The Classical Association of the Middle West and South is among the oldest and most distinguished learned societies for classical studies in North America, with a membership comprising university faculty, schoolteachers, and independent scholars who have devoted their professional lives to the Greek and Latin traditions. Its annual Latin Translation Contest is held under that same standard of seriousness: competitors — drawn from both high schools and universities across the United States and Canada — are presented with an unseen passage of Latin prose or verse and asked to render it into English with precision, fidelity, and literary grace.
That last requirement matters. The contest does not reward a student who has decoded the grammar correctly but produced something that reads as no one would ever write. It asks for translation in the fullest sense: a passage that carries the meaning of the original and something of its character. This is considerably harder than it sounds, and it is why the contest is taken seriously by serious Latinists. The judges are classicists. They know what Latin sounds like, and they know what good English sounds like, and they can tell when a translation has achieved both at once.
The field is composed almost entirely of students from the United States and Canada — schools with long traditions in Latin, some of them among the most prestigious classical institutions in North America. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, whose students appear regularly among the winners, is one such school. Sung Won Cho and Yeonwoo Sung placed above nearly all of them.
They did so as students in Korea, working in a language that is not the language of their daily lives, competing against a field for whom English is the native tongue. The translation contest requires not only command of Latin but the ability to write with elegance and precision in English. To place second and third in that competition, under those conditions, is a distinction that does not require inflation to be understood as remarkable.
A note on Kelly Sung’s placing in particular. She sat this contest as a ninth-grader — the same year she earned an Honorable Mention at the International Philosophy Olympiad in Slovenia. To place third in the CAMWS Translation Contest at that age, in a competition that includes university students and draws from the strongest Latin programs in North America, is not the result of precocity alone. It is the result of a formation that was already, at fourteen, producing the kind of Latin and English that the judges of a serious scholarly society were willing to recognize. We are proud of both students and record their results here accordingly.