Last Friday, I attended the Comms Cymru conference in Caerdydd. Ed brought boxes of our Trio Writing book to promote during the lunch break, and that in itself was a massive success, as well as the rest of the day!
The highlight for me was the ‘delivering bilingual communications’ panel, where a quote struck a cord, “We don’t translate, we trans-create”. This is something I came to realise pretty quickly since starting here at CDPS, and it’s been at the forefront of my mind ever since. We don’t translate word for word, we ensure the Welsh is just as readable and accessible as the English, making both versions the best they possibly can be.
That day, I left the Welsh Government Office feeling completely refreshed - which is impressive considering it was a Friday afternoon! It was a reassuring experience, I felt that I’m on the right track with what I’ve set out to do here at CDPS.
Roll on blwyddyn nesaf!
On Thursday the Comms Cymru conference came up North to the Welsh Government Office in Llandudno Junction. Myself and Catrin had a great time hearing presentations from comms professionals across the UK, including those by local professionals at Mon FM and M-Sparc.
Like Alaw, I really enjoyed hearing from the panel on delivering bilingual communications. In particular, I loved seeing video examples of individuals creating comms bilingually, speaking in both English and Welsh. In these instances, participants that weren’t so confident delivering entire speeches or presentations in Welsh spoke in English, but used their Welsh language skills where they felt comfortable to - it didn’t have to be all or nothing. I think this is a really positive message to send to Welsh learners.
I also really enjoyed hearing from Emily at M-Sparc, who discussed how the organisation has created and promoted a variety of learning opportunities for children and adults including their Skills Academy and Miwtini Bach programmes. I think my learnings from this will be really valuable to my work in the Learn Digital Skills Service.
Rwy’n edrych ymlaen at fynuchu eto yn y sbring!
Howdy folks, Josh here to give a rundown on the presentation I gave at the Designing Digital Experiences Community of Practice last week. The presentation was all about digital accessibility; how it should be defined, some quick wins and top tips, and tools or resources to help public sector organisations (and, really, anybody) produce more accessible and engaging content.
The session was well attended by externals and CDPS staff alike, and we had a number of questions asked and discussions emerging from them.
I look forward to developing the accessibility guidance further in 2024!
Gem here! As part of the ‘Leading in a bilingual country’ programme myself and Poppy offered to run a Vision workshop at the next in person meeting. We both realised that internally we don’t have a vision for how CDPS will support the Welsh language and felt this was an important first step in giving life to the use of Welsh. The vision workshop took attendees through the purpose of a vision, the qualities needed and words they wanted to include as part of the statement.
We organised everyone into two break outs and they had a chance to come up with a vision statement each. It was really interesting to come back together and compare what we had come up with. Group 1 even dabbled with using AI to help generate their statement! We used dot voting to pick the best statement and then additional green dots to capture the words people felt were needed in the final statement.
It was a really engaging session and a big learning curve for me. I had never run that sort of workshop before and now I feel more prepared for the in-person event taking place in Cardiff next week.