By Julian GONZALEZ ARTERO (MAM-S7DEB)
Last school year, my L2 teacher informed us of a translation competition, “Juvenes Translatores”, organised by the European Commission, in which our school would be participating. Unfortunately, only students born in 2006 could participate that year, so I had to wait it out and hope that our school was selected the following year to participate again.
As soon as we were informed, I asked to participate in this year’s edition, translating from my mother tongue – Spanish – into English, and I was among the five pupils chosen in our school to participate in the competition. The day of the competition finally came and, while our classmates were writing their geography prebacs, us five were sitting in a computer room, anxiously awaiting our texts.
We started translating them and started racking our brains in search of the right expressions and the best way to translate the text we had been given. After the allotted time had passed, we handed in our texts and hoped to have translated it well enough. The translation of the text was really interesting and I was surprised by the challenge it represented, but at the same time I was really glad to have participated as it was fun as well. The only thing marring the moment was a sentence I had misunderstood and tried to guess the meaning of when translating (Ironically, the translator at the Commission who had written my text praised my translation of this bit).
And so we waited for our texts to be marked. Finally, we got an invitation to watch the announcement of the winners. We waited for what seemed like an eternity for the Luxembourgish winner to be announced and… I won?! I was informed that my parents, Ms Gröber – who had coordinated the competition at our school – and I were invited to Brussels for the award ceremony a few weeks later.
Fast-forward to the ceremony and I got to know the winners from every EU country. The ceremony itself was nice, with a few of my fellow winners as well as professional translators holding speeches. Then, we were shown around the Directorate General for Translation’s offices and saw the day-to-day activities of the Commission’s translators.
The day after that, we also visited the House of European History and after the visit, said goodbye to the other winners whom we had spent the last few days with. Translation aside, the people involved were truly the best part of the experience; from the winners to the Commission’s translators, the people were amazing and seeing so many people from all over the EU really highlighted the European aspect of the competition.
All in all, the competition was great and I was really happy to have participated in it. If you’re reading this and think this might be for you, please give it a try! The translation aspect is already a nice challenge, but who knows, maybe you’ll be Luxembourg’s next winner.
