European Commission Honors 27 Winners of Annual ‘Juvenes Translatores’ Contest

On February 12, 2026, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) announced the 27 winners of the 2025-2026 “Juvenes Translatores” translation contest for secondary school students.

As an equalizing measure, the contest rules require all participating students to be 17 years old. This means that, for the first time, this year’s cohort of participants was born after the contest was established back in 2007, signaling the competition’s longevity and continued popularity. 

Each year, the contest draws roughly 3000 students from schools around Europe. Schools begin applying early in the Fall, and in November about 720 are randomly selected. Quotas are set for how many schools can participate from each EU country based on the country’s number of seats in the European Parliament. Selected schools may then enter two to five students to participate.

On November 27, 2025, the participating students were given two hours to complete a translation in any two of the 24 official EU languages. While the students performed their translations online, they were only permitted physical or digital dictionaries and could not use any form of machine translation (MT), AI translation, or computer-aided translation (CAT) tools.

Translators from the European Commission then evaluated the submissions, and selected the best translation from each EU nation based on accuracy, grammar, stylistic fluency, and “creativity in finding effective translation solutions.”

This year’s contest drew 3004 participants from 716 schools across Europe. The students translated in 155 different language pairs among the 522 possible combinations using the 24 EU languages.

The winning student from each country will receive a 3-day trip to Brussels in March 2026 to attend an award ceremony and have the opportunity to meet with European Commission translators.  

Among the 27 winners, seven chose to translate in language pairs that did not include English. Although this is lower than the 10 non-English translations from last year’s winners, it is consistent with the average of the last five years of about seven non-English winners per year. 

This year’s non-English winners were more diverse in terms of language pairs compared to last year, when 8 of the 10 non-English winners included German in their language pair. This year, the non-English translations saw a four-way tie in terms of the most-represented language. Swedish, Spanish, German (including the Austrian winner), and Hungarian (including the Hungarian winner) were each used by two of the non-English winners.

Notably, Austria is the only country whose winner has not used English in their language pair in four of the last five years. France, Germany, and Hungary are next, each of which has had winners that did not use English in three of the last five years.