Levent Yildizgoren from TTC wetranslate Ltd

Translation Challenge, the competition where Essex translation students test their skills on a challenging real life commission, is set to become an annual event after two successful years.

The competition, which is run by the Department of Language and Linguistics at Essex in partnership with award winning local company TTC wetranslate Ltd, saw approximately 130 students take part in this year’s challenge. Their brief was to translate a real project for local fine art gallery Brandler Galleries, run by John Brandler who also kindly donated prizes and took part in the event.

The students were broken into teams to translate materials into Mandarin, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese.

Ignazia Posadinu, Director of the MA in Translation, Interpreting and Subtitling at the University said of this year’s competition, “It was a huge success. Translation Challenge has been interesting, exciting and most of all educational. Students have had a taste of a real life work assignment and have produced high quality, publishable standard translations.”

Chelmsford based company TTC wetranslate has been translating for businesses for over 20 years. Levent Yildizgoren, Managing Director, said: “Connecting students to the real world of employment is such an important thing to do. We have greatly enjoyed working with Essex over the last two years and have been very impressed with the translation students who have taken part. We look forward to making this an annual event.”

When the competition began in 2014 it was the first of its kind to be run by the Department of Language and Linguistics. It is open to Masters and final year translation students.