Bilingual English and Welsh content for Cardiff agency clients

What to take away

What Welsh Language Standards mean for Cardiff agency clients

Welsh Language Standards are the duties made under the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011. They set out how named organisations must treat Welsh and English. The standards fall into five groups: service delivery, policy making, operational matters, promotion of the language and record keeping.

In Cardiff, the organisations in scope are mostly Welsh public bodies. Examples include the Welsh Government (Llywodraeth Cymru), Cardiff Council (Cyngor Caerdydd), Cardiff and Vale University Health Board and Natural Resources Wales. Which standards bind each body is set out in a compliance notice the Commissioner issues to it.

The Welsh Language Commissioner (Comisiynydd y Gymraeg) enforces the standards. A body that fails to comply can face an investigation and enforcement action, including civil penalties, and can challenge a decision at the Welsh Language Tribunal. That risk sits with the client, but the agency that produced the content is usually asked to fix it. The wider UK regulatory picture for content marketing is covered separately.

Before briefing, ask the client for its own compliance notice and read the standards listed there. A council's promotion standards, for instance, differ from a health board's service delivery duties. Quote only for the standards the client has to meet, and record which ones in the contract.

Most private Cardiff clients are outside the standards regime. A tech firm in Cardiff Bay or a restaurant in Pontcanna has no statutory duty to publish in Welsh. Many still choose to, because Welsh is part of how they present themselves in the city.

So the first job on any new account is a scope question: is this client under the standards, voluntarily bilingual, or English only? The answer changes the brief, the budget and the sign-off process.

Where a client sits outside the standards but markets to Welsh speakers, treat the language as a segmentation question rather than a legal one. Our guide to defining the target audience covers how to split a market by language and identity without guesswork.

The Office for National Statistics publishes cultural identity and language data, including Census 2021 figures on Welsh language skills. It is a sensible starting point for segmenting a Welsh audience rather than assuming one.

Planning a bilingual English and Welsh content workflow

A bilingual workflow is a production line with two outputs from one brief. Build it once and it stops being a scramble on every campaign.

Treat the English text as the source, but write it knowing it will be translated. Short sentences and plain terms translate cleanly. Idioms, puns and wordplay do not, and they cost more to rework.

Where a client is under the standards, Welsh must be treated no less favourably than English, so the Welsh version cannot be an afterthought. Both versions must stand on their own. That means the Welsh version needs its own review, not a spellcheck against the English.

Freezing the source is the step agencies skip most often. If the English changes after translation starts, the Welsh has to be redone and the cost lands on someone.

Set the workflow up as a written standard your team follows on every account. The principles in our piece on workflow standards apply to bilingual production just as they do to English-only work.

Content design practice from government publishing is useful here, because it is built for readers who need information quickly. The guidance at GOV.UK publishing guidance on publishing, updating and retiring content covers plain structure, front-loaded meaning and short sentences, all of which survive translation better.

Translation, review and sign-off roles

Four roles sit on a bilingual job: commissioner, writer, translator and reviewer. On small accounts one person may hold two, but never the translator and reviewer.

Use translators who work into Welsh as a first language and who know the client's sector. A health board leaflet and a tourism campaign need different registers, and a generalist will flatten both.

To find translators, start with Cymdeithas Cyfieithwyr Cymru, the Association of Welsh Translators and Interpreters, whose members are professionals. For terminology, the National Terminology Portal (Porth Termau Cenedlaethol Cymru), run from Bangor University, gives approved Welsh terms. Ask any agency you shortlist which of these resources it uses.

Bilingual review and sign-off should be a named step with a named person. Record the date, the version and any changes. When a public body is audited, that record is the evidence.

Build a glossary per client: product names, job titles, place names and any term the client insists on. Cardiff place names alone cause arguments, so settle spellings early and keep them in one file.

A starter glossary for a Cardiff account might hold these terms: Caerdydd (Cardiff), Bae Caerdydd (Cardiff Bay), Cymraeg (the Welsh language), Llywodraeth Cymru (Welsh Government), Cyngor Caerdydd (Cardiff Council) and Comisiynydd y Gymraeg (Welsh Language Commissioner). Add the client's own terms and have the translator confirm each one.

Where the client is a Welsh public body, ask who holds internal language responsibility. Many have a Welsh language officer who will review drafts and whose approval carries weight internally.

Sign-off should cover both languages at once. Approving English first and Welsh later is how mismatched pages reach publication.

Audience expectations across Cardiff and Welsh public bodies

Welsh speakers in Cardiff are not a single audience. Some use Welsh daily and expect it as a first language. Others read Welsh occasionally and will switch to English if the Welsh is awkward.

Welsh public bodies expect Welsh to appear with equal prominence, not tucked at the bottom of a page. A toggle that hides the Welsh version behind a small link reads as a token effort.

Readers of both languages expect the same information, not a summary in one and the full text in the other. If the English page lists five service options, the Welsh page should too.

Outside the public sector, expectations are softer but real. Cardiff audiences notice when a campaign uses Welsh naturally, and they notice when it is decorative.

Research before you assume. Our guide to audience research sets out how to test language preference and comprehension with real readers rather than internal opinion.

Equality law sits underneath all of this. The Equality Act 2010 sets duties on non-discrimination that touch advertising and content, and language can be part of how a service is delivered fairly.

Accessibility matters as much as language. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative publishes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the standard that keeps bilingual pages usable for readers with assistive technology. WCAG also expects the language of a page, and of any passage in another language, to be marked up in the code.

Quality checks before bilingual content is published

Run the same seven checks on every bilingual job. A short list, applied consistently, catches most of what goes wrong.

A Cardiff health board needs a flu vaccination page. The agency freezes the English source on day one, sends it with a glossary to a translator on day two, and books the reviewer for day four.

The reviewer flags one clinical term and one heading that reads oddly in Welsh. Both are fixed, the client's language officer approves, and the page goes live with matching content in both languages and a sign-off record on file.

Publishing is not the end. Check analytics by language version, because a Welsh page with high bounce usually means the toggle is hidden or the translation reads poorly.

Set your own standards for this work and measure them. Our guide to service standards shows how to turn quality checks into commitments you can report against.

Choosing a Cardiff agency for bilingual work

When you shortlist a Cardiff content marketing agency, the questions matter as much as the workflow. Ask each agency four things. Who translates into Welsh, in-house or freelance? Who reviews it independently? Has it worked for a client under the standards? Which glossary and terminology sources does it use?

An agency that cannot name its translator and reviewer roles has not built the workflow above. Ask to see a sanitised sign-off record from a past job. Judge bilingual capability on that evidence, not on a claim that the team has Welsh speakers.

Common questions