At the 17th edition of the “Juvenes Translatores” translation competition, organized at the level of the European Union, the winner from Romania was Matei Abălaru, according to Agerpres. The award ceremony will take place on March 21, 2024, in Brussels.
Mihai Abălaru, the winner from Romania, PHOTO European Commission
Matei Abălaru is a student at the “Mircea cel Bătrân” National College in Constanta and participated in this competition, which had the theme “We dare to make a change”, along with 3,055 other competitors.
At the contest organized in November of last year, language skills were tested by translating a text into and from any of the 24 official languages of the EU. Thus, students from 701 schools throughout the European Union used 155 language combinations out of the 552 available, including translating from Romanian to Swedish and from Czech to Danish.
The number of participating schools from each EU country is equal to the number of seats held by that country in the European Parliament, the selection of schools being carried out randomly by the computer.
33 schools were selected from Romania, which enrolled 160 students in the competition. The translators of the European Commission selected one winner from each EU country on Thursday and their names were made public by the Representation of the European Commission.
Another 247 students received special mentions for their exceptional translations, 20 of them from Romania.
The “Juvenes Translatores” contest is organized annually, starting in 2018, by the Directorate-General for Translations of the European Commission, with funding from the Erasmus+ program. Its purpose is to promote translation and multilingualism. Over time, this contest has changed the lives of many of the participants and winners. Some decided to study translation at university, while others joined the European Commission's translation departments to do an internship or pursue a career.
The “Juvenes Translatores” competition aims to promote the study of foreign languages in schools and to give young people the opportunity to get an idea of the job of translator. The competition is addressed to high school students aged 17 and takes place simultaneously in all selected schools in the EU.
