On Friday, 29thof March, the Minister of Justice Jānis Bordāns visited the State Language Centre, in order to discuss the highlights of the Centre's activities and the official language with the Director of the State Language Centre Māris Baltiņš.
During the visit, the Minister of Justice Jānis Bordāns welcomed the previous work of the State Language Centre in development of the Latvian language and supervision of its use, simultaneously confirming the readiness to support the activities initiated by the Centre. "The State Language Centre has proven itself as a modern state administration institution, which has been able to go along with the development of information technology. At the same time, the State Language Centre activates the volunteering in the public administration and involves the public to participate in the official language enrichment by creating public assistant institute, which provides advice to the use of the Latvian language and supports the implementation of the objectives of the Official Language Law," says the Minister of Justice Jānis Bordāns.
During the meeting, the Director of the State Language Centre Māris Baltiņš, speaking about the results of the work performed in the last year, stressed that according to the Centre's fields of competence, a particular attention was paid to language use in the process of the education reform implementation. This year, the development of the institute of public assistants will also be a topical issue. Currently, 34 voluntary public assistants operate throughout Latvia. In turn, the mobile app “Valodas draugs” (Language Friend) is downloaded by 1590 users since 24 January 2018. Within one year, the app has become an important source of information. Through the app, the State Language Centre has received 882 reports, of which 30 are commendations and 297 are complaints submitted for further consideration.
Simultaneously, since 12 December 2018, the State Language Centre in cooperation with the Latvian Academy of Sciences has established the National Terminology Portal, which summarises the sectoral terminology with the objective of providing a common and topical stock of terms developed in Latvia. The portal of the State Language Centre is constantly replenished with new and clarified terms.
Among the rest, the Minister of Justice Jānis Bordāns thanked the Director of the State Language Centre Māris Baltiņš and the staff of the State Language Centre for the initiative in organizing campaigns such as “Quality of the Latvian language in the periodicals” and “Latvian language-friendly environment”, since implementation of such campaigns motivates the media and the economic operators to respect the official language and respect the requirements of the State Language Law.