The winners of the European Commission's third annual ‘Juvenes Translatores’ contest for schools have been announced. The 27 winners, one from each EU Member State, will be invited to Brussels in March to receive a prize from the European Commissioner responsible for multilingualism.

The Juvenes Translatores contest is the only one of its kind in which 17-year-old school pupils can test their translation skills in any of the official languages of the EU. It was run for the first time in 2007 as a pilot project aiming to give a foretaste of what it is like to be a translator and to raise the profile both of the translating profession and of language learning in schools.

This year's contest was launched in September, when all interested upper secondary schools in the EU were free to register for participation. From all these, 600 schools were chosen in a random selection, and their names were published on the contest website. Thetranslation contest, whose name means “young translators” in Latin, was held simultaneously in all the participating schools, under the supervision of the schools, in November 2009.

The pupils were given two hours to translate a text from any of the 23 official languages of the EU into another official language of their choice. More than 2,000 translations covering all the official languages and 139 language combinations were submitted. Translators from the European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation marked and evaluated the translatiosn, and each one was assessed by a native speaker of the language into which the text had been translated. A board chaired by the Director-General of DGT then picked the best translation from each Member State.

The 27 winners (one for each member state) and their texts have been published in the Juvenes Traslatores website. In the course of a three-day trip to Brussels for themselves and an accompanying adult, each of the winners will receive a prize and a certificate from Commissioner Vassiliou at an award ceremony on 25 March 2010. They will also get a chance to meet EU translators at work.