Criteria for translating into English is the subject of the subsection Translation, but there are two important points to be made about using abbreviations in our multilingual institutional context.

First, if you need to provide English versions of the full names of university offices or government institutions, do not translate their abbreviations. For example, the English name of a university office called the Oficina de Programes Internacionals (OPI) would be the Office for International Programmes (OPI). And the English names of the Diari Oficial de la Generalitat de Catalunya, the Diari Oficial de la Generalitat Valenciana and the Boletín Oficial del Estado would be the Official Journal of the Government of Catalonia (DOGC), the Official Journal of the Government of Valencia (DOGV) and the Official Gazette of the Government of Spain (BOE), respectively.

Second, a number of very frequent abbreviations in Catalan-speaking universities come from common noun phrases that have no official English equivalent (PTGAS from personal tècnic, de gestió i d’administració i serveis, PDI from personal docent i investigador, SED from secretaria d’estudiants i docència and PAT from pla d’acció tutorial). In these cases, explain or paraphrase the full term the first time it occurs in a text and then use only the Catalan abbreviation for the rest of the text. This way, English-language readers can be more effectively helped to understand their non-English institutional environment.