The Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators is run by Queen’s Translation Exchange at Oxford University. It is a UK-wide creative translation competition for students aged 11-18. The competition is inspired by the life and work of the great translator Anthea Bell and aims to promote language-learning across the UK and to inspire creativity in the classroom. Students can enter at different levels depending on where they are in the their language-learning journey, from Level 1 (ab initio) to Level 4 (advanced).
This year over 16,000 students from across the UK took part in the competition task, and schools submitted the top five entries for each level. A team of 22 judges, including Oxford Modern Languages undergraduates and leading professional literary translators, assessed just under 3,600 entries to the competition, and remarked on their high standard and wonderful creativity.
We are therefore delighted to announce that the CLC Italian Department had two South-West area winners who also went on to win the UK Runner-Up in their respective categories. They are:
Sunny (SFC1) Italian Ab Initio, who translated the Level 1 competition task “Grazie Roma” by Antonello Venditti. The singer first wrote this song in 1983 when his football team, Roma, were about to win the Italian league. Since then, every single time the team wins a match, Roma fans sing this together.
Katya (SFC2) Italian A Level, who translated the Level 4 competition task “La fabbrica delle ragazze” by Ilaria Rossetti. A fictional story inspired by a real-life tragedy: the 1918 explosion of a munitions factory in Northern Italy, which killed thirty-five young women who worked there. Ernest Hemingway also wrote about this event in his short story, ‘A Natural History of the Dead’.
Many congratulations to them both. Needless to say we are extremely pleased and immensely proud of Katya and Sunny and their fantastic achievement.
Miss Clements, Teacher of Italian
