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Pethau Bychain

September 1st, 2010

Pethau Bychain have designated this Friday (3rd September) as a day to celebrate the use of Welsh online. It’s inviting people to make a pledge to create something in Welsh online, from blog posts to videos to websites.

This is an interesting approach to stimulating bottom-up content creation as well as generating a buzz and hopefully some publicity.

I don’t know if they have plans to make it an annual event? It would be interesting to try to get schools involved in this, maybe with a bit of sponsorship for some prizes… or I am getting too far away from the original spirit?

Of course this raises the issue of what I will be doing… hmmm…

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Lack of census

August 20th, 2010

It has been reported by the BBC that the 2011 census may be the last census of its type and that other sources of data, such as that available from the Post Office, local government and credit checking agencies will be used instead.

I wonder how many credit checking agencies record Welsh speaking ability in their records?

It seems to me that the end of the census would result in the loss of one of the most important sources of data about the Welsh language and the detailed analysis that can be done of the data, e.g. Aitchison, J. & Carter, H. “Spreading the Word: The Welsh Language 2001”. The census data informs much of the language planning activity in Wales and elsewhere in the UK. I wonder what alternative plans there are to gather this data and how this will be paid for.

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I see from a story on the BBC that English language speeches in the Welsh Assembly will no longer be translated into Welsh in the official record of proceedings. While this has raised eyebrows/objections/hackles in various quarters for a variety of different reasons, it is interesting that part of the argument in favour of this refers to “…proposals to make the records of our debates and proceedings more user-friendly by imaginative use of modern technology.” Given the importance of parallel bilingual texts for technology such as Google Translate, I can’t help wondering whether this will in fact inhibit the use (imaginative or otherwise) of Welsh in future modern technology and whether the strategic goal to “increase participation in the democratic process here in Wales”, will ultimately result in cementing English as the language of Welsh politics.

While this may be an easy way to save £250,000 in austere times, we should perhaps be mindful of unintended consequences, both directly for the language and indirectly in terms of the erosion of the Assembly’s claim to be “an exemplar organisation in its delivery of bilingual services.” Exemplar organisations are needed to develop and demonstrate innovative, effective, affordable, responsive bilingual organisational practices – if the Welsh Assembly can’t fulfil this role, who else will?

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The latest issue of BookCrossing News includes a call for volunteers to form teams to translate the forthcoming BookCrossing 2.0 interface. The call doesn’t mention any specific languages, and they are only looking for teams of up to three people – so will we see BookCrossing in Welsh, we’ll have to wait and see.

Read on if you are interested in the call…

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Is having a language enough?

March 17th, 2010

Last night I watched Week In Week Out: A Broken Heart – “Reporter Phil Parry returns to the village of Llangeitho after twenty years as he investigates the health of the Welsh language in its traditional strongholds, and asks some uncomfortable questions about its future.” Part of the programme was an interview with Alun Ffred Jones, the Minister for Heritage. A couple of the comments he made brought me back to thinking about what it would mean for Wales to be a truly bilingual country…

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BBC Strategic Review

March 3rd, 2010

I have always considered the BBC’s online Welsh language news service and material for people learning the language to be significant landmarks on the Welsh language virtual linguistic landscape. Therefore the potential impact of the recent Strategic Review on this provision has been a point of concern for me; is this provision under threat?

Having read through the Strategic Review, I am not really 100% certain one way or the other.

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EBLUL closes

March 1st, 2010

One of the mailing lists I subscribe to has just carried an announcement that the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages has closed. From their site I notice that the news service Eurolang is also currently closed.

Does anyone know if there is a story behind this, or is it just coincidence – perhaps funding sources that just happened to run out at more or less the same time? Are new organisations emerging to champion the cause of lesser used languages or is the language agenda less important in these times of economic crisis?

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Changing rooms at Debenhams

September 8th, 2009

As the words were leaving my mouth, I knew the question I was asking was stupid, “Are the changing rooms here?” The look on the faces of the two ladies on the till only served to confirm the fact. I was clearly and obviously standing at the checkout.

What was I thinking, or rather, what language was I thinking in…

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Google gyfieithu

September 2nd, 2009

Whilst idly considering the issues of bilingual blogging I came across an announcement about Google Translate on the murmur blog.

Google Translate now includes Welsh among its languages, but by Google’s own admission the quality of translation is “still a little rough”…

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Web2.0 and Bilingualism

August 19th, 2009

Implications of web2.0 for bilingualism on websites – towards best practice

Goblygiadau gwe2.0 ar gyfer gwefannau dwyieithog – tuag at arfer gorau

This has just been released by the Welsh Language Board. It explores issues, good practice and suggestions for organisations which are planning to make web2.0 services available bilingually.

It is an independent report commissioned by the Board from me, with the assistance of Courtenay Honeycutt (Indiana University) and the input of a number of stakeholders.

It is very much intended to be a discussion starter, rather than a definitive statement, so please feel free to join the discussion here…

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This morning I woke up and knew where the mistake was in the calculations.

So the estimate was wrong, but how wrong…

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I was reflecting on my last blog post about opportunities provided by new media and whether or not the Welsh language was taking advantage of these opportunities, and this led me to wonder how many Welsh language blogs we would expect there to be, and how many there actually are. So I set out to do some estimates…

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Planet Wicipedia

July 21st, 2009

There’s a nice little English-language article “Look it up in Wicipedia” published in the latest issue of Planet (195, pp 27-31) written by Craig Owen Jones from Bangor University (startling that such a fresh-faced young man should have responsibility for Punk Rock!).

The article makes a number of interesting points…

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Yet another funny (perhaps, though the joke is wearing a little thin now) story about a mistranslated sign Walkers’ sign lost in translation – you know the sort of thing, English says “look left”, Welsh says “look right”... hang on, that sounds awfully familiar…

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Having previously suggested that Google might be doing some interesting things with regards to minority languages, I was delighted to receive the following press release about the Apertium Welsh-English translator.

I know that they have had a few set-backs in the past, and they seem like nice guys, so it is great to see them getting a bit of a boost.

I think Fran’s comments about not getting any Welsh students applying for the post are interesting – many people have commented that Wales should be well-placed to be a leader in bilingual software design, localisation, translation technology and so on, and we have some great people doing some excellent work around the country – maybe we need to think about how this might be more directly fed into the computing and other curricula in universities to really build a knowledge/skill base and develop an industry.

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