Organizers

LingvaFest’ 2019 is organized by:

Organizing team:

In case of necessity, you can contact each of the organizers.

Peter Baláž – Main organizer of the event, programme

Peter Baláž, also known as Petro in the Esperanto community, is an Esperanto speaker, publisher and editor; he was elected the Esperantist of the year in 2012. Petro lives in his hometown Partizánske and speaks to different extent the following languages: Slovak, Czech, German, Polish, Russian, English and Esperanto. Petro is very actively involved in the international Esperanto movement and various educational projects, in 2005 he became the coordinator of E@I. He’s famous for being an organizer of international events (mainly but not only Esperanto-related events) as well. He is a former board member of Wikimedia Slovakia and a member of its revision committee since 2012. He owns the Slovak publisher Espero founded in 2005, which mostly publishes Esperanto works. You can see further information on Wikipedia.

Contact: peter.balaz@lingvafest.sk

Michal Grodza – Volunteers coordinator

Michal comes from the eastern part of Slovakia and is able to communicate in English, Polish, French, Turkish Esperanto and has set on a mission to learn Hungarian. His love for languages originated from watching Cartoon Network as a child. He has graduated from Teaching of English. However, he has fallen in love with non-formal education and works like youth coach and facilitator of multicultural youth exchanges and training courses.

Contact: michal.grodza@lingvafest.sk

Zuzana Šplhová – Exhibitors, sponsors

Zuzana studied translation and interpretation. Now she works as an independent translator; she mostly likes to translate subtitles for film festivals. She’s currently fluent in English and Spanish, is learning Esperanto and aims to master Chinese next. During LingvaFest’ she’s in charge of communication with exhibitors and partners as well as helps in translations and various other parts of the event organizing process.

Contact: zuzana.splhova@lingvafest.sk

Dorota Rodzianko – Invoices, finances, orders

Dorota, 29, is from Poland and currently lives in Slovakia. She studied economics. Since 2010, she has been organizing international events in various European cities and countries. Since 2012, she’s been mostly in charge of administration of participants and finances. She has experience in organizing events with 50 to 300 participants (she was also involved in the organization of a worldwide event with 1300 participants).

Contact: dorota.rodzianko@lingvafest.sk

Matthieu Desplantes – Web support, technical assistance

Matthieu is from France but has been living in Slovakia since October 2013. He studied computer engineering for five years in Paris and now works with both computers and languages. He speaks (to various degrees) French, Esperanto, English, Slovak and Russian, and has basic knowledge of a few more languages. He has been involved in the organization of several international events, most of which are related to Esperanto.

Contact: matthieu.desplantes@lingvafest.sk

Peter Roman – PR and media

Peter might come from the eastern part of Slovakia, but he has also lived in France for a year as an exchange student and currently resides in Denmark where he studies a MA programme Development and International Relations. His travelling soul has made him fluent in Slovak, Czech, English, French and Danish, and he is currently learning Serbian. Besides learning languages, Peter likes to actively participate in volunteer activities in Slovakia, Denmark and Serbia in his free time, where he has taught English, as well as oragnized summer camps and trips for international students.

Kontakt: peter.roman@lingvafest.sk

Petronela Špirková – sponsors

Petronela was born in western Slovakia near Trencin. She studied Political and Cultural Geography at the University of Ostrava. Her passion for foreign languages, countries and cultures made her live, work and study in the Czech Republic, Belgium, United Kingdom and China. Professionally is active in the area of university international relations. Her favourite task has always been communication and interaction with foreign students. Currently fluent in English, Czech, less fluent in French, fighting with Chinese characters and tones.

Kontakt: petronela.spirkova@lingvafest.sk

Who we are and why we’re doing it

Our organization, Edukado@Interreto (E@I), has long had an idea of organizing a language festival in Slovakia. We’ve been working on the topic of education by means of internet since the beginning (2005), concerning language learning mostly. We create various free multilingual websites. Our activities began by creating the first ever multilingual website for learning the international language Esperanto: lernu.net. Esperanto bears a great significance for us (it’s even the working language in our international office), but we’re busy with other languages, too. We’ve been gradually adding further new projects and languages: slovake.eu, deutsch.info, mluvtecesky.net, speaklearn.eu, lingvo.info etc. Here you cane find an overview of our projects. Besides creating educational websites, we organize various events as well: trainings, seminars, workshops, conventions, summer schools. We’ve been focusing on languages since the organization came to life, and we’ve already noticed the absence of this kind of event in Slovakia. Thus we thought to change this, and now we’re extremely happy to have found like-minded people with whom now we can prepare the event for you!

The vision of E@I is a world of peace and harmony. In which all its citizens are able to quickly and easily communicate with one another all over the globe. The main aims in this direction are:

• to encourage intercultural education, collaboration and communication;
• to support learning and using of internet technologies and languages;
• to help realize the Charter of the United Nations and The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

In order to achieve these aims E@I initiates and supports projects involving international youth cooperantion, organizes educational and cultural activities related to the very aims of the organization and promotes the importance and necessity of international communication with no restrictions.

We find it pleasant to cooperate with The University of Economics in Bratislava and directly with its Faculty of Applied Languages. Therefore we’re very grateful to the university rector Ferdinand Daňo and the faculty dean Radoslav Štefančík. We’d like express our gratitude to the Slovak polyglot Lýdia Machová for her cooperation, who actively helps us organize the event as well as promotes effective language learning methods through her company Jazykový mentoring at the same time.