As mentioned earlier, the Catalan Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Institut d’Estudis Catalans) was established as the normative authority. Since the pass of the Act on Catalan Sign Language, different actions have been undertaken by this institution (and other relevant institutions in the Deaf community) in order to start a process of standardization. The most important one was the establishment of the LSC corpus project. This project was set up by the Catalan Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Institut d’Estudis Catalans), and was possible thanks to funding from Obra Social “La Caixa” through the Department of Culture of the Catalan Government. The aim of the corpus project was to obtain a representative sample of the variation of LSC across the country from native LSC signers.
In order to achieve this goal, different signers were recorded from Deaf associations all over the Catalan territory in collaboration with the Catalan Federation for the Deaf (FESOCA). Signers where recorded in pairs (always man-woman) and they were distributed in three different groups of age: 18-30 years-old, 30-50 years-old, and 50-80 years-old. Only participants with Deaf relatives (parents or siblings) or having attended specific schools for the deaf were selected for the recordings.
All the recordings for the corpus were conducted by an expert Deaf interviewer in order to avoid influence from spoken language. Eight different tasks were presented to the signers, each one having different objectives, and thus different elicitation techniques were used for each task. All tasks are annotated using ELAN, a free software that allows to synchronize video files with annotation tiers.
Related to the corpus project, in 2016, another project was also set up by the Catalan Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The aim of this project was to create a lexical database using all the existing lexicographic works on LSC, expanding it and connecting it to the corpus. This would facilitate the annotation and classification of all the recorded corpus material as well.
The corpus and the lexical database will allow two types of searches: i) open to anyone, and ii) addressed only to researchers or professionals related to LSC, with restricted access. In the former one, the following filters will be available: location of the recording, activity, type of discourse (monologue or dialogue), discourse genre (descriptive, argumentative or narrative), date of the recording, age group (18-29, 30-49 or more than 50 years old), and gender (man or woman). In the latter one, other more specific filters will be available, related to aspects of the signers and his/her linguistic, social and educational environment. All the information about the progress in the corpus project and the lexical database are updated and published in the Catalan Sign Language Portal (Portal de la llengua de signes catalana), a public website. This website also allows access to the first basic grammar on LSC written in 2005, in LSC, Catalan and English.
Apart from the creation of the corpus and the lexical database, other relevant actions have taken place since the passing of the Act in order to promote LSC. Since 2008, the Catalan Sign Language Seminar is organized by the Catalan Federation for the Deaf (FESOCA), in collaboration with the Catalan Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In this workshop the most relevant studies in different fields related to LSC are presented. Both deaf and hearing members of the Catalan Sign language community take part in it.
In 2014, the Catalan Sign Language Award was given for the first time by the Catalan Federation for the Deaf in order to recognize Deaf community members who have a long trajectory working for the defense and promotion of LSC in Catalonia.
In 2015, the Department of Culture of the Catalan government gave for the first time the Award for the promotion of Catalan Sign Language.
In 2017, the General Direction of Language Policy (Direcció general de política lingüística) of the Catalan government, in order to promote LSC, published in its website an online basic vocabulary of LSC. The lexicon included in this vocabulary was created by LSC experts from the Catalan Federation for the Deaf (FESOCA), who have a wide experience teaching the language.
In 2018 the State Confederation of the Deaf has presented LSC (along with LSE) as candidate for intangible heritage of the State. Moreover, the General Direction of Language Policy (Direcció general de política lingüística) of the Catalan government has allocated specific funding for projects that aim at promoting LSC.
Pompeu Fabra University also contributes to the promotion of LSC with different actions. One of the most remarkable ones is the yearly Award for the best final project related to LSC for high school students.
Moreover, the General Direction of Language Policy, in collaboration with different experts and with the Catalan Federation for the Deaf, has engaged in the adaptation of the different levels of LSC teaching according to the guidelines of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.
Regarding the promotion of sign language in the national media, LSC interpreters are provided in the Catalan public television (TV3) mainly for the interpretation of TV news. However, not all daily TV news programs are broadcasted with LSC interpretation, and subtitles is the option most commonly offered to deaf people. Moreover, there is a website TV channel (WebvisualTV), produced and directed by Deaf people, which provides news in LSC related primarily to the Deaf community.
In relation to the education of deaf children in Catalonia, there are some bilingual programs (LSC-Catalan) in primary school. These projects already existed before the passing of the Act on LSC and are mainly located in the Barcelona area. The existence of such programs is essential to guarantee the rights of deaf children to develop in their natural language. Notwithstanding, the actual situation does not fulfill the needs of this population for many different reasons. First, most of the educators working in these programs are hearing people who have acquired LSC as a second language. Moreover, even though LSC is one of the languages of instruction in the program, it is not treated in the same way as the other languages (Catalan or Spanish), that is to say, it is not taught as a subject in the classroom. This is not possible due to the lack of Deaf teachers. Besides, there are not good assessment tools to evaluate the linguistic abilities of the children. This situation leads deaf children born in hearing families to an incomplete acquisition of the language, and thus their competence in LSC is not comparable to the competence of a native signer [SOCIO-HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 2.4].
As for interpretation training programmes, nowadays in Catalonia sign language interpreters are trained at the public university. Pompeu Fabra University is the only one across the territory that offers sign language interpreting training. LSC is included as a working language in the BAs for Translation and Interpretation Studies and Applied Languages along with spoken English, German and French [SOCIO-HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 2.4]. The first regulated studies on sign language interpretation, though, were created in 1990 by INCANOP, the Catalan Institute for New Professions (Institut Català de Noves Professions). In 1998, a two-year vocational training was created that included not only Catalan sign language interpretation but also Spanish sign language, International Sign and Deaf-blind interpreting. This vocational training was transformed into a Communicative Mediation vocational training in 2016, which focused not only in sign language interpretation, but in other aspects of mediation in general.
In parallel to formal training, Deaf associations, and other private and public institutions, offer basic sign language communication courses. The complete offer of training programmes of different levels of education can be consulted in an interactive map located in the website of the Department of Culture of the Catalan government.
Furthermore, in 2015, Pompeu Fabra University created a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course): Introduction to Catalan Sign Language: speaking with your hands and hearing with your eyes. This massive online course was offered in three languages: Catalan, Spanish and English, which allowed the participation of people from every country in the world in two different editions.