Results of the 2020 Maurine Dallas Watkins Sight Translation Contests have been announced by Eta Sigma Phi, the national honorary society for Classical Studies.
Two of the 27 prizes awarded this year went to a St. Olaf student: Vania Liang, a sophomore Classics major from Beijing, China, took first place in Intermediate Classical Greek and tied for second place in Koine Greek. Congratulations to Vania!
The other winners are from Hillsdale College (3 prizes), Stockton University (1 prize), the Catholic University of America (3 prizes), the University of California, Davis (5 prizes), the University of Georgia (7 prizes), the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (1 prize), and the University of Kentucky (5 prizes).
Students must be enrolled in an ancient Greek or Latin course at the intermediate or advanced level to be eligible to compete in one or more of these categories: Classical Greek (Intermediate or Advanced Level), Koine Greek, Latin (Intermediate or Advanced Level), Latin Prose Composition. After students take the written exams at St. Olaf in February, their papers are mailed to a national distribution center and sent out from there to be evaluated anonymously by judges at universities elsewhere in the country. The winners receive monetary awards as well as national recognition.
In the Maurine Dallas Watkins Contests, St. Olaf College has the best record of any school in the United States, with at least one winner nearly every year since 1980. Click here for a list of previous winners.