When the Liberal Democrats initially came up with the specification for what would turn out to be their Fleet website system, simple bilinguality for the Welsh State and Welsh Local Party sites was a key requirement.
The need helped guide us towards Typo3 as a platform. It was designed for the job, which in this case was to make it simple to build in both English and Welsh languages and switch between them.
We’ve built Fleet for our Welsh sites to offer that option. We’ve worked with a translator and the Welsh Party so that the “scaffolding” of sites automatically translates between pages. However, we’ve also made it easy for site editors to create the rest in both languages – from menu items to full pages and news articles.
Context is also key, and its not just the text that can vary between versions. It maybe that there is a better picture to illustrate the Welsh language version of an article than the one used on the English version. You can change that too. And the descriptive text like alt tags, descriptions and even url click-throughs can also be set by language: brilliant!
We’re regularly asked why we don’t use automatic translation of content blocks from English to Welsh. Answer: it still sounds terrible. An automatic translation will generally give the “flavour” but also be absolutely obvious to a native Welsh speaker. Want a Welsh translation? You need a Welsh speaker!