A sign of the times...

[DVB Cornwall]

Nothing out of the ordinary you might think, except .....

































The Welsh translation when translated back to English reads ....

I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated

[Pete]

if a man deals with "translation requests" surely his prime correspondence would be with English speakers.
So why was his out of office reply in Welsh?

[Alexia]

Daily Express had a good one yesterday. Proudly boldly at the top of the Sports back page read something along the lines of: "DO NOT EDIT THIS STRAP"

[m-in-m]

if a man deals with "translation requests" surely his prime correspondence would be with English speakers.
So why was his out of office reply in Welsh?

Or why not simply put his out of office in both languages.

[Mr Q]

This might be a provocative question, but what on earth is the point of these sorts of bilingual signs? Don't get me wrong - I've got nothing against local languages. I respect that there are people who treasure such things, and are perfectly entitled to want to protect them. But road signs should be direct and to the point, providing the necessary information to motorists in the smallest amount of space possible. Having to write things out twice seems redundant to me, since I would have though most (if not all) Welsh speakers would have a functioning knowledge of English anyway. The net effect is simply to increase the total cost associated with such signage, and perhaps to create confusion where the translations aren't consistent (as with the rather extreme case shown here!). Is there a large group of Welsh-only speakers that I appear to have missed? Or is it all simply part of a government-led attempt to "save" a language that has become increasingly irrelevant to the daily lives of most Welsh people?

[Chie]

This might be a provocative question, but what on earth is the point of these sorts of bilingual signs?

Smugness.

[Alexia]

I don't expect either of you to understand, but I shall attempt to explain.

It's not smugness Chie; that sort of accusation stems from the English resentment for us Welsh people having such a visible and powerful symbol of our culture.

Mr Q - it is written into the law of the UK (and to some extent the EU) that minority languages be protected. Welsh has actually evolved from the native tongue of the WHOLE of Britain pre Anglo-Saxons / Vikings / Normans etc. As such one could argue it has as much right to be nurtured and protected as other ancient monuments in the UK like castles, earthworks, stone circles and the like. Just because they have become irrelevant to our daily lives, doesn't mean we raze them to the ground.

The difference with Welsh is that it isn't an irrelevant monument. It is a living, breathing language. Mr Q asks "Is there a large group of Welsh-only speakers that I appear to have missed?" and "I would have thought most (if not all) Welsh speakers would have a functioning knowledge of English". This may be true, but for a sizeable proportion of Wales, Welsh is their FIRST language - spoken in the home for day-to-day activities; the language of their education and socialisation, with English being taught as a second, foreign language. This means that if you were to remove all Welsh signage you would effectively be forcing a group of UK citizens to use a language which does not come naturally to them - i.e. a language they do not THINK in. Which would be against (and I hate this phrase as much as anyone) their human rights.

As for signage costs - I think that the sign DVBKernow shows is already oversized anyway. Why not put a no entry sign up with a HGV plate underneath, or a picture of a lorry with a line through it? What happened to symbolic signs which have no language issues? When did we have to start spelling shit out to drivers?

[cdd]

In that case, alexia, how come the English text appears above the Welsh text?

[Sput]

Probably a practical decision because more english first language types are likely to see it than welsh.

[Mr Q]

Mr Q - it is written into the law of the UK (and to some extent the EU) that minority languages be protected. Welsh has actually evolved from the native tongue of the WHOLE of Britain pre Anglo-Saxons / Vikings / Normans etc. As such one could argue it has as much right to be nurtured and protected as other ancient monuments in the UK like castles, earthworks, stone circles and the like. Just because they have become irrelevant to our daily lives, doesn't mean we raze them to the ground.

Alexia - as I said, I have no concern with people using minority languages. I don't think I suggested they be "razed to the ground" - I merely questioned the point of sticking them on road signs when people would understand the English anyway. Although I take your later point that icons would be better still than text in any language.

As for your analogy, it is true that castles and other physical monuments are national treasures which people derive tremendous amenity from. Yet we don't insist that every single structure in the UK be built to replicate them. You can still respect and appreciate a language without plastering it over every sign.

The difference with Welsh is that it isn't an irrelevant monument. It is a living, breathing language. Mr Q asks "Is there a large group of Welsh-only speakers that I appear to have missed?" and "I would have thought most (if not all) Welsh speakers would have a functioning knowledge of English". This may be true, but for a sizeable proportion of Wales, Welsh is their FIRST language - spoken in the home for day-to-day activities; the language of their education and socialisation, with English being taught as a second, foreign language. This means that if you were to remove all Welsh signage you would effectively be forcing a group of UK citizens to use a language which does not come naturally to them - i.e. a language they do not THINK in. Which would be against (and I hate this phrase as much as anyone) their human rights.

All that is fine, and I would happily accept that, except that I can't imagine that using English is a particularly onerous task for Welsh speakers.

Let me put this in context. I can speak German - not fluently, and indeed it's probably getting a bit rusty. But I learnt it through part of primary school and all of high school. I studied it for four years at uni. Yet if I were forced at the drop of hat to converse in German, to understand signs in German, to go about my day-to-day life using German, I would struggle (at least at first). But then I didn't learn German when I was very young. I wasn't exposed to it at all until school. Indeed, my exposure to it has pretty much only been in a classroom environment, apart from three weeks travelling through Germany a couple of years ago.

By contrast, I suspect - although I admit that I have no first hand knowledge of this - that most Welsh children grow up with quite extensive exposure to English from a very young age. Even if household conversations are in Welsh, much TV programming is in English (although there are also Welsh services). I understand there isn't a Welsh-language daily newspaper - there appears to be one major weekly paper, and that's about it. Even if they have a preference for Welsh, I don't imagine Welsh-speakers would face any great difficulty if they had to read and understand something in English. My impression is that they are fully bilingual, and so even where English is the second language, their comprehension of it is not substantially lower than with Welsh. So I question whether it is strictly true that English doesn't come "naturally" to them.

Again, let me clarify that my point is not to challenge the worth of minority languages. I see absolutely no issue with people choosing to speak Welsh if that is their preference. If we were talking about people who spoke Welsh only, with limited exposure to English, then of course bilingual signs would be entirely appropriate. Yet here I see no practical benefit of signs that are translated into a second language when the target audience for that second language can already understand the first.

[Ronnie Rowlands]

I'm terribly sorry, Alexia, but even being Welsh myself, I have to say that bi-lingual road signs serve only as a hinderance. I don't think there is a single person who lives in Wales who can't speak English. If the Welsh really did want their language to be the dominant one they would put them in Welsh and Welsh only; you wouldn't see road signs in English and German in Germany, would you? But I get the feeling that the Welsh kinda rely on the English living there, or being on Holiday there to pay money into their economy, but they want to make things difficult, therefore i think there is a little bit of smugness involved. I don't know if anybody saw the Weakest Link the other day, but there was a very anti-English Welsh chap on there who displayed much of the idiotic racism you find in many Welsh people. That's not to say that Wales is a wholly racist nation, however.

sometimes, though, it really is absurd when there are so many similarities between the words on the signs. For example, Colwyn Bay, in Welsh, is ''Bae Colwyn". I was in a pub once and there we a sign saying 'Snooker', with "snwker" written underneath it. I'm sure most people will get the hint of there being a snooker table in the pub, what with there being a Snooker table in plain view and everything. And how much bloody paper is being used by printing entire leaflets TWICE in different languages?