The sixth edition of the Babylon Best Young Translator Award received entries from five source languages—English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Czech—into two target languages, Macedonian and Serbian.
The winner of this edition of Babylon was the translation from German into Macedonian of an excerpt from Das geheime Lächeln by Bettina Stroks, authored by Elena Mitrička. The award was presented to the winner by H.E. Samuel Žbogar, Head of the EU Delegation in the Republic of North Macedonia, and the president of the Babylon Organising Committee, Ognena Nikuljski.
In addition to the one-year active membership to MATA and the publishing of her translation in Kulturen život, Elena will get to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, in October 2020.
Honourable mentions were given to Elena Strezoska and Stojanka Nikolova for their translation from German into Macedonian of an excerpt from Das Floß der Medusa by Franz Stefan Griebl , as well as to Ivona Gerasimovska, for her translation of an excerpt from Der Schatten by Melanie Raabe, also from German into Macedonian.
The competition was announced in Macedonian, English, and Albanian in both print and electronic media, and additional promotional materials were distributed to the faculties of philology at all public and private universities, as well as to the EU Info Points in multiple cities in the country. Moreover, representatives of the Organising Committee, of the Delegation, and past award winners appeared on national televisions in order to help the information on the competition reach a wider audience.
As part of the competition cycle 5 informative sessions and translation workshops were held in Skopje, Štip, Tetovo, and Bitola, during which the attendees had the opportunity to translate texts from multiple official languages of EU member states into Macedonian and Albanian.