Translanguaging

You have written a practice response. Before looking at the Welsh, check it against the eight clauses of the task and find which are missing.

1. 01Clause one and two — language directions

   Is it in Welsh throughout? Any English left in it — a quoted phrase, a name of an organisation you did not know in Welsh — is a signal that the source was still in your head when you wrote. A proper noun is fine; an English sentence is not.

2. 02Clause three — the form

   Can a reader tell within two lines whether this is a letter, an article or a pamphlet? A letter needs a salutation and a stated reason for writing. An article needs a headline and an opening that makes the reader care. A pamphlet needs headings, short blocks and direct address. If none of the three is unmistakable, the form mark is unavailable.

3. 03Clauses four and five — interpret, then opine

   Count your paragraphs. How many are about what the source said, and how many are about what you think? If the first number exceeds the second, the balance is wrong: the specification says understand and interpret BEFORE expressing an opinion, which makes interpretation the preliminary and the opinion the substance.

4. 04Clause six — the audience

   Who is this addressed to, and is it visible in the writing? A letter to a newspaper editor, an article for a Welsh-language magazine and a pamphlet for parents at a school are three different audiences and three different registers. If the piece would read identically to all three, the audience clause is undemonstrated.

5. 05Clauses seven and eight — no translation, no dictionary

   Look for sentences whose word order is English wearing Welsh vocabulary. That is the fingerprint of translation, and it appears even when you did not consciously translate. And check whether any of your best phrases depended on a word you looked up — in the examination you will not be able to, so any sentence that rests on a rare word is a sentence you cannot rely on.

Result: Eight clauses, checked before a single point of grammar. The commonest failures are a form that is not unmistakable, more paragraphs of summary than of opinion, and an audience that is nowhere visible — none of which is a Welsh problem.

The source’s opening says, in English, that a proposed new road will cut journey times by twelve minutes and that local opposition is based on nostalgia. Show what a translation produces and what a translanguaged response produces.

1. 01The translation

   Bydd y ffordd newydd arfaethedig yn torri deuddeg munud oddi ar amseroedd teithio, ac mae’r gwrthwynebiad lleol wedi’i seilio ar hiraeth. (The proposed new road will cut twelve minutes off journey times, and local opposition is based on nostalgia.) Accurate, competent, and wrong for this task — it has the source’s structure, the source’s emphasis and the source’s claim presented as if it were yours.

2. 02Notice what the translation smuggled in

   The English sentence puts the twelve minutes first and the objection second, and it characterises the objection as nostalgia. By translating faithfully you have adopted both the ordering and the characterisation. In a response, that is a surrender of the argument before you have begun — which is why translating is not merely disallowed but strategically disastrous.

3. 03The translanguaged opening

   Deuddeg munud. Dyna, yn ôl yr erthygl, beth mae’r ffordd newydd yn ei gynnig — a dyna hefyd, yn ôl yr un erthygl, pam mae pobl leol yn anghywir i’w gwrthwynebu hi. Dw i ddim yn cytuno. (Twelve minutes. That, according to the article, is what the new road offers — and that too, according to the same article, is why local people are wrong to oppose it. I do not agree.)

4. 04What changed

   The content survived intact — twelve minutes, the road, the characterisation of the opposition — but the structure is now yours: a two-word opening for emphasis, the source attributed twice with yn ôl so that its claims are clearly ITS claims, and a flat statement of position at the end of the paragraph. Nothing was translated; everything was used.

5. 05The test to apply

   Read your first paragraph and ask: could somebody reconstruct the English sentence order from it? If yes, you translated. If no, and yet the facts are all there and correctly attributed, you translanguaged. That single test, applied to the opening paragraph, catches the problem where it starts — because a response that begins as a translation almost never recovers.

Result: The translation adopted the source’s order and its characterisation of the opposition; the translanguaged version kept every fact, attributed both claims with yn ôl, restructured for emphasis and stated a position. Same content, different piece of writing.

Here are five sentences from a practice response. Identify the fingerprint in each and rewrite it as Welsh rather than as translated English.

1. 01English word order surviving

   Wrong: ‘Y newydd ffordd fydd yn helpu.’ The adjective has been placed before the noun because English puts it there. Welsh puts most adjectives after: Bydd y ffordd newydd yn helpu. And note that the corrected version also begins with the verb, which is the normal Welsh order and which the English original was suppressing.

2. 02An English preposition

   Wrong: ‘Mae’n rhaid i ni edrych ar y broblem yma i.’ The verb has been given the preposition English uses. Welsh verbs demand their own: edrych AR (look at) is right, but ‘talu i’ for ‘pay for’ is wrong — Welsh is talu AM. Learn each verb with its preposition attached, exactly as the specification’s inventory prints them.

3. 03An abstract noun where Welsh prefers a verb

   Clumsy: ‘Mae gwrthwynebiad y trigolion lleol yn seiliedig ar hiraeth.’ More natural: Mae’r trigolion lleol yn gwrthwynebu, ac mae’r erthygl yn dweud mai hiraeth ydy’r rheswm. Welsh carries argument on verbs more readily than English does, and a sentence built on a verbnoun almost always reads better than one built on an abstract noun.

4. 04The English ‘of’ chain

   Wrong: ‘Y cost o’r cynllun o’r cyngor.’ Welsh forms the genitive by simple juxtaposition with no word for ‘of’ and no article on the first element: cost cynllun y cyngor. The specification prints the rule outright — the ‘the’ and the ‘of’ must be omitted, as in pen y mynydd for ‘the top of the mountain’.

5. 05The structural fingerprint

   Not a sentence but a shape: if your response has five paragraphs and the article has five paragraphs and they cover the same things in the same order, you translated at the level of the document even if every sentence is idiomatic. The repair is structural — decide your own opening, and make it something the article does NOT begin with.

Result: Five fingerprints: adjective placement, an English preposition, an abstract noun, an ‘of’ chain, and paragraph-for-paragraph correspondence. The first four are sentence repairs; the fifth needs the whole plan rewritten, which is why the face-down rule matters more than any of them.

The source argues that Welsh-language road signs confuse visiting drivers. Write the opening of each of the three forms in Welsh, naming the audience for each.

1. 01Letter, to the editor of the newspaper that ran the piece

   Annwyl Olygydd, Ysgrifennaf mewn ymateb i’r erthygl am arwyddion ffyrdd a gyhoeddwyd gennych yr wythnos diwethaf. Fel rhywun sy’n gyrru ar y ffyrdd hynny bob dydd, hoffwn gynnig safbwynt gwahanol. (Dear Editor, I am writing in response to the article about road signs that you published last week. As somebody who drives on those roads every day, I would like to offer a different view.) Note ysgrifennaf, the short-form present, and a gyhoeddwyd, a relative clause with the impersonal past — the formal register the addressee requires.

2. 02Article, for a Welsh-language magazine

   ARWYDDION — Y BROBLEM NAD YW’N BODOLI. Bob haf, mae rhywun yn ailadrodd yr un ddadl: bod arwyddion dwyieithog yn drysu gyrwyr. Bob haf, does neb yn gofyn i’r gyrwyr. (SIGNS — THE PROBLEM THAT DOES NOT EXIST. Every summer somebody repeats the same argument: that bilingual signs confuse drivers. Every summer, nobody asks the drivers.) A headline, a repeated structure for rhythm, and an opening that makes the reader want the next sentence.

3. 03Information pamphlet, for visitors to Wales

   CROESO I GYMRU — DEALL YR ARWYDDION. Ydych chi’n gyrru yng Nghymru am y tro cyntaf? Dyma bopeth sydd angen i chi ei wybod. Mae pob arwydd yn ddwyieithog. Mae’r wybodaeth yr un fath yn y ddwy iaith. (WELCOME TO WALES — UNDERSTANDING THE SIGNS. Are you driving in Wales for the first time? Here is everything you need to know. Every sign is bilingual. The information is the same in both languages.) Headings, a question, direct address, short blocks.

4. 04Note how the audience changed the argument

   The letter argues with the writer. The article argues with the idea, and assumes a reader who is already irritated by it. The pamphlet does not argue at all — it informs, because arguing with a visitor would be pointless. Same source, same opinion, three different jobs, and the job was set by the audience rather than by the form.

5. 05Use the audience gap deliberately

   In all three, the fact that the source was written for readers outside Wales is available material. In the letter it becomes a polite correction; in the article it becomes the joke in the headline; in the pamphlet it becomes the reason the pamphlet exists. Noticing whom the source was written for, and writing for somebody else, is the clearest demonstration of the task’s own idea.

Result: Three openings, three registers, three purposes — argue with the writer, argue with the idea, or inform a newcomer. The audience decided each one, and in each the difference between the source’s readership and yours became usable material.

The source is an English comment piece arguing that small rural schools in Wales should be closed and their pupils bused to larger ones, because larger schools offer more subjects. Plan and open the response as a letter.

1. 01Ten minutes — the four notes, in Welsh

   Y ddadl: dylid cau ysgolion bach a chludo’r plant i ysgolion mwy. Y dystiolaeth: mwy o bynciau, llai o gost fesul disgybl, mwy o athrawon arbenigol. Y bwlch: dim sôn am amser teithio, nac am beth mae colli’r ysgol yn ei wneud i bentref, nac am iaith. Y gynulleidfa: darllenwyr Prydeinig cyffredinol, nid rhieni yng Nghymru. Four notes, and the third and fourth are where the response will live.

2. 02Eight minutes — the six-line plan

   Line 1: audience the editor, form a letter, register formal. Line 2: position — the argument is right about subjects but has left out the two things that matter here, travel and language. Line 3: travel — an hour a day on a bus is an hour of childhood. Line 4: the village — a school is often the last shared institution left. Line 5: language — in some areas the small school is where Welsh is a daily language rather than a lesson. Line 6: close — ask the editor to consider what the calculation leaves out.

3. 03The opening three sentences

   Annwyl Olygydd, Ysgrifennaf mewn ymateb i’r erthygl am ysgolion gwledig a gyhoeddwyd gennych ar y trydydd o’r mis. Mae’r ddadl am nifer y pynciau yn ddadl deg, ac mae’n anodd anghytuno â hi. Ond mae’r erthygl yn gadael dau beth allan, a dau beth sy’n cyfrif yn arbennig yng Nghymru ydyn nhw. (Dear Editor, I am writing in response to the article about rural schools that you published on the third of the month. The argument about the number of subjects is a fair one, and it is hard to disagree with it. But the article leaves out two things, and they are two things that count particularly in Wales.)

4. 04Why that opening works

   It declares the form in four words, attributes the source once, CONCEDES the source’s strongest point before disagreeing — which makes the disagreement credible — and announces the structure of the rest. It also contains not one sentence that could be reconstructed from the English article, because the article did not concede anything and did not mention Wales.

5. 05Finish and sweep

   Close by asking the editor for something rather than by summarising: Hoffwn ofyn i chi ystyried beth sydd ar goll o’r cyfrifiad — nid y pynciau, ond y pethau nad oes modd eu cyfrif. (I would like to ask you to consider what is missing from the calculation — not the subjects, but the things that cannot be counted.) Then seven minutes: treiglo from the trigger list, verb systems, agreement and conjugated prepositions, spelling, punctuation, and one last check that the register has not slipped from Annwyl Olygydd to something more casual.

Result: Four Welsh notes, a six-line plan built with the source face down, a three-sentence opening that concedes before it disagrees, a close that asks rather than summarises, and seven minutes of sweeping. The two points the response is built on — travel and language — were both things the source left out.