of "cum" + ablative, hence having the meaning 'with': 'with nine most beautiful cows'. It should be noted that the adjective here is a superlative. The word "novem" does not look like the others because numbers above three do not decline in the same was as nouns or adjectives. We can thus conclude that the sentence means - 'once upon a time, Hercules was making a journey to Rome with nine very beautiful cows'.