Do Europeans Do Everything Better?

Just ran across this little article about the second European Union “Young Translators” contest among European high school students.  The students were not translating literature — rather, according to the article, they were translating “a text on the topic of multilingualism” — but it is still heartening to see translation treated as a worthy field for competition. I wrote bad essays and worse poetry in my salad days, and even participated in declamation contests in foreign languages (well, one anyway), but never was asked to translate a piece of writing from one language to another. Imagining 2250 high school students across the E.U. participating in a translation contest — it makes my heart go pitter-patter.

-ar