Bilingual corporate communications in Wales: Welsh standards

What to take away

The named Welsh Language Standards duties that bind public bodies

The Welsh Language Standards are duties created through regulations under the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011, not a single rule. The Welsh Language Standards (No. 1) Regulations 2015 are one named instrument; standards regulations are made under powers in sections 26, 27, 39 and 150(5) of the 2011 Measure. Each body's duties depend on the regulations and compliance notice that apply to it.

The Policing and Crime Act 2017 is not the statutory basis for the Standards. The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 provides the framework, and standards regulations are made under powers in that Measure.

Each body receives a compliance notice listing exactly which standards apply to it. A county council, a health board, a Welsh Government sponsored body and a police force will not have identical lists. That is why copying another organisation's bilingual policy is a weak starting point.

The Welsh Language Standards (No. 1) Regulations 2015 authorise the Welsh Language Commissioner to give compliance notices to the Welsh Ministers, county councils, county borough councils, corporate joint committees and National Park authorities, requiring compliance with standards specified under regulation 2. The Welsh Language Standards (No. 1) Regulations 2015 (Amendment) Regulations 2021 brought corporate joint committees within the specified standards. This is the scope of the No. 1 series, not a complete list of every body that may be subject to Standards: check the regulations and notice that apply to your body.

Within those groups, certain duties bite hardest on communications teams.

Some numbered standards make the communications duties more concrete. The Service Promotion Standard (Standard 81) concerns promoting and facilitating Welsh-language use internally among staff through campaigns and activities. Standard 149 requires keeping a copy of any written Welsh-language complaint, whether or not it relates to a standard binding on the body; Standard 160 requires providing information requested by the Commissioner about compliance with applicable service delivery standards. Check the body's compliance notice before treating any particular standard as applicable.

What the standards do not do is require every internal email to be bilingual. The detail sits in your compliance notice. Read it before designing a workflow, because the notice defines the scope you will be judged against.

One practical consequence: the standards treat Welsh and English as equals in service delivery, but they do not require literal, word-for-word symmetry in every channel. A short Welsh social post can sit alongside a longer English thread if both carry the same message and the Welsh version is not an afterthought.

Communications teams that understand this can plan realistically rather than promising identical output everywhere.

What the Welsh Government expects of bilingual communications

The Welsh Government's Welsh language policy sets the direction that standards, funding and inspection follow. Its Welsh language topic page is the reference point for the current strategy, targets and ministerial messaging, and it is worth checking before you write a bilingual communications plan.

The expectation is a Welsh language that is visible in daily public life, not confined to official documents. That has direct consequences for corporate communications.

First, Welsh should appear where the audience already is. A bilingual press release matters less if the Welsh version never reaches Welsh-language media, community newsletters or local radio.

Second, bodies are expected to increase Welsh-language use, not merely offer it. Offering a Welsh line on a form and then routing every caller to an English-speaking adviser does not meet the spirit of the policy.

Third, the Welsh Government expects public bodies to plan language provision as part of service design. A new online service should have Welsh built into the content model and the user experience from the start.

Fourth, ministerial expectations flow into funding and oversight. Bodies that can show Welsh-language take-up, and can explain what they did to raise it, are in a stronger position than those reporting only that a translation was commissioned.

For communications leads, this reframes the job. The question is not whether a Welsh version exists. It is whether the Welsh version performs. That is an audience question before it is a language question, and it is the same discipline set out in our guide to audience research that starts with populations rather than channels.

It also affects how you choose where to publish. A bilingual notice on a low-traffic corporate page will not reach the people it concerns. Our article on choosing channels by purpose applies directly: the Welsh version needs its own route to the audience, not a mirror of the English one.

The Welsh Language Commissioner and how compliance is monitored

The Welsh Language Commissioner is the regulator. The office was created in its current form by the 2011 Welsh Language (Wales) Measure and its powers were reshaped by the 2017 Act, as set out in the background on the Welsh Language Commissioner.

The commissioner does several things that matter to communications teams.

Monitoring is not purely reactive. The commissioner publishes reports and thematic reviews, and bodies are expected to submit evidence about how they meet their standards. That evidence usually includes samples of correspondence, screenshots of bilingual pages, campaign material and internal policy documents.

For a communications team, the practical implication is documentation. If a complaint arrives about a Welsh-language response, you need to show what you published, when, and in which language. A shared drive of loose files will not do that quickly. A content system that timestamps both language versions will.

There is also a governance angle. Most bodies nominate a Welsh language officer or a senior responsible owner, and communications sits alongside them. Where the two functions do not talk, the same failure repeats: a campaign is signed off in English, translation is requested late, and the Welsh version misses the launch window.

Compliance is easier when the duty owner and the publishing owner are the same person for each asset. That sounds bureaucratic. In practice it removes the handover where bilingual content usually goes missing.

Worked example: publishing one notice in English and Welsh

Take a routine task: a health board must publish a public notice about a change to clinic opening hours. The notice goes on the website, on social media, in a printed poster for the waiting room and in an email to registered patients.

Use a workflow that turns the duties in the body's compliance notice into publishing tasks, without assuming every body has the same requirements.

For the clinic-hours notice, the publishing workflow can work like this:

Two things commonly go wrong. The first is late translation, which pushes the Welsh version past the launch and turns a bilingual duty into a retrospective fix. The second is layout, where a Welsh headline runs longer than the English one and breaks a poster template nobody tested.

A third, subtler failure is tone. If the Welsh version is a stiff literal rendering of a warm English notice, Welsh-speaking readers notice immediately. Briefing the translator on tone costs nothing and prevents it.

Software workflows for holding English and Welsh content together

Most bilingual publishing problems are content management problems. The fix is a workflow that treats the two language versions as one asset with two outputs.

The core design choices are straightforward.

A simple content table makes this concrete.

None of this requires exotic software. A structured content model in your existing CMS, plus a translation request step, covers most of it. The important part is that the Welsh version has an owner and a state, not just a folder.

Where teams publish across many channels, the same record should feed the website, the email platform and the social scheduler. Duplicating the Welsh copy into three tools is how versions drift apart, and how a corrected English notice ends up with an uncorrected Welsh twin.

There is a governance reason to keep this tidy, too. The rules that UK rules reach corporate communications from other regulators overlap with language duties, and a single content record makes it easier to show which requirement applied to which publication.

Bilingual regulator pages: Charity Commission and Companies House in Welsh

Regulators and public bodies outside Wales often provide Welsh-language pages, and they are useful models for anyone designing bilingual corporate communications.

The Charity Commission for England and Wales publishes a Welsh-language version of its GOV.UK organisation page, the Comisiwn Elusennau. It covers guidance for charities in Wales in Welsh, which matters because many Welsh charities work in both languages and deal with the commission on registration, reporting and complaints.

Companies House does the same through its Welsh-language page, Tŷ'r Cwmnïau. Company registration, filing and late-filing penalties are bilingual concerns for Welsh businesses, and the Welsh page gives them a route into the same services.

What can communications teams learn from these pages?

For a Welsh public body, the lesson is that bilingual publishing is a service commitment. If a user can register a company or report a concern in Welsh on a UK-wide regulator's site, they will expect the same from their council, health board or sponsored body.

It also shows the value of consistency. A single Welsh-language landing page with a clear link to the English equivalent is easier to maintain than scattered translated PDFs with no index. Before you commission new Welsh content, check what already exists and where it points.

Our guide to mapping who a corporate communication affects is a useful check at this stage, because it forces you to name the Welsh-speaking audiences you are actually serving.

Measuring bilingual reach without inventing totals

Bilingual reporting goes wrong when teams reach for impressive numbers they cannot source. There is no single figure for how many Welsh speakers read a given page, and quoting one invites challenge from the commissioner, from scrutiny committees and from your own board.

Measure what your own systems record.

Depending on what your systems capture, a baseline could include:

These are honest measures because they come from your own records. They also show progress over time, which is what the Welsh Government's policy direction and the commissioner's monitoring both reward.

Set a baseline first. If you do not know how many people currently read the Welsh version of your main pages, any target you set is guesswork. A short audit of your top twenty pages, recorded by language, gives you something real to improve against.

Finally, report the gaps. If Welsh-language take-up is low on a service that matters, say so and explain the plan. Regulators tend to respond better to a documented problem with a remedy than to a claim of full compliance that the data does not support.

Common questions