Bilingual is not translation

There is a kind of bilingual design you see everywhere in Wales. The English is confident: big type, good spacing, the headline the designer wanted. The Welsh sits underneath in a smaller size, or in a lighter weight, or wraps to three lines because nobody checked. It is correct. It complies. And it tells every Welsh speaker exactly which language the brand thinks in.

We think that is a design failure, not a language one, and it comes from treating bilingual as a translation step at the end of the process.

The join is always visible

When a brand is designed in English and translated, the Welsh inherits every decision that was made without it. The line lengths were set for English. The typeface was chosen before anyone checked it had a ŵ. The tone of voice was written for one language and carried across word by word, so it sounds like a notice from a council even when the English sounds like a friend. None of that is fixed by a better translator. It is fixed by starting differently.

Start with both

We are a Welsh-speaking studio, so this is not a policy for us, it is how we think. The first sketch of a mark has both languages on the page. The first tone-of-voice draft is written in both, not written in one and rendered into the other. The layout is tested with the Welsh first, because it is usually longer, and if the Welsh fits the English will. Motion is timed to the longer line. None of this costs more. It costs the same, earlier.

What changes

The Welsh stops looking like the translation, which means Welsh speakers stop feeling like the second audience. Sometimes the brand gets simpler, because a name or a mark that has to work in both languages without help is a stronger mark. Rownd a Rownd became RaR partly for that reason. And the guidelines get shorter, because the rule for how the languages sit together was made once, at the start, instead of case by case for years.

The broadcasters know this already

S4C, the public sector and the bodies that work under the Welsh Language Standards have lived with this for a long time, and the best of them design in both languages as a matter of course. The rest of the country is catching up, and the brands that get there first will look like they belong here. The others will keep looking like they arrived with a phrasebook.