Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Catalan Literary Translation and the need to Prioritize Minority Languages By Ismenia Miranda As a lover of literature and a student of translation, I became curious about the quality of literary translation in Spain, especially of works in minoritized languages. Out of the country's numerous officially recognized regional languages, Catalan is the most widely spoken with 9 million speakers, so I decided to focus my inquiry there. Various circumstances and barriers would not make this investigation easy or straightforward. Like in many places in the world, there is waning interest in reading as a form of entertainment in Spain. Additionally, there are not many available studies chronicling the publishing trends of translated works from English or Spanish into Catalan and vice versa.
[00:00:53] So to start, I decided to pay a conceptual visit to the premier language institutions of Spain, the Royal Spanish Academy and the Institute of Catalan studies. Founded in 1713, the RE has dedicated itself to stabilizing and standardizing the use of the Spanish language using a largely prescriptivist approach.
[00:01:16] That is, they provide information on how to write and speak Spanish. If you ever have a debate on what the right word is or the most correct way of structuring a phrase, they have the final say. The ray's influence on Spanish speakers linguistic sensibilities is also apparent. There are certain features the average Spanish reader will find grating. The silver lining here is that assessing the quality of translation into Spanish is now remarkably easy, or at least relatively easy, as compared to languages following a more descriptivist, flexible linguistic. Naturally, the Institut of Catalan Studies, or Institut de Studis Catalans, functions similarly, though it stresses a secondary function of serving as a cultural reference as well. Ultimately, they too set the norms for the use of the language. However, a quick navigation through their website shows a markedly different tone than that of the ray. There is more mention of representing all Catalan users of every variety, including Valencian. They highlight the following quote from the president of the institute, Teresa if we really want there to be a model that is global and allows the linguistic cohesion of all regions, the model cannot be limited to academic norms, much less, if it is focused on the norms of a few regions, it it must expand with the varieties. This distinction in the overall intention of these influential institutions begs the Do Catalan speakers judge works in Catalan the way Spanish speakers do works in Spanish? In other words, are the tastes of individuals who view Catalan as their mother tongue different from those who consider their mother tongue Spanish? And furthermore, how does this apply to literary translation quality in Catalonia and Greater Spain? Historically, there have been initiatives to position Castilian Spanish as the only national language of Spain. This was not made clearer than by the series of strict language policies imposed during the Franco regime following the Spanish Civil War from 1939 to 1975. During this period, the use of newly minoritized languages, including Catalan, Galician, and Basque, was strictly prohibited and prosecutable. To give a sense of the tension, typical public signage displayed during this period read don't bark, speak the language of the empire. I've heard stories of people being physically assaulted by law enforcement for speaking Catalan in public.
[00:03:56] Despite much of these language policies and practices being reversed in later years, language ideologies, the cultural beliefs associated with the treatment and status of languages informed by these policies persist. Those coming of age under the regime had no academic or standardized exposure to Catalan, in contrast to today's youth who now take it as a required subject in school. Which brings us to the nature of quality in the Catalan publishing industry. Publishers Weekly describes the book industry in Catalonia as small but vibrant. It is home to two large Spanish language publishing conglomerates, Grupo Planeta and Penguin Random House. Grupo Editorial Catalonia also hosts a variety of independent Spanish language publishing companies.
[00:04:48] Publishers Weekly notes that There are nearly 100 publishers working with texts in Catalan, with the Catalan publishing industry amounting to about 10% of publishing businesses in Spain. Based on the articles I collected, this figure tends to stay consistently around 10%.
[00:05:06] None of the articles or reports really describe the notion of translation quality or public perceptions of Translated works. 12016 article by Catalan News stressed the need to translate works of fiction to Catalan as a strategy to increase readership, particularly for younger audiences, but there was no indication of how this was intended to be done or whether this had any connection to translation quality. Since a crawl through the Internet wasn't bringing me any closer to answering my questions, I decided to do the next best thing talk to a human being. I tapped my Spanish translation professor on the shoulder, knowing he is a working literary translator in Barcelona and of Catalan descent. Surely he had some insight on the matter.
[00:05:54] First, he told me that the quality assurance process for translators in Spain is not entirely transparent. It's typical for the editing process to focus more on semantic and syntactic errors as opposed to any holistic or stylistic ones. Next, he explained that some publishers purchase the translation rights for both Spanish and Catalan with the intention of only ever translating into Spanish, a strategy to reduce competition that the Catalan version could cause and ultimately reduce the cost of having to produce both versions. He spoke more about book centric national holidays and stipulations in translation contracts. But my mind kept returning to the previous distribution competition, and sales were these valid reasons for excluding Catalan from literary publishing.
[00:06:46] Many young people in Catalonia speak a combination of Catalan and Spanish. They code switch mid conversation easily. Ultimately, it's true that there are very few people who are monolingual speakers of Catalan. Books could very well be published in the Spanish market exclusively in Spanish and hit their sales targets. But what would be lost in the process? What happens when we choose not to value minority languages?
[00:07:14] These questions strike at the heart of why we localize in the first place. In my view, Catalan is a language of beauty and resistance and one deserving of high quality literary translation.
[00:07:28] This article was written by Ysmenia Miranda, a translation and localization management student at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. She also volunteers as a plain language editor at Clear Global and works as a generative AI associate for Inner Daughter, Inc. Originally published in Multilingual Magazine, Issue 237, February 2025.
