Designing services to promote the Welsh language

How the design and delivery of public services in Wales can help promote the Welsh language and meet user needs.

This is a challenging area for those building bilingual services in Wales.

Research and experience to date suggests four key blockers to increased use of Welsh in public services:

• people
• tools
• guidance
• budget

Do we have the right people, with the right skills in the right place? The need is there, the question is what stops it from happening?

We need to think about designing services with the Welsh language in mind from the outset. 

That includes thinking about how, when and why people want to access services in Welsh and how services can be designed to allow them to do that. 

This also includes testing with Welsh speakers as services are designed and iterated. As an example, this blog post on prototyping touches on testing prototypes with Welsh speakers as part of our work.

The principles of behaviour change (making things Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely) should apply equally to our thinking about how we design services and promote the use of the Welsh Language. 

You can find out more about making things Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely in this guidance from the Government Communications Service

Confidence is important for Welsh speakers to engage with public services in Welsh. It's also important for those who build public services to think differently about how they provide those services. 

How do we build that confidence and ‘normalise’ use of the Welsh language?

This guide is based on a knowledge sharing webinar.

At the session we heard from:

• Alun Shurmer from Dwr Cymru Welsh Water
• Jeremy Evas from Welsh Government
• Heledd Evans from Natural Resources Wales.

In a first for us at the Centre we ran the webinar using a simultaneous translator. To be honest we weren’t sure how it was going to work, but the technology was actually pretty straightforward to set up (once we worked out what we needed!) and easy for people to use. 

As a result, everyone attending, including the speakers, could choose to engage in either Welsh or English. 

As part of our learning, we’ve found that Zoom only records the original language, not the translation so whilst we are sharing the recording of the session, please be aware that the majority of the session was conducted in Welsh, so the recording may be limited for non-Welsh speakers.