Brain-teasers for Olympiad competitors

TWO pupils from St Joseph’s School, Spanish Point, Tara Comber and Sean Hanrahan, took part in the recent All-Ireland Linguistics Olympiad Finals, the search to find Ireland’s top young decoders at Dublin City University (DCU).

The best performers at the national finals were selected to represent Ireland at the International Linguistics Olympiad in Manchester, UK in July 2013.

The Olympiad, run by the Science Foundation Ireland-funded Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), challenged secondary-school pupils to apply logic and reasoning skills to solve complex language puzzles in unfamiliar languages. The contest aims to inspire the next generation of multilingual technology graduates, who possess a powerful blend of language competency and problem-solving expertise.

At the finals of this year’s competition, the country’s top 100 decipherers tackled a series of brain-teasing challenges in little-known or endangered languages. The problems covered everything from interpreting Armenian railway maps, to translating sentences into the fictional Yoda Speak language made famous in the Star Wars movies.