It was only belatedly, and then with vigour, that Bible and classics translations into Catalan became accepted practice. In the Catholic countries, direct reading of the Bible in any version other than the Vulgate had been prohibited since the Counter-Reformation. The first Catalan translation of the New Testament was accordingly begun, like so many others, under the auspices of the British and Foreign Bible Society; the translator was Josep-Melcior Prat i Solà (1781–1855), a Liberal politician in exile in England between 1823 and 1833. It was printed in 1832 and 1835, and reprinted in Barcelona in 1836 and in Madrid in 1888. Later in the century, several Catholic writers and members of the clergy translated fragments of biblical texts; those of the priest-poet Jacint Verdaguer stand out among them: a version of the Song of Songs and the passages of the four Gospels describing the Passion of Christ.

By the 20th century, the Institute of Catalan Studies (IEC), led by Frederic Clascar (1873–1919), had plans for a complete translation. Clascar’s death interrupted the project after the publication of the Book of Genesis (1915), the Song of Songs (1918) and, posthumously, Exodus (1925). Between 1928 and 1935, the institution Foment de Pietat Catalana published four volumes of a projected eight, aiming to comprise the entire Bible translated from the Vulgate; the Civil War put an end to it. In parallel, the Abbey of Montserrat published a literal translation, accompanied by numerous critical notes, of the whole biblical corpus. Between 1926 and 1936, eight volumes appeared; the remaining work was resumed after 1950. Alongside these projects, the Catalan Bible Foundation produced fifteen volumes between 1928 and 1948. The production of Bible translations has not abated since then.

Classics from Greek and Roman antiquity were only translated into Catalan when that language re-emerged as a language of learning in the second half of the 19th century. Interest (of an unremarkable nature, as the mere by-product of a classical schooling) had already been expressed in authors such as Horace from the very beginnings of the Renaixença movement. More significant was the interest in Anacreon; not only were some of his texts translated into Catalan, he was the subject of a doctoral thesis (1878) by the leading scholar Antoni Rubió i Lluch (1856–1937), who also translated Sappho. The most proficient translators were Joan Montserrat i Archs (1845–1895) and Joan Sardà (1851–1898). Montserrat, an active follower of renaixentista Romanticism, translated into Catalan works by Horace, Pindar and Tyrtaeus, as well as (apparently) the whole of the Iliad into Catalan prose (although only a small fragment with copious notes has survived). Joan Sardà is, without a doubt, the most important of all the classics translators of the time. In total he translated into prose and verse about 30 works by Horace, epigrams by Martial, a piece by Anacreon, 3 pieces by Catullus (unpublished) and a fragment of the Aeneid. A planned translation of Lucretius failed to materialize. For Sardà – who was a critic on the cutting edge of Catalan Realism-Naturalism debates – the classics were not merely a residue of traditional education; they provided aesthetic and ethical principles that would help him to assess the literature of his own age.

Other translators of note were the poet Miquel Costa i Llobera (1854–1922), and the poet and publicist Artur Masriera i Colomer (1860–1929). Other well-known Catalan writers of the time published translations of the classics: Eduard Vidal i Valenciano (Anacreon), Josep Roca i Roca (Euripides), Valentí Almirall (Herodotus, Petronius). They may have translated from an intermediary French translation, as Conrad Roure did in his version of the Iliad published in serial form in the Diari Català between 1879 and 1881.

Translations of Shakespeare first appeared in the last quarter of the 19th century. The first serious translation was a scene from Hamlet, by J. Franquesa i Gomis (in La Ilustració Catalana, 1880). Subsequently, there were more or less successful attempts by Artur Masriera and various others, including Salvador Vilaregut, who translated entire plays. In the age of Modernisme, Shakespeare was fashionable and as many as 18 works were published in the collection Biblioteca Popular dels Grans Mestres (1907-10), the aim of which was to translate all of his plays and popularize them.

Numerous collections containing translations, or mixtures of Catalan and foreign authors, were published in the first decades of the 20th century, e.g. the Biblioteca Literària (1917-25), directed by Josep Carner and Joan Estelrich, and the Biblioteca Univers (1928-36), directed by Carles Soldevila. In these publications the great names of world literature appeared in Catalan translation: Dante, Molière, Goldoni, Goethe, Byron, Hugo, Poe, Mistral, Ibsen, Tolstoj, Nietzsche and Dostoevskij. They were translated by writers doubling as translators and non-professional translators from the widest variety of fields.

The academic teaching of classical languages gained considerable strength after 1900, spawning authoritative translations and textbook editions of the classics. The magnum opus of this tradition, still unsurpassed among the Iberian languages, was the Bernat Metge Foundation collection, created and funded by Francesc Cambó, leader of the Catalanist party Lliga Regionalista de Catalunya. Founded in 1922, the Bernat Metge Foundation aimed to bring the classics to Catalan culture, to enrich the language and to train humanists. The first volume appeared in 1923 (Lucretius’ De rerum natura); to date, its collection runs to 385 volumes.