2025 marked the fifth year of the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators, the Queen’s Translation Exchange’s annual translation competition for secondary schools. This year, a record number of students participated in the Prize, with over 22,000 students from more than 400 schools across the UK taking part in the competition.
The Translation Exchange received almost 5,000 of the participating schools’ best entries. Entries are currently being judged by Oxford Modern Languages undergraduates. In the second round of judging, selected entries will be judged by professional literary translators. We look forward to announcing the winners in May and June!
Dr Charlotte Ryland, Founding Director of the Queen’s Translation Exchange and Supernumerary Fellow at Queen’s, said:
Seeing engagement with the Anthea Bell Prize increase in this way is a genuine and rare moment of optimism for languages. Across the languages world the mood has been increasingly sombre recently, in particular with Cardiff University announcing its intention to cut its Languages department. At QTE it’s clear that we are responding to a need amongst teachers and young language learners: to feel connected to other cultures, to engage with others’ voices, and to respond creatively to that experience. I’m now even more motivated to work collaboratively across the sector to support this work and so to seed the change that languages so desperately needs.
The Anthea Bell Prize runs in six languages: French (into English and Welsh), German, Italian, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish. Registered schools gain access to free classroom resources on translating poetry, fiction and non-fiction, available for use throughout the academic year.
For the first time, students taking part in the Anthea Bell Prize in 2024-25 had the opportunity to translate Russian language texts. Russian language translation resources and competition tasks, featuring texts by a mix of male and female writers from Armenia, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, as well as literature of the Jewish and Muslim experience, were made available to all registered teachers. These resources were not only intended for young people studying Russian, but also to support Ukrainian students and other native Russian speakers at UK schools, many of whom are taking GCSE and A Level Russian qualifications. The Russian language strand of the Prize also includes an ab initio category, providing a new linguistic challenge for students with no previous experience of learning Russian. This year, QTE received 194 entries for the Russian strand of the competition, from schools all across the UK. We hope that these numbers will continue to grow in future years.
The Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators was launched for schools by the Translation Exchange in 2020. The competition is inspired by the life and work of the great translator Anthea Bell. It aims to promote language learning across the UK and to inspire creativity in the classroom. By providing teachers with the tools they need to bring translation to life, we hope to motivate more pupils to study modern foreign languages throughout their time at school and beyond.
