In July 2022, Wikipedia detected that Catalan content was no longer preferred in internet searches. Google’s algorithm had altered the parameters so that the search results no longer prioritized pages in Catalan even though the user had configured the search engine with this language. The bodies that oversee the use of the Catalan language warned Google in September, but until Christmas the digital giant fled the study, among other reasons “because it did not understand what had happened”.
Those who refer to these details are Genís Roca, president of the .cat Foundation, and Albert Cuesta, secretary of the new Alliance for the Digital Presence of Catalan (APDC), for which the .cat Foundation assumes the technical secretariat.
The APDC is made up of Acció Cultural del País Valencià, Amical Wikimedia, the .cat Foundation, the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, the Ramon Llull Institute, Òmnium Cultural, Plataforma per la Llengua, Softcatalà and WICCAC, organizations from the different territories Catalan speaking.
“Google is one of the most serious cases – says Roca – because they don’t know how to correct it and have explicitly stated that they have nothing against the Catalan language”. Roca says that they do not see “a black hand” and Cuesta insists that “the situation must be diagnosed based on data, not perceptions”.
“We have made efforts to combat this problem, but it is not the only one.” And he illustrates it with an example: “You can buy a Tesla, a car that speaks Catalan, but a Seat doesn’t. We don’t want to go against anyone, but this argument serves us to set an example for Seat”.
The APDC will work “so that the linguistic rights of Catalan speakers are respected by companies all over the world”, says Cuesta. The secretary of the new alliance recalls that “since the .cat domain was created more than 15 years ago, it is the first time that so many entities have joined. And we also want to do it with the governments of all the Catalan-speaking territories”.
But those in charge point out that this is an initiative of civil organizations and that governments “are part of the ecosystem” and want to be involved. In fact, the alliance has been commissioned by the Generalitat de Catalunya to issue a report on the current situation of Catalan in digital environments.
Cuesta details: “We have identified eight areas in which the presence of Catalan is not satisfactory, such as in the cases of search engines, voice assistants, social networks, household appliances such as televisions, etc.”. To correct these shortcomings, “the APDC is established as an interlocutor, and each association will intervene in its area”.
Cuesta talks about “civil diplomacy”, the human factor: “Since we are not a State, we have to find a way to influence companies, sometimes through a Catalan-speaking person who works there”.
The way to intervene will be to “identify which are the actors, public or private, that determine the presence of Catalan and collaborate with them to make the necessary tools available to them; create an observatory or dashboard to see if improvement actions are being taken, and follow them up so that the anomaly that has happened now does not happen”.
Those responsible for the APDC work with objectives based on data and consider that “claim actions must be the last resort”. “Catalans have a role to play in the defense of cultures in the digital world”, concludes Roca.
