FIRST PRIZE IN INTERNATIONAL TRANSLATION COMPETITION FOR THIRD-YEAR STUDENT YOANNA HRISTOVA
06 June 2024
Photo: St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo
Yoanna Hristova - a third-year student majoring in Graphic Design at Varna Free University "Chernorizets Hrabar" won first place in the international translation competition "Transformations", organized by the Faculty of Modern Languages at St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo. The competition was supported by the Ministry of Education and Science. This year, 463 participants - university and school students took part in the competition, with over 690 translations of prose and poetry. 216 university students from 8 universities in Bulgaria and 33 universities from 16 foreign countries took part.
Yoanna won the jury, consisting of highly qualified foreign language teachers from various educational and cultural institutions and foreign lecturers, with her translation from French of "LE JARDIN D'ÉPICURE" - a work of the great writer and Nobel Prize winner for literature Anatole France. The graduate of VFU "Chernorizets Hrabar" was one of the few participants in the competition whose major was not related to linguistics.
Yoanna Hristova participated in "Transformations" for third consecutive year, together with students from the Co-Share Educational Center, Varna. Last year she again translated a work by Anatole France and was in the top three. Before that, Yoanna presented a poetry translation from Japanese to Bulgarian. The graphic design student studies the language of the "land of the rising sun" at VFU "Chernorizets Hrabar", where the rare language has been taught for six years. The Department of Foreign Language Teaching and Postgraduate Qualification develops its language palette with classes in English and Portuguese. Studying foreign languages increases the competitiveness of graduates of Varna Free University and gives them the opportunity to include in their professional portfolio the command of two or three languages, including rare ones.
Yoanna Hristova is a graduate of the Fourth Foreign Language School Frederic Joliot Curie in Varna and is fluent in French, Spanish, English, Russian and Japanese. She designed the cover illustration of Ivanka Getsova-Momcheva's children's book "Star Stories. First Meetings with the Stars for Children and Parents". At the end of 2022, Yoanna presented her first solo exhibition "Jajda" (Thirst) to the Varna general public. In the period 2018 - 2022, she completed three projects - a poetry collection with internal illustrations and two book cover illustrations. She participated in the second edition of the "Illustration Biennale" in 2020 with two works. She was awarded an incentive award in the illustration competition for the book "Phoenix - The Temple of Life" by Elisaveta Loginova in 2021.
