https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBxr7hufnSE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCVh4lBfW-c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD7w2l88dl8
Dydd Gwener hapus! Adrián, Alaw and I ran a workshop at the Audit Wales Good Practice Exchange at Sophia Gardens on Thursday. We had a few more people than expected in the room - no bad thing. We asked people what problems they face designing bilingual services, what was important to them when doing this and what ideas they have. Many of the themes were similar to what we’ve heard before and it will be useful for us to take note of these themes to shape future work.
The event itself was also interesting. ProMo Cymru spoke about service design in a very accessible way and presented some interesting ways of engaging organisations to these ways of working. We also heard how National Lottery were now starting to fund some projects in stages (discovery etc.). More of this type of funding would be great, to allow organisations to be more agile and encourage this way of working.
Another interesting topic for me was presented by Professor Tom Crick. He spoke about how bilingual services are the gateway, but multilingual will be the true delivery. This was in the context of AI and technology. It reminded me of a recent workshop where Amazon (AWS) demonstrated how their machine translation tools can convert documents in seconds minutes, in exactly the same format. This had been used to offer multilingual information about bin collection schedules in councils in England, where there are diverse communities. However, the actual content translated this way in Welsh was correct, but suffered from much of the same issues we know about - content being too formal, jargon-filled and translation-speak. So AI, and translation technology can make existing problems worse, or help make them better. This technology might help us to tick boxes, but in a country where Welsh language services are legally required and part of our nation’s Well-being goals, there’s much to do before being able to say that language learning models and machine translation - without human intervention - will work for Welsh-language users in Wales.
Gem here! So the first week of the month = comms report time. This month I noticed differences in our publishing behaviour:
September:
August:
It looks as though we live tweeted more in August than September (the yellow spikes show when that happened) and steadily published photos. One recommendation I’m going to make is that we spend time each week forward planning our social media publishing to make sure there is a consistency across our channels. I found the graphs fascinating which is why I enjoy the reporting side of things - there’s always something to learn from data.