Competitions for 'Budding Translators'

A good way to stimulate young people's interest in something is to take advantage of their natural competitiveness by running a competition. The European Commission's Directorate General for Translation has been doing this for several years by organising an annual competition for secondary school students. They call it Juvenes Traductores. It's been mentioned several times before on this blog; for past years enter juvenes in the Search box on the right. The age limit is 17. Such is the diversity of languages in the 28 countries of the EU that this year there were entries in 152 pairs including Greek to Latvian and Bulgarian to Portuguese, but in fact the number of entrants from the different countries varied greatly: between 360 from Italy and 25 from Estonia, although all the contestants faced stiff competition. Particularly striking is the figure of 27 from Malta, because few people outside the country are aware that Maltese is a language. Imagine the effort it must take to run a competition like that! The EU's aim is not however entirely altruistic; they want to encourage young people to take up translation, knowing, with an eye to the future, that they need to keep up the supply of recruits for their own enormous translation organisation.

The Commission has just announced the winners for 2017, and they will go to Brussels in April to receive their prizes. The markers for the competition are Expert Translators from the EU's own service, so the standard is high. That doesn't mean, however, that the contestants are expert – not yet anyway. One text does not an expert make. However, they've probably had language courses in which translation was a component, and they may well have had coaching from their teachers, so they're far from being naive Natural Translators.

A different kind of competition is being organised in Italy for the first time this year. The organisers are a research group at the Forli campus of the University of Bologna which calls itself In MediO PUER(I) (Amongst Children? – my Latin is rusty) and specialises in child language brokering. Forli is the campus that hosted the first International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation, and from the viewpoint of this blog their competition is potentially even more interesting than the EU one. Its name is Traduttori in Erba (Budding Translators). Its interest lies largely in the fact that it's open to children from primary school to the first year of secondary school, that is to say about six to eleven, and therefore much younger and less 'educated' than the EU ones. Moreover there are to be three levels: first and second years of primary school, third through fifth years of primary school and first year of secondary school. Taking all the entries and not just the winners, it should be possible to detect development in the translating ability. Assuming of course that there are plenty of entries.

For more information and updates, contact Prof. Rachele Antonini at rachele.antonini@unibo.it.

Sources
Florian Faes. Translators win big across Europe. SLATOR Language Industry Intelligence, 24 February 2017.  Click [here] or go to https://slator.com/industry-news/translators-win-big-across-europe/.

Rachele Antonini et al. Concorso "Traduttori in erba" 2016/2017. METRA Centro di Studi Interdisciplinari sulla Mediazione e la Traduzione a Opera di e per Ragazzi/e, 2017. In Italian. Click [here] or go to http://metra.dipintra.it/2017/01/26/concorso-traduttori-in-erba-20162017/.