A CO KILDARE student has become the Irish winner of a European Union language competition, and is now due to travel to Brussles in April to collect his prize.

Fintan McGrath, a student at Confey College in Leixlip in Co Kildare, won the Juvenes Translatores (young translators) contest for his translation of Irish into English.

Around 3,000 17-year-old secondary school students participated in the competition last year – a record number for the competition.

Participants were required to translate a one-page text of the European language of their choice. The completed translations were then marked by staff translators from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation and assessed by a native speaker of the language. A selection board then picked the best translation from each EU country.

The winners will all meet in Brussels on 7 April for the award ceremony.

The Juvenes Translatores competition has been running since 2007, and aims to give young people a taste of what it is like to be a translator in an EU institution, raise the profile of the translation profession and also encourage language learning in schools.

Irish has been an official language of the EU since January 2007.