Catalan companies increasingly fined for publishing information only in Spanish

ALMOST a hundred Catalan companies have been fined so far this year for using only Spanish in their signage.

The region’s consumer code requires that businesses publish all public information ‘at least in Catalan’.

The government has been cracking down as its desire to secede from Madrid and enforce Catalan as the predominant language grows.

Companies who write signs, menus or catalogues only in Spanish can be fined from hundreds to thousands of euros, depending on size or the amount of untranslated language.

Citizens can report defiant businesses anonymously.

A librarian, Roger Sueba, has claimed to have denounced 5,000 companies.

In 2015, the number of businesses sanctioned grew from 57 to 68, with fines totalling almost €150,000.

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Laurence Dollimore

Laurence Dollimore is a Spanish-speaking, NCTJ-trained journalist with almost a decade’s worth of experience.
The London native has a BA in International Relations from the University of Leeds and and an MA in the same subject from Queen Mary University London.
He earned his gold star diploma in multimedia journalism at the prestigious News Associates in London in 2016, before immediately joining the Olive Press at their offices on the Costa del Sol.
After a five-year stint, Laurence returned to the UK to work as a senior reporter at the Mail Online, where he remained for two years before coming back to the Olive Press as Digital Editor in 2023.
He continues to work for the biggest newspapers in the UK, who hire him to investigate and report on stories in Spain.
These include the Daily Mail, Telegraph, Mail Online, Mail on Sunday and The Sun and Sun Online.
He has broken world exclusives on everything from the Madeleine McCann case to the anti-tourism movement in Tenerife.

GOT A STORY? Contact newsdesk@theolivepress.es or call +34 951 273 575 Twitter: @olivepress

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