Welsh Assembly Government to increase spending on its translation department
The Assembly Government is planning to increase spending on its translation department at a time when the rest of the public sector is being cut back. The move has prompted astonishment among those aware of it. One management post has already been upgraded, and staff are to be invited to apply for new roles on a higher salary band.
The department does one thing: it turns Assembly Government documents from English into Welsh. It is not a discretionary press office or a communications team that can be trimmed at will. It is the mechanism by which a devolved government meets a statutory duty.
The official line
An Assembly Government spokesman put it plainly. "Translation is a very important part of our business," he said. "The amount of translation has grown over the last few years, and we have responded by making the translation service larger. This has not resulted in universal upgrading or increase of salaries."
That last sentence is doing a lot of work. Nobody is claiming a blanket pay rise. What has happened is narrower and, in staffing terms, fairly ordinary: as the volume of work grew, one post was regraded and a set of roles were placed on a higher band, and existing staff have been invited to apply for them.
The objection
Charlotte Linacre, campaign manager at the TaxPayers' Alliance, was blunt. "It will be a shock to taxpayers that pay rises are being given out now, as many are tightening their belts this Christmas and face a VAT hike in the New Year," she said.
It is a fair political point and a familiar one. Any upgrade inside a government department looks provocative when councils are freezing recruitment and departments are being told to find savings. The question is whether translation is a nice-to-have that should share the pain, or a legal obligation whose cost does not fall simply because the budget does.
Why the volume is going up, not down
Welsh is not a courtesy language in Cardiff Bay. It is an official one. The Welsh Language Act 1993 established the principle that Welsh and English should be treated on a basis of equality in public life in Wales, and successive devolution settlements have deepened that. Assembly Government documents, consultations, statutory guidance, ministerial statements and the Record of Proceedings are expected to appear bilingually. That is not a batch of leaflets. It is a continuous stream of technical, legally sensitive prose that must be rendered accurately and, in many cases, published in both languages at the same moment.
The workload has grown for a straightforward reason. Devolution keeps handing Wales more competence, and every new competence generates new documents. More primary legislation, more subordinate legislation, more consultations, more guidance. A translation unit sized for the Assembly of 2001 will not cope with the Assembly of 2011.
The direction of travel was already visible. A Welsh Language Measure was moving through the Assembly that would create a Welsh Language Commissioner and replace voluntary language schemes with enforceable standards. Enforceable standards mean somebody can be held to account for failing to publish in Welsh. Governments that expect to be held to account tend to staff up first.
What translation departments actually cost
Public bodies frequently discover that in-house capacity is the cheaper option once volume passes a certain threshold. Buying document translation services from agencies at commercial rates, at short notice, on legally sensitive material, is expensive and hard to control. An in-house team builds terminology, keeps a translation memory, learns the house style and can be held to a deadline. Regrading a post to retain an experienced Welsh legal translator is not obviously worse value than paying rush rates to an outside supplier every time a Bill lands.
There is also a supply problem that money alone does not solve. The pool of translators who can handle legislative Welsh is small. They are trained slowly, they are in demand from councils, health boards and broadcasters, and if the Assembly Government will not pay a competitive salary band, somebody else will.
The argument nobody is having
The row is being conducted as if the only question is whether the pay band moved. The more interesting question is what the state is buying. Bilingual government is a policy choice made in statute, ratified repeatedly by ministers of every party, and it carries a bill. That bill can be paid efficiently or inefficiently, in-house or outsourced, with good terminology management or without. What it cannot be is wished away by refusing to staff the unit that delivers it.
Roughly a fifth of the population of Wales reported speaking Welsh at the last census, and the number of children in Welsh-medium education has been climbing for a generation. Demand for Welsh-language public documents is not a legacy cost that will politely fade out. It is growing, and the people who will use those documents are getting younger, not older.
The quality problem behind the cost problem
Wales has a long and slightly embarrassing history of bilingual signage gone wrong, most famously the road sign that carried an out-of-office email reply in Welsh because nobody in the office could read the reply they had been sent. Those stories get laughed at, then filed away. They are symptoms of the same thing the Assembly Government is now trying to fix: too little professional capacity, spread too thin, asked to work too fast. Cheap translation is only cheap until it has to be corrected, reprinted or defended.
What to watch
The useful test is not whether the department grew this year. It is whether the extra money buys measurable output: turnaround times, published bilingual documents, a terminology database that other public bodies can reuse. If ministers cannot show that, the TaxPayers' Alliance will have the better of the argument next time, and the department will find itself defending its existence rather than its salary bands.