More Web2.0 in Welsh
January 21st, 2008
I know this one has been lurking on the fringes for a while – but I guess it is live now – perthyn.com. I haven’t joined it yet, but it seems to be a Welsh language social networking site – personal profiles, friends, blogs, groups, forums, music, video… is there anything it doesn’t have?!
Interesting – unfortunately the Andanom Ni doesn’t give too much away. Maybe if my Welsh was better I’d be able to figure out more about it – anyone know who’s behind it? Anyone a member? The “bilingual” locations list on the search page puzzled me for a while!
Posted by djcunlif | Tagged with web2.0
January 21st, 2008 at 04:29 PM More on the way too - a really exciting Welsh (bilingual) video content site to be launched in Feb 2008. I'll have more details soon... Have you seen the new fangled www.maes-e.com too? Just been upgraded to phpBB3. V.nice.
January 22nd, 2008 at 09:09 AM Site seems to have most of the functionality that one of these social networking sites needs to have to compete. As it's in Welsh though, and I'd guess there's not that many in Welsh, then it'll probably do well, if it hasn't already. Is there a link to an English Translation of the main content and navigation? I couldn't find one. If there isn't then that's interesting, and from my point of view, very good. If people building Welsh language sites in Welsh dont feel the need to provide English translations of the main content, then it would be only fair if English language sites don't have to provide Welsh translations of their content. I know this isn't a government funded site, well I don't think it is anyway, and therefore not legally bound or advised to do so, but the point is valid. I'd guess that the people who've made the site haven't provided a full translation to english as they are a corporate business. As a business they have to keep a very close eye on costs. They've realised that there's no point in releasing an English version of the site, the people who go to the site will want to read it in Welsh. The extra cast would be a waste of money and time. If you follow that line of thought, when you go to an English content site, you want to read it in English, and providing a Welsh translation of the site would be a waste of time and money. If it isn't your money though, and there is absolutely no accountability in the place where you work, then there is always going to be people who think there should be a Welsh translation of every word on all the pages of the site, as they don't realise the cost in any way shape or form. Would every member of staff in the University mind giving the web team 500 pounds each, per annum, to fully translate the glam site into Welsh? I don't think they would to be honest. Why are the news items in English on Perthyn? Because they probably haven't got the resource/money to have them translated on the fly would be my guess. Bravo perthyn.com, a Welsh site in Welsh in Wales, so can we have English sites in English in Wales then?"
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:52 AM
Almost all English language sites don't provide Welsh translations of their content. We certainly can have English sites in English in Wales, indeed we can have French sites in French in Wales. The only exception is when we have an English site in English delivering services in Wales and they fall under the auspices of the Welsh Language Act. Organisations - such as the university of Glamorgan - have volunteered to prepare Welsh Language Schemes. One of the "natural" consequences of operating in a bilingual country is the need to operate in two languages.
I don't know who is behind the site - but my guess would be that the reasons the site is Welsh only are not commercial, but are better understood as a form of language "activism" - this is a deliberate decision to create a Welsh language community as an alternative to other social networking sites which tend to be dominated by the English language. There are a number of sites which I would place in this category - and more to come as I understand. You could argue that excluding English deliberately in order to promote the Welsh language is morally more defensible than excluding the Welsh language because it will add additional costs.
The cost of translation is an interesting issue - as you say in practice the resources are not available to provide a fully bilingual service, so resources must be prioritised. What is less well understood is how to prioritise. I suspect that a lot of the content on the University site is fairly static so there would be reduced costs after the initial translation and a good translation memory could reduce ongoing costs.
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:08 PM Fair play to perthyn.com for going ahead with the enterprise - they already have over 1000 members. However, social networking sites built for a language niche will always leave a certain amount of people out because they don't provide a somewhat equal translation. For example, I'm a native Welsh speaker, and even though I support the idea behind perthyn.com, I'm not a member. Nor do I intend to become one at the moment. Many of my non-welsh speaking friends would be lost at the site, and so I'd rather use a site that I can keep in touch with all my friends, rather than feeling the need to reiterate things in Welsh on another site. Interestingly, facebook have recently announced that they'll be opening their platform to be translated (see http://www.facebook.com/translations/), and there's a group on facebook (with almost 3,000 members) that's campaigning for a Welsh translation - Gweplyfr (or wyneblyfr) - http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2263349767
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:12 PM Hi Daniel You could argue that excluding English deliberately in order to promote the Welsh language is morally more defensible than excluding the Welsh language because it will add additional costs. Morally, hmm, not going down that track. :-) You can't do something that costs money without money though Daniel. You could also argue that deliberately excluding English translations of sites is doing exactly the opposite of promoting the Welsh language, as nobody other than Welsh speaking people can read it. So you'd be promoting welsh language to people who already speak Welsh. Nearly all the sites in the University of Glamorgan umbrella are dynamic CMS driven applications, not alot of static content at all. So the reduction in costs would be minimal. We've built the application to handle Welsh translation, and will continue to do so in our new applications, that alone takes resource. This'll be interesting. Does anyone know how much a translator would charge to translate 500 words from English to Welsh? I bet it's not cheap.
January 22nd, 2008 at 01:16 PM
Leaving aside the issue of free translation, for example in the Open Source community, I presume that there is a budget for the website (though I might well be wrong!). I don't believe that there is a budget specifically for an English language website, rather than provide MORE content in English, perhaps the existing budget should be targeted towards providing a better Welsh language service - no additional costs involved! The University employs its own translators (not enough of them judging by how busy they are!) - maybe it is just a case of adequate resourcing to meet need, rather than thinking about it as a whole additional cost burden.
Of course there is a real issue about the visibility of the language to non-speakers, and I agree that it is important than non-speakers are exposed to the language and appreciate that Wales is a bilingual country - a good argument for more Welsh language provision on websites?
Sorry, I was a little unclear, when I said "static" I didn't mean that the pages were hard-coded in XHTML, but that the content itself was fairly static. Any idea how much new content or amendments is generated on a yearly basis? And how much of that would need to be newly translated because it wasn't already included in the translation memory?
Does anyone know of any real cost analysis relating to bilingual provision? Or is this another one of those areas where we are forced to rely on intuition and personal opinion?
January 22nd, 2008 at 01:18 PM Matt:I would argue that social networking sites wouldn't work bilingually anyway, especially if it's a diglossic situation. The "stronger" language will always override the "weaker". You can see this on English language message boards that have a Welsh language section. It nearly always gets disrupted by people using online translating tools or taking the piss (see www.aber.co.uk or the Western Mail forums). Therefore it is a necessity for sites like Perthyn to be Welsh only for them to function. The site has been set up by an individual wanting to create a community for young people where Welsh is the language in use. That simple. He saw a gap and filled it. It already has over 1000 members. Niche social networking and 2.0 sites are going to be popping up all the time now I think. It's a nonsense to say that you need a huge critical mass for a soc. net site to work. You just need a busy group that share an interest! Anyway, peopl will have a persona on one site and severl others on others. There's no certainty of commitment to one site any more.
Having websites solely in Welsh is no argument for not having bilingual websites where they are public services or organisations with a Welsh Language Policy. And most sites in Wales are...English already. Most Welsh sites are in English! There's no imbalance in that way! For me it is not a waste of money, it is simply a case of redressing the balance. Public services are funded by, and are for, the public that speak both languages - therefore Welsh speakers should be able to receive those public services in Welsh also. However, nobody is saying that all content, without exception, needs to be translated into Welsh. Common sense on the part of Welsh Language Officers should be able to stop this.
January 22nd, 2008 at 01:24 PM
The use of Welsh in Facebook is something that interests me. Certainly it is used - as it is on numerous other social networking sites, blogs etc. Do you (Aled) use Welsh on Facebook, or do you only use English as some of your friends are non Welsh-speaking? As a non-speaker I am always very conscious when people choose to switch their conversation into English so that I can take-part. It is interesting to see if this "courtesy" behaviours carry over into online settings - and if so, what effect this has on language use, both at an individual level (does it encourage Aled to use English in other online situations) and at a society level (does the lack of Welsh change peoples perceptions about the "value" or "status" of the language).
Unfortunately the short answer to these questions is "we don't know". The long answer is "give me some funding and we'll find out!"
January 22nd, 2008 at 01:34 PM Is it possible to get free translation from English to Welsh in the Open Source Community that is up to a standard that Welsh Speakers would accept? Send us a link if there is.
January 22nd, 2008 at 02:27 PM
Sorry - meant free translation by people for Open Source projects. I am not aware of any reliable, free translation software, though there do appear to be a few unreliable ones!
January 22nd, 2008 at 03:26 PM Perthyn.com was set up and is maintained by a guy called Luke Williams and although he's selling add space on it (and using Google Ads), I think this is to help with costs rather than trying to be a commercial site, which he hopes to sell on to Google on Rurdoch in a few years for £50m. I don't think you can compare Perthyn with Glam Uni's site either. One's a hobby and the other's a public institution. I don't know whether the English version has been left out on principle, or Luke didn't think having an option to switch the interface to English/German/Basque/Mandarin would be necessary. As to him not having the resources to translate to English, I bet whatever software he's using was already in English and that;'s what he translated it from into Welsh. I find it strange that some still consider having something in Welsh is 'promoting' the language, while having something in English is just seen as a normal way of providing information to someone.
January 22nd, 2008 at 03:36 PM With regards to Open Source Project translation. There's a crazy amount of duplication taking place from my experience. I'm doing a bit on Wordpress now and I know I've translated many of the string plenty of times in the past. When Nireblog was being translated, the Welsh version was around 50% complete before anyone even started as they'd managed to use strings from translations of other sites in the past - don't ask me how. 500 translated commercially would cost around £20, maybe cheaper if you had a deal with someone - or free if using your own in house translators. Many of the translating firms and dept now use memory software which identifies past sentences/paragraphs which save lots of time, but I doubt if the firms pass this saving on to customers!
January 22nd, 2008 at 05:06 PM
Mea culpa! Rhys is right - I do have a tendency to subscribe to the school of thought which sees using a minority language as a conscious act of politico-linguistic resistance - when in fact it is just someone speaking their mother tongue.
Whilst there are some Welsh language sites that were clearly started with a language promotion objective (e.g. in terms of intending to encourage more people to read or write in Welsh) - it is clearly not the case for all, or even most of them.
Of course one of the things I am interested in is the use of the internet for language activism - so I tend to see language activists everywhere, rather than just people who happen to use Welsh online!
I would certainly see English language websites as promoting the English language, I guess it just looks less like promotion because it is not clear that there is any real need to promote it. Perhaps if Chinese starts to become the dominant language on the internet, the notion of sites promoting English will be more apparent. In a Welsh context it could be suggested that a website only in English is promoting the English language to the (possible/probable/definite?) detriment of the Welsh language.
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:58 AM @Daniel - I and most of my friends on facebook use its functionality on a bilingual basis - what's interesting is that even though I may be friends with someone who can speak Welsh; I don't necessarily do so when talking to them (force of habit, i suppose); and this is reflected online on facebook. All of my facebook friends know I'm a Welsh speaker, and when I write in Welsh, many non-Welsh speakers will understand some elements of it (punctuation and emoticons gives the gist too). I tend not to make a point or a stand of writing in Welsh - its often a case of what pops into my head, or depends on what I'm replying to. One thing is certain: facebook dropping the "is" in their status updates has made it even easier (and more grammatically correct) to write in Welsh! With regards to translation, or rather localisation - how local can you go in terms of Welsh? Maes-e at one point had two variations of language - formal and informal. Both were location neutral, but you can take it further by making a Gog and Southern version. And East and West. And etc...
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:18 AM Hi, I came accross this page when checking out my site stats. I am the creator of Perthyn.com. To address the comments about why I have decided to omit the English translation, this is just for marketing purposes. That simple. I think that marketing a Welsh site is easier than marketing a bilingual site to Welsh speakers. I do have an English translation, and might when the site needs the English translation to grow; include it at a later date. At the moment though the site is growing at a steady pace and I dont feel I need to do this. There is no budget as you call it and I am not funded by any gpart of the Welsh government all the money that is needed to keep the site going is my own hard earned money. I belive in the Product and think that my investment in the site is a sound one. At the moment the site is treated as a hobby but when I feel I have enough people on the site to do so, I will be introducing a comertial element. Ideas include subscriptions to businesses that will give them special privilages e.g. The ability to send mailshots to all their aquired friends at once. A shop will be put on Perthyn where members can buy promotianal merchandise with the points they earn on Perthyn but will also be able to buy other products like Welsh Music CD's T-Shirts etc using Paypal. I am very exited about the future of Perthyn and I see that the site has had a few column inches on the www as well as getting exposure on a few local radio stations all with minimal promotion investment. When I get to about 2500 members I will be going after the Welsh TV programmes too. All the best Luke Williams
January 23rd, 2008 at 03:02 PM The main University website does not have a 'budget' in itself, apart from the staff employed to run it. The content isn't static - that's why we have a team of 4 in the marketing department whose full-time job it is to manage, produce, edit and maintain content. Any development we do has to come 'free' and we are reliant on the technical and design genius of our colleagues in the IS Dev team to provide this.
January 23rd, 2008 at 04:08 PM One interesting 2.0 news snippet I saw recently is that the Catalan Government - the Generalitat - have funded and set up a website where professionals (i.e. doctors/teachers etc) can set up their own blogs, fora (both private and public) and more. I think it's an amazing idea. I'm sure that it will all be in Catalan and Spanish too so it could be very interesting case study for you Daniel. Check it out: E-Catalunya
January 23rd, 2008 at 04:14 PM One more thing - some Linux people have a site called Kywiro which aims to collect translated terms for ope nsource software. It's part of the Kyfieithu project.
January 25th, 2008 at 09:03 AM
Well, this little post has stimulated an interesting discussion - thanks everyone!
Aled - thanks, your comments reinforce the point that the language behaviour of bilinguals is complex, and that we don't really have much of an understanding about what language choices bilinguals make, or why. I guess one of the problems is that these things are just difficult to study. Maybe I could just come and peer over your shoulder for a couple of weeks!
Luke - thanks for providing a bit of an insight into the thinking behind perthyn and for yet again reminding me that not every act of language use is an act of language activism! You have been added to my list of people I need to sit down and have a long conversation with at some point (as are several other readers of this blog - you have been warned!). There are so many interesting Welsh language online things happening, but very little investigation into the whats and whys behind them.
Bex - Thanks for the insight into the way our website is run. If you ever want someone to argue that is really needs a budget, let me know. So currently, how does the Welsh provision get created? Are there Welsh language skills within the team, or do you rely on goodwill and free translations? The lack of a budget, and a specific budget for Welsh language provision would appear to be slightly at odds with the Welsh Language Scheme which states "The University is committed to developing and increasing the bilingual provision in its web site and will adopt an action plan to achieve this." Does the action plan exist - is it available for inspection?
Rhodri - thanks for the pointers, will definitely check them out!
January 25th, 2008 at 03:06 PM Quote Daniel Cunliffe Said "There are so many interesting Welsh language online things happening, but very little investigation into the whats and whys behind them." I will be launching a new site next month due to the exiting new increase of Welsh sites. It will be an advertising gateway aimed at Welsh website Publishers, kind of like google adsense but without the complicated algorithms. The site will allow website publishers to sell adspace on their site, including text ads, banner ads and video ads. The publishers set the price e.g £1 a day, £25 a month or even 4p per click and also get to approve or reject ads. We will only be allowing Welsh or Bilingual sites to sell space so that advetisers can find a one stop shop for all their Targeted Welsh Site Marketing needs. We will be allowing Welsh and English Ads but the Publisher can decide to omit English ads if they like. I am putting the site together really so I can have more control over the type of ads I show on Perthyn.com when we get to a scalable size. Luke Ps seems i dont have to earn 2500 members before going to the TV companies, I've got an Interview on "Hacio" Next week. It is going to be shown on S4C next thursday I think.