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“We have a fully bilingual website but nobody uses the Welsh version”
When your translation looks like it’s been done by a monoglot feeding individual words into Google Translate, it tends to be opaque at best (top left) and unusable at worse (bottom left). I had to switch to the English version to see what “Cadw at Eto” was supposed to mean.
All the staff in my local library are Welsh speakers, and I assume the majority of users throughout the county are as well. Why was this released to the public without being proofread?
cc @golwg @NationCymru (not that anyone will see this)
Bad and sloppy translation has been treated as a joke in Wales for far too long — I bear some responsibility for this, having encouraged the idea of “Scymraeg”, collecting and laughing at particularly bad examples — but it should be making us angry, not making us laugh.
Just to update this in English as well: I ended up making an official complaint about this, and errors of the Transport for Wales website and app, and it looks like I've been keeping more than one person busy for at least a few hours.
The Welsh Language Commissioner's office does take things like this seriously, and even if I don't agree with everything they've decided*, I'm glad they took the time to follow this up, and not just with Ceredigion CC.
* one thing I may not have explained particularly well is why is stated that “rhif PIN” is wrong. It wasn't because I think they should have translated the acronym; it's because they *have* translated part of it, unnecessarily.
“Rhif PIN" is the equivalent of “corfforiaeth y BBC” or “treth VAT”, but I’m afraid if I explain this in an email they'll have to have another meeting about it.
@nic But presumably they translated it from the English 'PIN number' (which is equally wrong) and shouldn't there be a Welsh acronym like there are for other things? (NHS and UK spring to mind).
@DramatisPaws Nope, the English just had “PIN” and “Enter your PIN”.
https://toot.wales/@nic/114103752714760548
Some acronyms get translated and accepted, but some never cross the linguistic divide — including S4C, to be fair: Sianel Pedwar Cymru. I’ve seen British Broadcasting Corporation translated on plaques and so on, but I doubt anyone would recognise CDdB as being a translation of the acronym, and we all say either bî-bî-sî or bî-bî-ec.
Like you say, NHS/GIG, UK/DU, USA/UDA are all commonly used, at least as written forms — but none of them are spoken as acronyms, as far as I’m aware.
These ones are pronounced as acronyms: IT/TG (tuh-guh), GCSE/TGAU (tuh-geye), WJEC/CBAC (cuh-bac). One problem with Welsh acronyms is they tend to have lots of Cs in them. I can think of at least three institutions whose acronyms are CCC, which isn’t much use!