The Spanish government attributes to an "error" the surreal attempted translation to Spanish of Catalan place names in this Wednesday's Official State Gazette (BOE) which lists the localities affected by a storm last April. According to sources from the Spanish agriculture ministry consulted by ElNacional.cat, "it is an error" and "a correction will be sent to the BOE as soon as possible", specifically this Friday. Thus, the Spanish executive assumes the mistake and closes the controversy that has been generated by the official publication of the text.
According to the document - which dates from September 14th - the county of Pallars Jussà is Pajares de Yuso, while the Baix Camp is called Bajo Campo. Curiously, the BOE leaves the names of the provinces of Lleida and Girona in their original - and official - Catalan form, but attempts to "Spanishize" the names of the smaller units, the counties: thus the Pla d'Urgell county is changed to the Plana de Urgel and the county of Moianès is described as Moyanés. In the demarcation of Tarragona, the Priorat is considered the Priorato, the Conca de Barberà becomes the Cuenca de Barberá and the Terra Alta county, is rebaptized as the Tierra Alta. All this, in spite of the fact that the original, Catalan form for these place names in Catalonia is the only official form.
The Spanish translations of the toponyms appear in an annex to the royal decree that establishes the regulatory bases for the granting of state aid to areas affected by the frosts of Storm Ciril, which struck in April. It is a document drawn up by the Spanish agriculture, fisheries and food ministry, led by the Valencian politician Luis Planas Puchades (PSOE). The decree is the result of a plan whicih granted subsidies of more than 12 million euros for the fruit growing centres affected by the exceptionally cold spring weather, amounting to a maximum of 200,000 euros per beneficiary.
An insult to the Catalan language
Former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont called these translations an insult to the language and a new form of xenophobia on the part of the Spanish government, as he wrote in a tweet. "The insult to the Catalan language and its status as an official language (including place names) is published in the Official Spanish State Gazette. The government lacks respects to a grotesque extent. Laughing at our words is a form of xenophobia. An official offence to the language of an entire people", he wrote, indignantly, on Twitter, in a message accompanied by the BOE page showing all the names "translated" to Spanish.
An artificiaI intelligence translation to three languages, in 2023
After the Spanish government had abandoned the publications of a Catalan version of the State Gazette in 2021, it made a pledge in March this year to once again translate the official publication into Catalan, as well as to Basque and Galician, from 2023. On this issue, the PSOE and the PDeCAT reached an agreement under which the state agency responsible for the publications would launch a project to translate the legislative texts into the co-official languages, using artificial intelligence, starting in 2023. Thus the two parties agreed, via a transactional amendment to a non-law proposition presented by the Catalan party to the Territorial Policy Commission of the Congress of Deputies, which obtained majority support in the lower house.