Catalan Translation Services

Brightlines provides Catalan translation services for clients across the UK and internationally. As a UK translation agency, Brightlines works with brands and consumer businesses entering the market, public-sector bodies and local authorities operating under the Generalitat de Catalunya, legal and compliance teams handling jurisdiction-specific content, publishers producing Catalan editions, tourism and hospitality businesses operating in Catalonia and organisations with Catalan-speaking workforces. Brightlines matches every project to a translator with native Catalan command and confirmed sector experience.

Catalan at a glance

• Script: Latin alphabet with additional accented characters (à, è, é, í, ï, ò, ó, ú, ü, ç) and the digraph l·l (with a punt volat or "raised dot"). Spelling and accent rules are codified by the Institut d'Estudis Catalans.
• Speakers: Approximately 5 million active Catalan speakers in Catalonia, plus Catalan as the sole official language of Andorra. Catalan shares linguistic roots with Valencian (spoken in the Valencian Community) and the Balearic varieties (Mallorquí, Menorquí, Eivissenc), but these are recognised under their own names in their respective regions.
• Grammar and structure: Catalan is a Romance language closer to Occitan and Italian than to Spanish in some structural features. It uses a Latin-based grammar with two genders, articles that contract with prepositions (al, del, pel), and a verb system that includes a periphrastic past tense (vaig parlar) found in few other Romance languages.
• Translation risk: The largest commercial risk for Catalan is treating it as Spanish. Catalan content produced by a Spanish translator, or content for a Catalan-speaking audience delivered in Spanish, is a frequent misstep that signals the organisation does not understand the market. Public-sector bodies in Catalonia have formal language requirements that Spanish translation does not satisfy, and Catalan consumer audiences respond to Catalan content as evidence that an organisation has taken the market seriously.
• AI suitability: AI training data for Catalan is sparse compared to Spanish, and AI output for Catalan frequently contains Spanish-influenced vocabulary, grammatical errors and register failures. Human review by a Catalan translator is required on every project.

How clients use our Catalan translation services

• Brand and marketing copy for the Catalan-speaking market: consumer and B2B campaign content, advertising and brand communications for Catalonia. Creative Translation is essential because Catalan brand work reads very differently from Spanish brand work, and producing Catalan as a token translation of Spanish source copy fails to reach the audience that responds to genuine Catalan content.
• Public-sector and institutional content: government communications, local authority materials, public information and compliance documentation for organisations operating under the Generalitat de Catalunya. Specialist Led Translation is required because public-sector Catalan follows institutional register conventions and the formal terminology established by the Institut d'Estudis Catalans.
• Tourism, hospitality and publishing content: brand and operational materials for tourism and hospitality businesses, plus publishing content for the Catalan literary market. Creative Translation for consumer and editorial content, with Specialist Led Translation for operational and reference materials. Catalonia is one of Europe's largest tourism destinations and has a substantial independent publishing industry.

What you get with Brightlines

Catalan translators matched to sector

For you: translators native to Catalan and matched to the content type, not Spanish translators handling Catalan as an afterthought.

Brightlines works with Catalan translators who are native to Catalonia and hold professional experience in the relevant content sector. A public-sector translator brings command of institutional register and the conventions used by the Generalitat de Catalunya. A brand translator brings the warmth and cultural fluency Catalan consumer content requires. A publishing translator brings the literary register and editorial voice the Catalan publishing market expects.

Human-led review of Catalan grammar, vocabulary and the distinction from Spanish

For you: Catalan accuracy, register fit and absence of Spanish interference confirmed before delivery, not after audience feedback.

All Catalan translation work at Brightlines goes through a human review stage that checks Catalan grammar, vocabulary, register appropriateness and the absence of Spanish-influenced forms against the project brief. The review confirms that the content reads as written for Catalan-speaking audiences in Catalonia, not as Spanish content with Catalan vocabulary substituted.

Get a quote for Catalan translation services in the UK

Brightlines is a UK translation agency providing Catalan translation services to brands, public-sector bodies, legal and compliance teams, publishers, tourism and hospitality businesses and organisations with Catalan-speaking audiences in Catalonia and Andorra. We work with brand and marketing copy, public-sector and institutional content, legal and certified translation, publishing translation and tourism and hospitality content, matching every project to a translator native to Catalan and the relevant content sector. If you need Catalan translation that reaches Catalan-speaking audiences as Catalan rather than as translated Spanish, talk to us about your project.