How bilingual communications works in Wales under the Welsh Language Standards

What to take away

• Corporate communications in Welsh public bodies is not a translation afterthought: the Welsh Language Standards create enforceable duties on how you publish, correspond and run events in Welsh and English.
• The standards are made under the Policing and Crime Act 2017, and the Welsh Language Commissioner can investigate, issue improvement notices and, in the last resort, refer a body to court.
• The Welsh Government expects Welsh to be treated as a language of service and of work, not a ceremonial add-on, and its policy guidance shapes what regulators and inspectors look for.
• Most failures are process failures: content written in English, sent for translation late, then published with Welsh missing from the page, the PDF or the social post.
• A bilingual content workflow holds both language versions as one record, with named owners, review states and compliance evidence kept alongside the copy.
• Measure Welsh-language reach with the data you actually hold, such as page views by language, rather than quoting national totals you cannot verify.

The named Welsh Language Standards duties that bind public bodies

The Welsh Language Standards are not a single rule. They are a set of duties imposed on named public bodies by regulations made under the Policing and Crime Act 2017, which is the statutory basis for the standards regime.

The Policing and Crime Act 2017 transferred the old Welsh Language Board functions into a commissioner model and gave ministers the power to set standards by regulation.

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 duties fall into broad groups. Service delivery standards cover what the public receives: correspondence, telephone calls, meetings, forms, signs and published material. Policy making standards cover the internal process of deciding how a new or revised policy will affect Welsh.

Operational standards cover the language of internal administration, such as staff-facing systems, internal communications and training. Promotion standards cover how a body publicises Welsh-language services and encourages use.

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

• Correspondence: reply in Welsh when a member of the public writes in Welsh, without asking them to switch.
• Notices and public documents: publish the Welsh and English versions together, with the Welsh version not buried behind a toggle or a download.
• Website and digital channels: treat the Welsh-language version as a live channel, not a static archive.
• Social media and campaigns: plan Welsh-language assets at the same time as English ones.
• Events and consultations: provide Welsh-language provision and state clearly what it will be.
• Staff communications: apply the standards to internal messages where your compliance notice says so.
• Record keeping: keep evidence that the duty was met, because the commissioner can ask for it.

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.

• Sets and issues the compliance notices that list which standards apply to a body.
• Provides guidance and casework support on how duties should be interpreted in practice.
• Investigates complaints from members of the public about a body's Welsh-language provision.
• Conducts its own inquiries into sectors or themes, not only individual complaints.
• Can issue improvement notices and, where a body still fails, seek enforcement through the courts.

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.

Here is a workflow that satisfies the standards without doubling the work.

1. Draft the English notice with the audience and the action required stated first. Identify the single call to action: check the new times before travelling.
2. Write the Welsh version from the same brief, not from the finished English sentences. Give the translator the audience, the channel and the action, so the Welsh reads naturally rather than as translated English.
3. Hold both versions in one content record, with the Welsh page linked to the English page and both marked with the same campaign reference.
4. Check the Welsh version in the channel where it will appear, including the poster layout and the character limits on social posts.
5. Publish both versions at the same time, with the Welsh version reachable in one click from the English page and vice versa.
6. Log the publication date, the channels used and the name of the person who signed off each language version.

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.

• One record, two language fields. Store the English and Welsh versions in the same content item so neither can be published alone by accident.
• Explicit language states. Mark each version as draft, in translation, in review or approved, so nobody guesses whether the Welsh is ready.
• A translation trigger. When English copy is approved, the system creates or flags the Welsh task automatically.
• Shared metadata. Keep the campaign, audience, channel and review date identical across both versions.
• Version history per language. Track edits to the Welsh separately from the English, because they will not move in step.
• A publish gate. Block publication of the English version where the standards require both, unless a named person records a reason for the exception.

A simple content table makes this concrete.

Field	English version	Welsh version
Content ID	NOT-2026-014	NOT-2026-014
Language state	Approved	In review
Owner	Communications officer	Welsh language officer
Channel	Website, email, poster	Website, email, poster
Publish date	Set	Blocked until approved
Evidence	Sign-off logged	Sign-off logged

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?

• The Welsh version is a real page with its own URL, not a machine-translated overlay.
• Navigation and service names are translated, so a Welsh speaker can complete a task without switching language partway through.
• The English and Welsh pages link to each other, which keeps the relationship obvious to users and to search engines.
• The content covers transactions, not just corporate statements, which is where bilingual provision is most often tested.

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.

• Page views and unique users split by language version, taken from your analytics.
• Click-through from the English page to the Welsh page, and in the other direction.
• Welsh-language engagement on social channels, including shares by Welsh-language accounts and media.
• Correspondence received in Welsh, and the time taken to reply in Welsh.
• Translation turnaround time, from English approval to Welsh publication.
• Complaints or queries about language provision, and how they were resolved.

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

Do the Welsh Language Standards apply to every UK public body? No. They apply to bodies named in the regulations and to the specific duties listed in each body's compliance notice. Bodies operating only in England, Scotland or Northern Ireland are generally outside the standards regime, though some UK-wide bodies publish Welsh-language pages voluntarily.

Can we use machine translation to meet a Welsh Language Standard? The standards require a Welsh-language version of the service or document, and quality matters because the public reads it as a published communication. Machine translation can speed up a first draft, but a competent Welsh reviewer should check anything published under your name.

Who enforces the standards if a body keeps failing? The Welsh Language Commissioner investigates complaints and can issue improvement notices. If a body still does not comply, the commissioner can seek enforcement through the courts, which is why documented evidence of what you published matters.

What is the statutory basis for the standards? The standards regime rests on the Policing and Crime Act 2017, which reshaped the commissioner's powers and allowed ministers to impose standards on named bodies by regulation. The 2011 Measure provides the earlier framework the 2017 Act amended.

How do we prove compliance in an investigation? Keep the published Welsh and English versions, the dates they went live, the channels used and the name of the person who approved each version. A content system that stores both language versions in one record produces this evidence in minutes rather than days.

Does bilingual publishing mean every internal email must be in Welsh? Not automatically. Operational standards cover internal administration for some bodies, but the exact scope sits in your compliance notice. Check the notice before extending bilingual requirements to internal messages that fall outside it.