* Posts by Kevin Donnelly

1 publicly visible post • joined 16 Feb 2009

Libra freezes out Welsh legalese

Kevin Donnelly

Calm down, peeps ....

Some of the comments here are a little ill-informed.

Although there are probably no monoglot Welsh-speakers any more, about 20% of the Welsh population speaks Welsh, and a large proportion of those will be first-language speakers.

Some people will be very much more comfortable in their first language rather than their second one (English), and that is very relevant in a formal enviroment such as the courts system.

The principle is that citizens should be able to deal with public bodies in the language they want to use. So an English-speaker going to court will not have everything translated into Welsh, but if a Welsh-speaker goes to court and wants to speak Welsh rather than English, translations will be made. That seems both fair and economical.

Both English-speakers and Welsh-speakers pay the same taxes - the implied suggestion that taxes from Welsh-speakers should go towards English-language services, but not towards services in their own language seems a little odd. I don't think a suggestion that English-speakers should pay extra to fund public services in English only would go down very well.

Since the 1993 Welsh Language Act, Welsh has "parity of esteem" with English in Wales. Whoever commissioned the system really should have been aware of this, and certainly his/her contacts in the courts system should have been.

I would be surprised if auto-translation is involved here, especially in something so formal as court procedure. Auto-translation for Welsh is at an early stage yet (see for example the system I am currently helping to develop at http://www.cymraeg.org.uk) - there is a long way to go. The likely functionality is a template system, where standard sentences can be built up into the required court document. By the way, this is not quite as simple as it sounds.