Languages
English, Spanish and Catalan. Pick yours.
This site is written in three languages. You can switch here, and here is how one gets picked for you when you do not pick.
How a language gets picked when you do not pick one.
We look at the country you are coming from, and nothing else.
The first time you arrive we know nothing about you except the country your browser is connecting from, which the network serving this site tells us. That gets it right nearly every time, nothing has to be asked of you, and nothing has to be stored yet.
Which language each country gets.
- From Spain and from the countries in the Americas where Spanish is official, the site is served in Spanish.
- From Andorra, in Catalan: there it is the official language of the country.
- From anywhere else, in British English.
- If the country cannot be worked out — some connections do not say — the site is served in Spanish, which is the language everything is written in first.
Catalan never arrives on its own. You have to ask for it.
Not even in Catalonia. That is our decision and it is worth saying out loud: in Spain the site opens in Spanish, and anyone who wants it in Catalan changes it here or from the header. A site that assumes someone coming from Girona reads in Catalan gets it wrong for a great many people who live in Girona.
Andorra is the exception, because there Catalan is not one language of two but the official language of the country. There it is served without anyone asking.
What you pick wins, and it is remembered.
As soon as you pick a language it is stored in your browser, and from then on your choice comes before the country. If you are travelling, if you are on a client’s network or if your connection comes out somewhere else, the site stays in the language you asked for.
One thing is stored for this and one only: which language you want. Clearing the site data in your browser removes it, and the country takes over again.
To change it, come back here. The link is in the header of every page, with the language you are reading in on show, and in the footer as well.
The addresses are the same in all three languages.
The contact page is /es/contacto/, /ca/contacto/ and /en/contacto/. Only the first part changes; the rest of the address stays in Spanish in all three.
That is deliberate. Translating the rest as well would mean keeping three lists of eight hundred matching addresses, and every line missing from one of them would be a page that cannot be found — the kind nobody notices until a client goes looking for it. With one skeleton, a link that works in one language works in all three.
The one address that does change is this one: /es/idiomas/, /ca/idiomes/ and /en/languages/. This is the page people look for precisely when the site is not in their language, and there a word you recognise helps more than consistency does.
If your language is missing.
There are three, and no others are planned for now. If you need something from this site in another language, write to us and we will talk it through.