Maltese schools encouraged to compete in EU translators challenge

Six Maltese secondary schools will this year be able to participate in the second EU Juvenes Tranlatores (young translators) contest aimed at testing the language skills of European students.

Every Maltese school can field up to four candidates who will compete with 2,760 pupils from a total of 690 schools from all over the EU.

The competition will be held on November 27 when students will be asked to translate texts from and into one of the 23 official languages of the EU.

Since Malta's accession into the EU in 2004, Maltese has been an EU official language.

Individual schools have until October 20 to register for this competition through a special contest website at: http://ec.europa.eu/translatores .

Following the registration phase, the schools have to nominate up to four pupils born in 1991 and provide details of the language combinations they have chosen for the short text to be translated in the contest. The choice is free among the 23 official EU languages (for example, from Polish into Romanian or from Maltese into Finnish).

After the contest, translations will be evaluated by a panel of professional translators from the Directorate-General for Translation of the Commission, and the contest jury will choose the best translation from each member state.

The 27 winners will be an-nounced next January.

Next April, the winners will be invited to Brussels to an award ceremony during which they will receive their prizes from Leonard Orban, the Commissioner for Multilingualism.