The European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO) has just announced 933 job vacancies for translators coming from any of the EU's 27 Member States. The jobs are for a 1-3 year contract (or in some cases, more).
EPSO has determined a specific quota for each (main) language, as follows:
Note: the above table is an extract from the official notice of competition. You can only apply for one language.
The pre-selection exams, provided there are more than 600 applicants in a given language (which is almost certain for at least 15-18 languages), will include:
- numerical reasning in your main language
- verbal reasoning in your main language
- verbal reasoning in your 2nd language (English, French or German, different from the main one)
- verbal reasoning in any of the EU's 23 official languages (different from the above two)
Online EU Training offers verbal reasoning tests in English, French, German, Polish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Greek, along with numerical reasoning tests in English and French.
For those language where pre-selection exams are needed, they take place in March-April 2012 - you can sit the computer based tests in any of the EU's 27 Member States, or maybe even beyond (information not yet provided by EPSO).
The salary depends on your professional experience and background, but the net monthly amount starts at around 3000 EUR and may go up to 5000 EUR (also depending on family circumstances, number of children etc.).
In all cases, there will be a so-called CV sift, which is a check of your professional background (qualifications, education) and a scoring that, in a positive scenario, will result in you being invited for the second stage of the recruitment, a live translation exercise without a dictionary.
Important: you do not need to be a qualified translator to apply. Having a translation degree is a plus, but others with a law, economics, finance or engineering and translation experience, or any diploma in any subject with translation experience with English, French or German languages are equally fine.
Deadline to apply: 29 November 2011 noon (Brussels time).
More details: http://europa.eu/epso/doc/final_call_2011_en.pdf
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