A CHANGE OF DIRECTION

Twenty years ago, I’d been in Cat­alo­nia for 13 years. Mar­ried to a local girl who had not long be­fore given birth to our first child, I was pretty sure that this was going to be where I would set­tle for life. I was also pretty sure that teach­ing Eng­lish would con­tinue to be my cho­sen pro­fes­sion, and I was ready to in­vest a tidy sum of money into doing an ad­vanced train­ing course to im­prove my job prospects as an Eng­lish teacher.

But as we all know, life has a funny way of de­rail­ing our best laid plans. A chance en­counter at a din­ner party with Stephen Bur­gen, Cat­alo­nia Today’s first Ed­i­tor, led to me typ­ing these words two decades later. Stephen told me that a jour­nal­ist who used to work for the El Punt news­pa­per, Car­les Puigde­mont, had started his own daily pub­li­ca­tion en­tirely in Eng­lish and that he was re­cruit­ing na­tive Eng­lish speak­ers with jour­nal­is­tic ex­pe­ri­ence. He in­vited me to come and meet Puigde­mont. The rest, as they say, is his­tory.

Yet while it was true that Cat­alo­nia Today was look­ing for Eng­lish na­tive speak­ers with jour­nal­is­tic ex­pe­ri­ence, and also true that I ticked both boxes, I think that one main rea­son Car­les was in­ter­ested in me was be­cause of my Cata­lan. I had never got very far with Span­ish and after only a cou­ple of years I switched to Cata­lan be­cause most of the peo­ple in my life spoke Cata­lan. By 2004, I had been speak­ing the lan­guage for 10 years and so my level was quite good, as was my knowl­edge of Cata­lan so­ci­ety and cul­ture. It may not be so dif­fi­cult to find today, but 20 years ago there weren’t many na­tive Eng­lish speak­ers with jour­nal­is­tic ex­pe­ri­ence with a high level of Cata­lan who were also in­te­grated into the local so­ci­ety. These char­ac­ter­is­tics made me a good fit for Cat­alo­nia Today and the pub­li­ca­tion of­fered me the change of pro­fes­sional di­rec­tion I didn’t know I was look­ing for. (Eng­lish teach­ing is a fine pro­fes­sion and a job I en­joyed but I’m not sure I was par­tic­u­larly good at it and so I jumped at the chance of a change.)

So why did my level of Cata­lan and my knowl­edge of Cata­lan so­ci­ety and cul­ture make me such a good fit for Cat­alo­nia Today?

One of the pub­li­ca­tion’s key goals is to ex­plain Cat­alo­nia in all its com­plex­ity in Eng­lish, so an Eng­lish-speak­ing jour­nal­ist who is in­te­grated into Cata­lan so­ci­ety is the ideal per­son to do this. That is es­pe­cially true if we re­mem­ber that some of Cat­alo­nia Today’s read­ers might only have a su­per­fi­cial knowl­edge of Cat­alo­nia and its pol­i­tics, his­tory, cul­ture or tra­di­tions. So, any ar­ti­cle deal­ing with those is­sues will be more un­der­stand­able and com­mu­ni­cate its point bet­ter if it passes through the fil­ter of some­one with a pro­file like mine.

Sec­ondly, the bril­liant part of Puigde­mont’s idea is not that it fol­lowed the model of the free news­pa­per funded by ad­ver­tis­ing, a con­cept that al­ready ex­isted, but that Cat­alo­nia Today was born in the El Punt sta­ble. To fill a news­pa­per re­quires a large work­force of jour­nal­ists and ed­i­tors who also need the time to take ar­ti­cles from the idea stage to pub­li­ca­tion. But if you have rel­e­vant con­tent avail­able that is fresh and that has been pro­duced and vet­ted by qual­i­fied jour­nal­ists and ed­i­tors, then pro­duc­ing an Eng­lish ver­sion of that ar­ti­cle is rel­a­tively sim­ple, as long as you have a small num­ber of peo­ple with the skills to trans­late and adapt it so that it is suit­able for an Eng­lish-speak­ing read­er­ship. Cat­alo­nia Today al­ways has and al­ways will pro­duce its own orig­i­nal ma­te­r­ial, but hav­ing the op­tion of draw­ing on the work pro­duced by El Punt Avui’s staff and adapt­ing it for our pub­li­ca­tion is a fac­tor that made the pro­ject fea­si­ble in the first place.

That is why my Cata­lan was as im­por­tant as my Eng­lish and my jour­nal­is­tic abil­i­ties when Car­les took me on 20 years ago. And I’m not the only one, there are more like me at Cat­alo­nia Today and to­gether for 20 years we have ex­plained Cat­alo­nia in Eng­lish like no other pub­li­ca­tion I’ve ever en­coun­tered. Here’s to the next 20!

Opin­ion