Celebrating two decades of Catalan news in English

In 20 years, our coun­try has un­der­gone great changes, surely more than most coun­tries around us. Today, no one ques­tions the in­ter­na­tional char­ac­ter of the Cata­lan econ­omy and es­pe­cially of its cap­i­tal, Barcelona. Twenty years ago, when Cat­alo­nia Today was born, the re­al­ity was com­pletely dif­fer­ent. But it was ob­vi­ous that glob­al­i­sa­tion, which caused the com­mer­cial ex­plo­sion of the in­ter­net, was going to turn the Eng­lish lan­guage into an es­sen­tial tool that every so­ci­ety had to mas­ter. Not only that, how­ever: it was the lan­guage in which our coun­try could ad­dress the world di­rectly using the new tools of in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. At the same time, there was a grow­ing aware­ness that Cata­lan so­ci­ety did not have the Eng­lish lan­guage skills to meet the chal­lenge of glob­al­i­sa­tion. In coun­tries around us, knowl­edge of the Eng­lish lan­guage was su­pe­rior to ours, and this lim­ited our op­por­tu­ni­ties to com­pete in the new eco­nomic and so­cial con­text. Ac­cord­ing to the 2023 Ed­u­ca­tion First re­port, Cat­alo­nia cur­rently has an “av­er­age” level of Eng­lish, sim­i­lar to that of Italy, but below the Nether­lands, Aus­tria or Den­mark, which have a “very high” pro­fi­ciency. This long­stand­ing lan­guage gap, and the fact that Cat­alo­nia is a coun­try that has tra­di­tion­ally had an in­ter­na­tional out­look and an econ­omy open to the world, meant that there was a real need for an Eng­lish pub­li­ca­tion con­ceived from a Cata­lan view­point but ex­pressed in the global lan­guage. Twenty years have passed since the first issue of this mag­a­zine (this is issue num­ber 486) and today no one doubts the im­por­tance of hav­ing a pub­li­ca­tion in Eng­lish that con­tributes to this in­ter­na­tional out­look, or that read­ing Cata­lan con­tent in Eng­lish is a way of in­ter­na­tion­al­is­ing the coun­try. I hope read­ers can enjoy read­ing the mag­a­zine for many more years to come, and offer a big thank you to our team, con­trib­u­tors, read­ers and sub­scribers, and all our friends for all your sup­port over the past two decades. Here’s to many more an­niver­saries, Cat­alo­nia Today!