Brussels, 01/09/2008 (Agence Europe) - As of today, Monday 1 September, secondary schools across the European Union will be able to enrol for the second Juvenes Translatores contest, a competition launched by the European Commission in 2007 to promote language learning and translation.
Secondary schools wishing to take part in the contest have from 1 September to 20 October to enrol using the electronic registration form which is available on the contest website (http: //ec.europa.eu/translatores) in all of the official EU languages. The number of schools, selected at random to represent each member state, will correspond to double the number of votes the member state has in the Council of the EU. Thus, 690 schools and up to 2,760 students will be able to take part (58 schools in France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, 54 in Poland and Spain, 28 in Romania, 26 in the Netherlands, 24 in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary and Portugal, 20 in Austria, Bulgaria and Sweden, 14 in Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Lithuania and Slovakia, 8 in Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Luxembourg and Slovenia, and 6 in Malta). The schools will then have to nominate four students born in 1991 and provide details of the language combinations they have chosen for the text to be translated in the contest. Students and schools will have a free choice from among the 23 official EU languages (for example, translating from Polish into Romanian or from Maltese into Finnish). On 27 November, the day of the contest, the students from the selected schools, all working simultaneously, will have a short text to translate under the supervision of the schools. Thereafter, the translations will be assessed by a panel of professional translators from the Directorate General for Translation of the European Commission, and the best translations from each member state will be selected. The 27 winners will be announced in January 2009 and they will be invited to the award ceremony in Brussels in April to receive their prizes from Multilingualism Commissioner Leonard Orban. (O.L./transl.rt)