Our partners at Queen’s College Oxford Translation Exchange are publicising two competitions for schools and students of Modern Foreign Languages (and one of these may also be of interest to English language students).
Find out more below about the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators and the Stephen Spender Trust & Oxford University competition for a multilingual approach to Jayne Eyre.
Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators
Registration is now open for the second year of the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators, open to all teachers of French, German, Italian [new this year!], Mandarin and Spanish.
The prize launches this month with ready-made teaching resources designed to be used around European Day of Languages (26 September) and International Translation Day (30 September). The prize is for students of French, German, Italian, Mandarin, or Spanish aged 11-18.
Bringing more international culture into the classroom is a central aim of the prize, and so all texts will be rich in cultural content, and creativity in the translation will be rewarded.
All interested teachers will receive a teaching pack for the first lessons, to be run any time from late September onwards. Following the first lesson, which focuses on translating poetry, teachers will be asked to confirm their registration for two further teaching packs (on translating fiction and non-fiction) and for the competition phase. The competition phase will be open from 21 February to 1 April 2022.
For more information and to register, please see the prize webpage.
The Anthea Bell Prize is an initiative of the Queen’s College Translation Exchange at the University of Oxford.
About Anthea Bell
Anthea Bell OBE (1936–2018) ranked among the leading literary translators of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work from German, French and Danish into English encompassed the writings of Kafka, Freud, E.T.A. Hoffmann, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Georges Simenon, W.G. Sebald, René Goscinny, Cornelia Funke and many others.
She won numerous literary awards, some of them several times, and was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2015. We are delighted to be able to honour Anthea’s great work, and her commitment to encouraging young language-learners and translators, with this prize.
Prismatic Jayne Eyre
Prismatic Jayne Eyre: An experiment in the Study of Translation, is a nation-wide creative translation competition for school pupils in three categories (Key Stage 3/S1-3, KS4/S4 and KS5/S5-3). It launches on 30 September 2021 – International Translation Day! The competition deadline is March 2022.
Entrants are asked to produce a poem in another language inspired by a selected passage from Jane Eyre. The competition accepts submissions in any language, and all entries need to be accompanied by a literal translation into English.
Up to 100 entries to the competition will be published in a printed anthology, which will also be available online.
Support materials will be available on the organiser’s resources page. Additional activity packs will be provided in the workshop languages (Arabic, French, Polish, and Spanish) by October 2021. These materials give learners and teachers the chance to take part in creative translation activities related to Jane Eyre in their own homes or classrooms.
The competition guidelines, selected passages, and entry form will be made available on 30 September 2021.
If you are a teacher who would like regular updates about the competition or the project more generally, please register your interest using this form.
The organisers of the competition are the Stephen Spender Trust and Oxford University.
Further links
- Click here to find out more about Queen’s College Oxford Translation Exchange and the wide range of opportunities for schools relating to Modern Foreign Languages and translation
- Click here to find out more about the Stephen Spender Trust and multilingual creativity, education programmes and the Stephen Spender Prize
