The Scientific Board of the State Translation Centre (AzSTC), chaired by Afag Masud, on Friday held its next meeting.

The AzSTC Chair, in her opening remarks, reviewed the work of the Translation Centre, outlining the 2019 projects and stressing the progress regarding official language use and the steps to improve translation quality. “We at AzSTC obviously have been conducting expert reviews of the webpages of state-run entities since 2015," Afag Masud said. "The reviews, in which we provided examples of stylistic, lexical and grammatical errors, had revealed flaws in general in the content found in the texts on the webpages. We prepared and submitted such expert reviews to more than 100 government agencies, yet the situation remained unchanged. However, we have succeeded in tackling this issue in recent years. Therefore, in order to overcome these challenges, we embarked on new projects to improve the quality of language and translation at the local level, to identify professional translators, and to oversee the standard for these fields. We created our own Database that includes the list of translators, passing the second round of examinations and becoming Certificate holders. We officially informed the government agencies on them."

"The next more important step in the proper use of the official language was to prepare a perfect spelling dictionary, and we tackled this gap as quickly as possible. Thus, the existing spelling dictionary, full of flaws, has been replaced with our updated edition entitled “Spelling Dictionary of the Azerbaijani Language”, an initiative, making it easily available and accessible to government agencies as well as related organizations. It is gratifying that our activities that called for intellectual thinking and were carried out for many years yielded positive results. Thus, the latest monitoring results show that the situation  has profoundly changed in this area, and most government agencies have profoundly changed their webpages in compliance with the norms and rules for Azerbaijani literary language, with flaws in texts (English and Russian sections) being significantly reduced. Thus, the unfavourable impression across Internet space has been changed for the better. Since this year as well, we have observed the same turnaround in the media: numerous grammatical, lexical and stylistic errors found in the texts of many websites and portals in previous years were reduced in terms of official language use. To hear all this is certainly gratifying, and I wish to emphasize particularly the progress we have achieved, resulting from great intellectual work.”

Later, the meeting heard reports on AzSTC’s 2019 work; local and international publication projects; a new edition of the ‘Spelling Dictionary of the Azerbaijan Language’; an exchange of viewpoints on teaching guides for higher education institutions; and the translation and publication of scientific literature.

In the end, the meeting focused on AzSTC 2020 Thematic Plan, its presence abroad, and further steps to improve language and translation quality.

In conclusion, the event saw the creation of “Diploma of Honour for Significant Contributions into Translation”, which was set up by the Translation Centre to assess the contributions of translators to the translation industry.  

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