In July 2022, Viquipèdia detected that content in Catalan was no longer preferred in Internet searches. The Google algorithm had altered the parameters, so that the search results no longer prioritized the pages in Catalan even though the user had configured the search engine with this language. The organizations that ensure the use of the Catalan language notified Google in September, but until Christmas the digital giant went off on a tangent, among other reasons “because it did not understand what had happened.”
Those who will refer to these details are Genís Roca, president of Fundació .cat, and Albert Cuesta, secretary of the new Alliance for the Digital Presence of Catalan (APDC), in which Fundació . cat assumes the technical secretariat. APDC is made up of Acció Cultural del País Valencià, Amical Wikimedia, Fundació .cat, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Institut Ramon Llull, Òmnium Cultural, Plataforma per la Llengua, Softcatalà and WICCAC, organizations from the different Catalan-speaking territories.
“Google is one of the most serious cases –says Roca–, because they don’t know how to correct it, and they 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 been investing 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 to you, and on the other hand, a Seat doesn’t speak it. We don’t want to go against anyone, but this argument helps us to set Seat as an example.”
APDC will work “so that the linguistic rights of Catalan speakers are respected by companies around 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 been associated. And we also want to do it with the governments of all the Catalan-speaking territories”.
But those responsible stress that it is an initiative of civil entities, and that governments “are part of the ecosystem” and want to relate to them. 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, as in the cases of search engines, voice assistants, social networks, electrical appliances such as televisions, etc.” To correct these shortcomings, “APDC establishes itself as an interlocutor, and each association will intervene in its field”.
Cuesta speaks of “civil diplomacy”, of 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 in that company.” The way to intervene will be to “identify the actors, public or private, that determine the presence of Catalan and collaborate to make the necessary tools available to them; create an observatory to see if the improvement actions are being carried out, and follow up so that the anomaly that has happened now does not happen”.
Those responsible for APDC work with objectives based on data and consider that “demand actions have to be the last resort.” “We Catalans have a role to play in defending cultures in the digital world”, concludes Roca.
Catalan version, here
