TURKISH WILL BE ONE OF THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGES OF THE EU

Minister for EU Affairs and Chief Negotiator Egemen Bagis attended the award ceremony of the Young Translators Competition 2012, organised by the Ministry for EU Affairs. Bagis indicated that Turkish, though belatedly, would be one of the official languages of the EU. Bagis said Turkey made amazing efforts to translate the acquis communaitare into Turkish.

In his speech he made in the awards ceremony held in TOBB Plaza, Istanbul Bagis said:

''Turkish, though belatedly, will be one of the official languages of the EU. Naturally, we make great efforts to translate the acquis communaitare into our language in order to be able to take the necessary steps in Turkey’s EU accession process. We started a new cooperation with the universities for that. In this process together with our universities we put a different kind of potential to good use. The adoption of the acquis will increase the standards of living, law, democracy and transparency in this country and today the acquis is translated not only by the official staff of the state but also by the contribution of students and future administrators of the country. 27 different universities showed interest to this competition and this indicates that the EU accession process that is to say the reform, democratisation and transparency process of Turkey has been adopted by the whole country. It has now become a process adopted by Turkey as a whole. Turkey is one of the few countries which attach great importance to foreign language education of their children. However, after a 6 years foreign language education in our country competency in that foreign language is unfortunately very low. So I believe that in the forthcoming period we should make efforts together with the Ministry of National Education to improve the quality of foreign language education."