University of Glamorgan

Once again I find myself musing about bilingual packaging. This time Daioni milk has caught my attention. Is there something about dairy products or the dairy industry that particularly lends itself to being branded as “Welsh” or do I just spend more time staring at dairy packaging than other packaging? With the Exception of Halon Môn, all my examples of bilingual packaging are dairy products.

Anyway the Daioni label actually contains almost no Welsh, in fact I guess we could debate whether or not it should even be considered bilingual. But what did strike me was their website – fully bilingual. After several examples of the use of Welsh in branding NOT being extended to the website, it was refreshing to find an example where the opposite is true.

The website is actually quite nice too – I am a sucker for pictures of cute animals and that whole “these are the people (and cows) who make your milk” personal touch thing. Of course it isn’t perfect, would you like “Saesneg” or “Welsh”? And I’d suggest that the cross language links would be better leading you to the same page in the chose language rather than the homepage. But , come on – cute animals, who can resist?

As an aside, I see that the feed to BlogCymru is once again working, which means that my ruminations on milk labels and cute animals will shortly be appearing amidst some very earnest discussion about Welsh politics. No politics here – just milk labels.

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Plaid Cymru’s Adam Price has won the British Computer Society’s best MP website award, as reported in a piece on the BBCs website. It is not entirely clear what the criteria used were, though they are reported as “design, engagement, accessibility” with the best overall considered to be an outstanding example of the very best incorporation of all three qualities.

What encourages me about this is that Adam’s website is bilingual, showing that it is entirely possible to have an excellent site and make a bilingual provision – the two are not mutually exclusive as many people who resist making a bilingual provision might like us to believe.

However it is interesting to note that his blog, whilst featuring entries in both Welsh and English is not bilingual (not every story is available in both languages). This pattern of presenting relatively static content bilingually and more volatile content monolingually (usually in English) has certainly been a characteristic of Welsh political party websites, though Plaid has adopted a fully bilingual approach since the launch of their redesigned and rebranded website. Similar attitudes towards volatile content can also be seen on some commercial sites, Outlook Expeditions for example state “Due to the dynamic nature of this website we apologise we are unable to produce a Welsh translation. ” They do however offer to send a copy of their bilingual brochure (again static content). Once again we see the Welsh language being minorised not only in terms of content availability, but also in terms of a language of consumption (after translation) rather than original creation.

Thanks to Beverley for pointing this story out to me.

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In these times of the phony non-election campaign it is good to learn that the Downing Street website is now available in Welsh. This reveals to us all manner of interesting information, for example a page in Welsh about Tony Blair appears in the breadcrumb navigation as “You are here: home > Welsh homepage > Welsh PMs in history > Welsh Tony Blair”. Who would have thought that so many previous Prime Ministers were Welsh.

Of course, once they remove the news story from the Number 10 homepage the Welsh homepage will be rather harder to find. A search on “Cymraeg” doesn’t actually return the Welsh homepage, but it does return this page Welsh guide to Government which might come as a bit of a disappointment to anyone who thought they might actually get some information about Government in Welsh. The Welsh homepage is, somewhat un-obviously linked via the “other languages” button which is in the “Newsroom” section, listed after latest news, media centre, email updates, photo galleries and webchats. Just as well that they are “keen to make it more accessible to people in the UK and around the world”, just imagine if they were reluctant.

Yes of course I’m being grumpy and critical and I should be celebrating the fact that they have at least started and that they have started with Welsh. It’s a Monday, I haven’t had a cup of coffee yet and I have a cold. It’s my blog and I’ll be unsatisfied if I so choose! Anyway it’s Mike’s fault he sent me the link to the story.

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Oli Rhys posted an interested comment in response to my Language Choice in Bilingual Websites entry, in which he says:

”...The most realistic method for websites I have seen is to compare the logs of an English language page with a Welsh language page. The site was a public sector body, the site was well written and all links worked. So far, my studies have shown that the majority of people do not choose the Welsh language site. The figures seem to work out at around 1% of the population visit the Welsh version, when faced with a choice of Welsh or English. I’m coming to the conclusion that a lot of vocal Welsh readers, while in the privacy of their own homes do not practice what they preach! “

This reminded me of some of the work reported by Grahame Davies looking at the BBC’s Cymru’r Byd service. They noted disparities between what people said about what they read on the site in Welsh and the logs. As a result of this they adjusted the proportion of local and international news and increased hits on the site.

There are of course many dangers in drawing conclusions solely from server logs, particularly if these conclusions are then extrapolated to other sites and other users. Oli’s conclusion was that Welsh speakers simply chose not to use the site in Welsh. There are several possible interpretations of this:

1. He is right, it was simply a matter of personal choice.

2. He is wrong, actually all the Welsh speakers who visited the site used the Welsh provision, there just weren’t many of them.

3. He is wrong, there were factors in the design of the site or it’s content which dissuaded Welsh speakers from using the Welsh provision.

Server logs may tell us what happened (within some obvious limitations) but they never tell us why.

While interpretations 2 and 3 are of course interesting in themselves, in many ways I find interpretation 1 the most interesting. Welsh speakers are (almost?) without exception bilingual, they have two languages to choose from. As I have suggested previously, the factors influencing this choice online are likely to be numerous, complex and interrelated. I find it very frustrating that there has been little if any sociolinguisic research looking into language use by bilinguals in online environments, while there has been a huge amount of work for instance on code-switching in their spoken language.

Once again I find myself somewhat overwhelmed by the number of key questions we simply don’t have answers to.

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Having decided it was probably time I actually read some of the blogs I voted for in the WBA and having been a little cheeky about one of them, I have just dusted off my favored Pocket Modern Welsh Dictionary and gone off the have a look at morfablog. Thankfully there was an entry which quoted heavily from an English language blog, Blogamundo. Basically the question being posed was “Why can??????t your ATM remember what language you speak?”.

Obviously it could, but should it? OK it would be inconvenient if I were being offered a whole range of languages which I don’t speak (as is the case with the Barclays cashpoint on campus) but what about the adjacent Nat West cashpoint which offers me a choice of English or Welsh? As a non Welsh speaker, should the cashpoint not offer me the choice of Welsh? In a bilingual country, do I have the right or a choice as a monolingual person, not to be exposed to the other language? Or in a bilingual country should both languages be offered regardless?

It seems to me that there is benefit in a minority language being visible to both speakers and non-speakers, regardless of whether that is on public signs, cashpoint interfaces, websites or whatever.

I remember Jeremy Evas from the Welsh Language Board giving a very interesting presentation where he presented a scenario in which your Welsh/English language preference was known by the DVLA and when a traffic warden issued a parking ticket it would be issued in your preferred language. I did idly wonder at the time what would happen if I registered my preferred language as one I didn’t understand, would this be any sort of defense in court?

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I was just looking through the results of the questionnaire conducted by Eleri Wyn Jones (Monitor Cymru) for CMC at the Eisteddfod. There are a number of interesting tables presented, but one that I was particularly interested in was the “When available, do you use the Welsh Language side of a bilingual website” table.

From 32 responses, the following results were received:

66% every time; 22% sometimes; 13% depends on the provision; 0% never

By comparison, we did a very small study (13 responses) a few years back which gave the following results:

4 would always choose Welsh; 8 would sometimes choose Welsh; 1 would never choose Welsh

Factors influencing this choice were: their ability to understand the Welsh vocabulary; the clarity of the Welsh; their mood or ability to concentrate; how information was going to be used; and to support Welsh language provision.

We were also interested in what would make them switch to English. Eleven would switch from Welsh to English if the Welsh was poorly written, 12 if they encountered unfamiliar Welsh terminology, 9 if the content had obviously been translated from English and 12 if there was less information in the Welsh version. Additional reasons given included if the Welsh had a strong regional dialect, if the Welsh was too formal, and to ensure that both language versions included the same content.

We also looked at how the choice of language related to the topic of the site. In the case of a repair manual for a car, no one would ??????definitely?????? use Welsh; on the other hand, for visitor information about a local attraction, no one would ??????probably?????? or ??????definitely?????? use English.

This all suggests a couple of things to me. Firstly the language choice of bilinguals is complex and dynamic (both between visits to a site and during a visit to a site). Secondly we really don’t know much about the factors which influence this choice. Without answers to these questions are we really able to have an informed discussion about what is or isn’t a good bilingual website?

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Two quick things that I like at the moment, partly because of their use of Welsh and partly because they use cute graphics (I’m a sucker for anything that uses cute graphics).

 The first is Nanw’s Great Adventure from the National Library of Wales. A fun educational game that can be played in either Welsh or English. Personally I always find the mental mapping from the keyboard arrow keys to the isometric projection very difficult, which means I am rubbish at the game (at least that is my excuse).

The second is Darllen ‘da fi from S4C which has a nice collection of resources to encourage reading with children in Welsh (the site itself is available in both Welsh and English). You don’t see much of the cute graphics on the site, though there are some in the games section. They do a very nice alphabet poster featuring the cute graphics which I picked up at the Urdd (yes I got one for the kids too and I didn’t keep any of the stickers for myself).

Both of these put me in mind of Viv Edwards keynote at ICML XI, in which she mentioned the importance of high quality production values for minority language materials if they are to compete successfully with majority language materials.

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I have been doing some work on a presentation that I will be making at the International Conference on Minority Languages in Hungary later this week. The thrust of the presentation is on whether we can consider the internet as a virtual Linguistic Landscape (LL research usually focuses on signs in the physical landscape – e.g. on high streets, train stations etc). As part of this I started thinking about bilingual packaging, a very quick rummage around the kitchen turned up Spar Welsh milk and Glengettie Tea, both of which feature Welsh on their packaging. However neither Spar nor Typhoo feature any Welsh on their websites, not even on the Glengettie Tea page ("A favorite in Wales for generations") – something I have described as a "discontinuity" between the physical and virtual landscapes.

At the risk of being sent tons of packaging, I would be interested in other examples of bilingual packaging (Welsh/English only please – unless it is really cool). Physical items or scans welcome – contact details on my homepage. I’m not quite sure what I am going to do with them yet, but I’m sure I’ll think of something – (polite) suggestions welcome.

If anyone thinks that going to international conferences sounds glamorous and exciting, they are free to join me for a coffee at Cardiff airport tomorrow morning after I have checked in at 4am (flaming Jeeps and coffee shop opening hours permitting of course).

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Snowdonia Cheese… just try it!

 Yes – I have noticed that comments are coming up in reverse order recently – don’t know why. I suspect it may be a feature – certainly means I don’t need to scroll through them all to get to the end (yes I have heard of RSS :-)

Thanks to Rhys for a couple of interesting looking new blogs too – ThinkOpen and e-Newyddion.

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I have been known to occasionally pass comment on Welsh language provision on websites – so I was quite intrigued by the Welsh URL being used on our University Homepage on the link to the Urdd stand "http://www.glam.ac.uk/Morgannwg yn ymweld â’r Urdd" which unfortunately doesn’t work. The link on the header text Cornel Cyfarchion Big Borther yn yr Urdd does work thankfully.

I know it is only a tiny thing (and I could have just emailed them and asked them to fix it) but I do wonder if is indicative of a more widespread problem where the Welsh language version of a site is under-resourced and under quality-controlled. Certainly a large number of the problems you see with Welsh language provision can be explained by poor processes.

I presume that Big Borther is also a mistake – unless it is something clever in Welsh of course :-)

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Well this blog seems to be turning into a Ping Wales fan site! Either I am getting lazy, or Ping Wales are publishing some interesting stuff recently – or both!

Anyway Ping Wales reports that MotivatingMates has gone bilingual. First of all, let’s just pause to offer support and encouragement to companies offering services bilingually… OK now let’s provide some helpful criticism about the site.

ARGH!!! Flags represent countries not languages!

The language change links don’t appear on some of the pages which is rather disorientating. There also appears to be some odd glitch with the language selector in that sometimes I get English pages when I expect Welsh and vice versa – seems to mainly affect the error pages if you haven’t logged in.

Certainly a reasonable provision of Welsh language material, though some still in English only – like the FAQ. Some links still in English in the store – and they also swap the language to English! 

Nice to see Welsh areas on the forums – though no actual postings in Welsh (yet).

It does occur to me that some of these issues should have been picked up by testing and almost any guidelines on multilingual site design will say not to use flags. Still this appears to be a genuine attempt to provide a bilingual service, so well done MotivatingMates!

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Jakob Nielsen 98% overgeneralised?

 Just happened across some of JN’s views on Splash Screens from 1999:

"I agree: splash pages are useless and annoying. In general, every time you see a splash page, the reaction is "oh no, here comes a site that will be slow and difficult to use and that doesn’t respect my time."

Splash pages are a sure sign of bad Web design."

and from 2005:

"The one bright point is that splash screens and Flash intros are almost extinct. They are so bad that even the most clueless Web designers won’t recommend them, even though a few (even more clueless) clients continue to request them."

Am I alone in thinking that Splash Pages have an important role to play in bilingual sites for providing a language choice?

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