The Cost of English in a bilingual Wales

One of the things that I have found interesting about the Western Mail's attack week feature on the Welsh Language is how they conflate bilingualism with excessive support for the Welsh Language.

A perfect example of this can be found in the support for the paper's anti Welsh attitude garnered from Paul Murphy: who warns against 'excessive' spending on Welsh language schemes!

The very word bilingual suggests something to do with TWO languages so any perceived cost of bilingualism should, surely, be shared between BOTH languages. A monolingual transcript of Assembly proceedings, in either language, would have a price tag attached. So how much of the £400K bilingual waste of money is actually being spent on JUST the Welsh Language?

Does English come free of charge?

However I am willing to agree with the Western Mail, translation costs money and in these straightened times money is short. When witnesses appear before committees of the Assembly and present their evidence in Welsh, or when members address those committees in Welsh, translations are a waste of money; they are unneeded and cost too much; after all those of us who can understand Welsh can sacrifice that wasteful spending on English in order to put that wasted money into more worthy pots! Translating those contributions into English is expensive, a waste of money and shouldn't be allowed!

I have attended many hundreds of bilingual meetings in Wales during the past forty years, without ever using any translation facility – as a fluent user of both Welsh and English I don't need translators – those who need the translation facilities are the mono-linguist English, not us bilingual Welsh speakers!

Translation, in Wales, is primarily, spending on the English Language!

Lost in Translation

This is the first paragraph of the French newspaper Le Monde's report on the elections in Zimbabwe:

Alors qu'au Zimbabwe, les premières estimations des résultats à l'élection présidentielle ont donné une légère avance au candidat de l'opposition au premier tour, le président Mugabe préparerait sa sortie, selon des proches cités par des médias anglo-saxons. L'homme fort du pays depuis un quart de siècle n'est plus apparu en public depuis samedi, alimentant les rumeurs d'une fuite en Namibie ou en Malaisie, où il se rend fréquemment.

Here is a computer-generated translation of the paragraph:

Whereas to Zimbabwe, the first estimates of the results to the presidential election gave a light advance to the candidate of the opposition to the first turn, president Mugabe would prepare his exit, according to close relations' quoted by Anglo-Saxon media. The strong man of the country since a quarter century has not appeared any more in public for Saturday, feeding the rumours of an escape in Namibia or Malaysia, where it frequently goes.

Not perfect English, but one can get the gist of the article!

This is the first paragraph of Normal Mouth's column in last week's edition of Golwg:

Dyma'r mis pan ddaeth yr encilio economaidd - o ran ei ddisgwyl os nad ei brofi - yn swyddogol. Roedd cydnabod y gair ddychrynllyd hwn yn ddigon i gael effaith ddramatig a chyflym ar y farn gyhoeddus, gyda'r gwahaniaeth rhwng Ceidwadwyr a Llafur yn y polau'n troi'n agendor.

And here is a computer-generated translation of the paragraph:

Here' is group month when he came he drives retreat economic he he shares you go look if no you go prove officially. He was acknowledge the one has frightful this donely I have dramatic I go chyflym signs the he judges public , with ' group difference between Conservatives I go Labor crookedly the polau'n turn ' heartburn gulf.

There is something almost poetic in the translation:

I go Labour crookedly
The polls turn
Heartburn!
Gulf!

I love it LOL.

But the translation is a nonsense; it makes no sense of what Normal Mouth actually said (what he thought he said can be seen here)!

There are two reasons why the translation machine can make sense out of French, but not out of Welsh. One is practical, the other is political.

The practical reason is that the French and English translations are based on a corpus of millions of translated words and phrases that have been fed into the databases that inform the translation facilities. English and French academic institutions have provided much of the corpus of information in order to enable on line translation.

An individual Welsh learner, who supplied a private database of fewer than 50,000 words and phrases, provided the Welsh corpus.

There are huge corpuses of Welsh language data available in digital form. Y Beibl Cymraeg Newydd (The New Welsh Bible) is digitised and could be easily compared with its digitised counterpart The New English Bible.

Geiriadur yr Academi, The Welsh Academy Dictionary, which is a dictionary of translations of terms and of words more than a dictionary of definitions, is available in electronic form. As are many other databases of Welsh language words and terms; including the databases that runs the Welsh language and grammar checkers Cysyll and Cysgair.

The political reason for not letting on line translation facilities use these databases is the fear that on line translations will be seen as a cheep option. People will use the on line facility to provide translations rather than pay for a true translation by a professional translator. The poor English used in the French-English translation would result in poor Welsh of a similar standard!

An understandable argument, but one that supports a cause that is already lost.

The 50,000 word corpus is being used to produce crap Welsh translations on a daily basis. Examples of which are publcised in Golwg everey week. Indeed there are so many poor Welsh language translations churned out by the limited database, that a new Welsh word has evolved: Scymraeg (Scum Welsh), and Scymraeg has its own Flikr site.

When I'm not doing politics I do a lot of family and local history. I have used OCR to put a number of Welsh language books on line, a laborious task. Every day I can guarantee that I will get an e-mail that says I found the name of my grandfather xxxxx in your text can you translate this for me?

I spend hours translating, and get an e mail back saying, thanks, but your translation proves that this isn't my xxxxx!

It's high time that the academic institutions that are sitting on huge corpuses of Welsh / English data release that data to the translation machines in order to enable decent, if not perfect, Welsh / English, English / Welsh translations on line.

Whatever the arguments about perfection, the imperfection caused from a decent corpus of Welsh words and phrases must be better than the crap created, anyway, from the limited corpus of Welsh that is being used at the moment!

Welsh not Walian

One of the mores of the British Empire was divide and conquer. The anti Welsh have used this with a vengeance since the advent of devolution.

In as much as my passport, my driving licence my birth / marriage and (if things don't change) my death certificate force me to have a British Identity, whether I like it or not, the existence of the National Assembly forces a Welsh identity on those who who live in Wales but abhor all things Welsh.

What is interesting is that this new Welsh Identity is not Welsh according to the British nationalist imperialists it is now Walian.

Walians come in many different shapes and forms. There are north Walians, south Walians, east Walians, Welsh speaking Walians, English Walians, British Walians, west Walians, gay Walians, straight Walians, bi Walians, Muslim Walians, Christian Walians, rich Walians, poor Walians, drunk Walians, sobber Walians any sort of Walian that you can imagine that divides one Walian from another and ensures that the multi faceted community that exists in Wales can never be considered as united in a single all encompassing national identity called WELSH.