The Queen's College, Oxford
Despite the pandemia another year has passed of
translation competitions for secondary school students.
The biggest of these
competitions, which we have reported on several times in this blog, is the
Juvenes Translatores, organised and funded by the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission across the whole European Union.
“The Commission has been been
organising the Juvenes Translatores (Latin for
‘young translators’) contest every year since 2007. Its aim is to promote
language learning in schools and give young people a taste of what it is like
to be a translator. It is open to 17-year-old secondary school students and takes
place at the same time in all selected schools across the EU. The contest has
inspired and encouraged some of the participants to pursue their languages at
university level and to become professional translators.”
The judges are drawn from the Commission’s
professional translators, so the standard required is high. Contestants can
choose any combination of EU official languages. The organisation required is
necessarily elaborate since there are 27 countries in the Union and all the
countries submitted entries. However, there’s a striking absence this year.
It’s the United Kingdom, previously a strong supporter but now a victim of
Brexit.
Yet the British are perhaps not losing out,
because now they have their own annual competition since 2020. It’s the Anthea Bell Prize for
Young Translators
based at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. (Anthea Bell,
an Oxford graduate, was a well-known literary translator who gained popular
recognition for her ingenious translations of the Asterix comics.) The Oxford
prize has an advantage over the European one: it’s open to students from age 11
to 18. On the other hand the languages are more restricted: namely French, German, Italian (new), Mandarin and Spanish. The
texts can be poetry, fiction or non-fiction.
And there are other school translation competitions
that we don’t have space to describe here, for example the ones at the
University of Sheffield for Year 12 and Year 13 students. In fact such
competitions are becoming fashionable in the UK now that translation has once again become
part of the General Certificate of Education.
We can draw several
conclusions from these competitions.
a)
Their
aim is not translation in itself but as an aid to language teaching. “By
providing teachers with the tools they need to bring translation to life, we
hope to motivate more pupils to study modern foreign languages [MFL] throughout
their time at school and beyond.”
b)
For the Anthea
Bell prize, “over 500 schools from across the UK registered
for the prize resources
in the first year (2020-2021), with 200 selected to take part in the final
competition phase.” This is astonishing. It means that translating is still
widely used in language teaching in schools in spite of the strictures against
it.
c)
There seems to
be no difficulty recruiting contestants for either the British or European
competitions. This suggests that translating is seen as a pleasurable activity
by many teenagers – perhaps as a game akin to solving crossword puzzles. One
teacher says, “These are
my first thoughts about the benefits of teaching translation - I have been
developing translation with my classes and most of my students love it - nearly
as much as I do!”
d)
It should not be
thought that these students are naïve natural translators. They are teen-age
students, many of them in the top years of secondary schools in their
respective countries. As such, and as I know from my own school days, they have
undoubtedly had some elementary instruction and exercises in translating as
part of their language courses.
Sources
The Queen’s College Translation Exchange.
The Anthea Bell prize for young translators. 2021.
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