FC Barcelona and Fundació.cat sign agreement to promote and defend the Catalan language in the digital realm

The president of FC Barcelona, Joan Laporta, and the institutional vice-president, Elena Fort, signed this Monday with the president of Fundació.cat, Genís Roca, an agreement whereby the two organisation will work together in the coming year with the aim of developing strategic projects to promote and defend Catalan in the digital realm. The event was also attended by Roger Serra, general director of the Fundació .cat and Albert Cuesta, its coordinator of digital positioning and secretary of the Alliance for the Digital Presence of Catalan.

This agreement promoted by the club's Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Department in association with the data department of the technology and digital transformation area is about recovering Catalan's position in internet search engines.

Loss of visibility of web content in the Catalan language, a reality

For several months, web pages in Catalan have been losing the place in search engine results in favour of versions of the same content in other languages, even when users set their browsers to make a priority of Catalan.

Progress has been made in finding out the reason for this, thanks to the numerous informal inquiries made to search engine producers and interested parties. The main organisations for the promotion and defence of Catalan (Acció cultural del País Valencià, Amical Wikimedia, Fundació.cat, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Institut Ramon Llull, Obra Cultural Balear, Òmnium Cultural, Plataforma per la Llengua, Softcatalà and WICCAC) have joined forces to create the Alliance for the digital presence of Catalan and are dedicating technical resources, knowledge and mobilisation capacity to diagnose the problem and help to reverse it.

The non-profit organisation Fundació.cat has undertaken, with the support of the other organisations and the Government of Catalonia, a draft report of the initial situation, based on objective traffic data from search engines for a large number of websites that offer content in Catalan and other languages. FC Barcelona is currently a patron of Fundació.cat and will contribute to the transfer of data to prepare this report.

Fundació.cat is mainly dedicated to the management of the .cat domain; to the promotion and promotion of the Catalan language and culture on the internet; and the creation of valuable digital solutions and services at the crossover between digital technologies and innovation.