The third edition of the Babylon Best Young Translator Award, a partner project of the EU Delegation in the country and the Macedonian Translators Association, was announced on 26 September 2015, as part of the celebration of the European Day of Languages.
Translators from five source languages—English, Slovene, Italian, French, and German—into two target languages—Macedonian and Turkish—entered the competition for the third Babylon Best Young Translator Award.
Following the bilingual and the monolingual assessments and the summing up of the results, the highest-scored were the translation from Italian into Macedonian of an excerpt from Teoria delle ombre by Paolo Maurensig, authored by Daniela Zdravkovska, and the translation from English into Turkish of an excerpt from Grief Is a Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, authored by Sanberk Yusuf. The awards were presented in the reception hall of the Blaže Koneski Faculty of Philology in Skopje, on 26 September 2016. Considering the narrow differences among the scores of the top three translations into Macedonian, the Organising Committee decided to give honourable mentions to the translators placed second and third: to Marija Kocevska and Ana Dimevska, for their translation from French into Macedonian of an excerpt from Ce cœur changeant by Agnès Desarthe, and to Elena Krkuleva, for her translation from Italian into Macedonian of an excerpt from La ferocia by Nicola Lagioia.
As every year, the upcoming fourth edition of the Babylon Best Young Translator Award was announced at the award ceremony.
After the successful presentation of the concept of the Babylon Best Young Translator Award at the conference of the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) in Bordeaux in 2015, the Macedonian Translators Association was encouraged to apply, and on 2 June 2016 officially joined the European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations (CEATL). Our member Kalina Janeva, who, on the invitation of one of the Council’s vice-presidents, Cécile Deniard, attended CEATL’s annual general meeting in Barcelona, on this occasion also spoke about the Babylon Best Young Translator Award to colleagues from all over Europe.