ZAGREB, February 2, 2018 – Ante Kuvačić, a junior student of the Split-based secondary school specialised in science, is the Croatian winner of the Juvenes Translatores 2017, an annual translation contest for high school students in the European Union.
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DG Translation) organises annual contests for high schools across the EU member-states, and in the latest, 11th contest, 3,348 secondary-school pupils took part. The winners in all the 28 countries will be invited to an award-giving ceremony in Brussels, scheduled for 10 April.
“My congratulations on your achievement. Well done for taking on the challenge and proving your talents in all 24 EU languages. Learning languages is a skill that is vital for your careers and personal development. It is amazing to see so many talented young people. Multilingualism defines us as Europeans,” Commissioner Guenther H. Oettinger, responsible for Budget and Human Resources, was quoted as saying.
This year, over 3,300 students from across the European Union translated texts on the 60th anniversary of the European Union. They could choose from any of the 552 possible combinations between any two of the EU’s 24 official languages. Students sat the competition in 144 language combinations, including translating from Polish into Finnish, and from Czech into Greek. All winners chose to translate into their strongest language or mother tongue, as the staff translators in EU Institutions do.
In Croatia, which started participating in the contest in 2013 when it entered the union, pupils mainly opt for translating from English or German into their mother tongue.
Previous Croatian winners are Ivana Busch from Zagreb (2013), Luka Planinić and Katarina Zornada from Pazin (2014 and 2015) and Petra Nimac Kalcina from Split (2016).
