On Thursday 21 November, a cohort of Shiplake Sixth Formers took part in a European-wide translation event called ‘Juvenes Translatores’ (Latin for 'young translators'). The competition, which takes place annually, saw over 3,500 young people taking part simultaneously in 751 schools in 28 EU countries and is designed to promote multilingualism, language learning and careers in translation. Contestants are asked to translate a text of about one page from any of the 24 official languages of the EU into any other official language. One winner will be chosen from each member state.
Here at Shiplake we had L Sauboua translating from French in English, F Young and E Guironnet translating from Spanish into English, A Gerecke from English into German and R Pandeva from English into Bulgarian. The completed translations were sent immediately to the European Commission to be assessed and we look forward to finding out the results in the spring.
E Guironnet says of the competition: “Although it was challenging tackling new vocabulary, Spanish phrases and conjugations outside of the A Level specification, it was a great opportunity to represent the school across the EU and get some valuable practice in.”
F Young adds: “It was pretty hard, but I feel like I got a lot from it in terms of grammatical understanding. From an A Level perspective, the translation provided me with much broader vocabulary, which I can now apply to my Spanish studies.”
L Sauboua: "Personally I found the translating competition quite hard as I found a few words I had never seen before alongside very complex vocabulary. I also found that the inverted sentences made translating into English quite complicated. Overall I found it helpful as it challenged me to really think about my work and helped me improve overall in my translation work that's given to me at school."
Update 3 March 2020
While there were no winners from Shiplake this time, all the sixth formers who took part were awarded with a certificate in assembly this week for taking part in what was a tough competition.
