Androulla Vassiliou, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, will present awards to the best young translators in Europe at this ceremony. Twenty-seven students, one from each Member State, will receive a trophy and a diploma for producing the best translation in a translation contest for schools organised by the European Commission.

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. The translation 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 Juvenes Translatores translation contest is organised every year to promote linguistic diversity and language learning. It is also an opportunity to try out the work of a professional translator and to test language skills acquired at school.

In the contest, pupils can choose a text in any of the 23 official languages of the EU, and translate it into any other of them. All the contests held since 2007 have been truly multilingual, as all 23 languages have been chosen. The contest is organised and marked by the staff of the Commission's Directorate-General for Translation, and it has gained in popularity each year since its launch: for this third contest, there was a 30% increase inenrolments.

The 27 winners (one for each member state) and their texts were published in the Juvenes Traslatores website.