Welsh civil servants take away day to translate eight English words… and fail

It has the makings of a bureaucratic joke – how many Welsh civil servantsdoes it take to translate a few English adjectives?

The answer is 43 – but they will need an away day, a special workshop and the help of eight academics before failing to complete the task and resorting to English words.

The seemingly simple job of translating eight words from a questionnaire into Welsh became an administrative nightmare for the Welsh Government, a research paper has revealed. The adjectives were part of a new environmental assessment about noise, or soundscapes, and how that affects people’s well-being.

Civil servants who helped write the academic paper explained that they needed to translate “eight perceptual attributes” about sound – pleasant, calm, uneventful, monotonous, annoying, chaotic, eventful and vibrant.

They attempted to translate the words in part to ensure the devolved Government met its “ambitions to increase the number of Welsh speakers”.

The proposed Welsh translation for soundscape attributes research paper, published in Applied Acoustics, shows how translators failed to agree on Welsh alternatives for four of the words and ended up using “Wenglish” – a mixture of Welsh and English – for two of them.

Despite this, the report, funded by Research England and involving academics from University College London (UCL), claimed their work represented a “groundbreaking achievement for sound studies in Wales”.

The research explained how members of the Welsh Government’s translation service struggled to find a Welsh word for “chaotic” before eventually opting for “caotig”, an “English loan word”. The word “annoying” was equally problematic, with staff choosing “niwsans”, a Welsh-sounding version of the English word “nuisance”.

The translators also concluded that “eventful” and “uneventfulness” were “alien” concepts in the Welsh language and struggled to find an alternative.

The four-stage translation process took place despite the civil servants accepting that “all” Welsh speakers also spoke English.

John O’Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said the report revealed how civil servants were “wasting their time and our money on translating pointless questionnaires” when the country was “on its knees” economically.

“If you sat down to write a sketch on government waste, this real-life episode might be deemed too unrealistic,” he added. “We must take a scalpel to wasteful spending while protecting vital public services, so we can give hard-pressed families and businesses a break with tax cuts.”

Andrew RT Davies, a Tory member of the Senedd representing South Wales Central, said: “Under Plaid Cymru separatists and Labour, Senedd waste is nothing new, but this is a particularly egregious example. Putting this level of resource towards translating eight words is a ludicrous expenditure for which taxpayers will foot the bill.”

It is not known how much the research cost. The study explained how both English – “a Germanic language” – and Welsh – “a Celtic language” – are official languages in Wales.

A proper translation of the questionnaire was a “necessity” as part of the Noise and Soundscape Plan for Wales project, which was intended to “champion appropriate soundscapes” to assess, among other things, “sound generated by wind turbine developments [and] transportation”.

The 28-page paper explained that there were “four phases” to the project. Firstly, 10 members of the Welsh Government’s translation service suggested Welsh alternatives for the eight English words.

Then a workshop with 13 civil servants for the Welsh Government, who were “confident Welsh speakers”, sought consensus on what words were most suitable.

Their conclusions were reviewed by five UCL researchers. Finally, 30 Welsh government translators along with three Welsh language scholars from Cardiff University and Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, the Welsh dictionary, enjoyed an “away day” before offering “a new draft of translations”.

Unanimity was only reached for two words – vibrant was translated to “bywiog”, and monotonous became “undonog”.

The paper said the difficulty in translating “annoying” was that it had no direct equivalent in Welsh, but “many noted that some Welsh speakers might choose to code-switch” and use English.

It concludes: “Niwsans on its own has the added benefit of being an English loan word, thus likely to achieve greater comprehensibility.”

The loanword “caotig” was used to replace “chaotic”, despite the fact “workshop participants were wary of approving what they deemed to be “Wenglish” – a term sometimes used for what is considered non-standard mixing of Welsh and English – for official terminology.

The study added that “it was not possible to achieve consensus on single word translations for four of the eight terms: ‘Eventful’, ‘Uneventful’, ‘Pleasant’, ‘Annoying’.”

The paper concluded that “a greater number of participants may have generated more reliable data”, adding that further work needed to be done because “defining the English terms has proven a challenge”.

A Welsh Government spokesman said 43 staff took part “most through informal, brief discussions in short meetings” or via Teams, adding: “We did not fund this research. A small number of staff voluntarily contributed their expertise to an international multilingual research project as part of their usual work.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]