Bilingual English and Welsh landing pages for Cardiff public campaigns

What to take away

What Welsh language standards require of a Cardiff public campaign

Cardiff is home to the Welsh Government, a wide set of public bodies and a creative sector that works with both. For a Cardiff public campaign, bilingual pages are not a branding choice. The Welsh Language Act 1993 put Welsh and English on an equal footing in public administration in Wales, and the Welsh language standards that apply to public bodies today are made under the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011.

Those standards are set out in compliance notices issued by the Welsh Language Commissioner, who enforces them and publishes the duties that apply to each body. A campaign landing page that delivers a council or health service is part of that delivery.

The practical effect is that a Cardiff council or health board cannot treat Welsh as a translation afterthought. If the English page collects a name, an email address or a consent tick, the Welsh page must do the same job with the same legal effect.

That means the data controller has to be named in both versions, and the purpose of the processing has to be clear in both.

Charities funded by Welsh public bodies often inherit the same expectations through grant conditions. Even where the strict standards do not apply, a Cardiff public campaign that ignores Welsh can look out of step with the city it serves.

The Cultural identity - Office for National Statistics publishes data on how many people in Wales report a Welsh identity. That context matters when you decide how prominent the Welsh version should be.

One common mistake is to build the English page first and then ask a translator to fit Welsh text into the same boxes. Welsh often needs more room for labels and consent sentences. Build the Welsh version alongside the English one, or the layout will break at the point where consent is captured.

Consent wording in English and Welsh on the same form

Consent wording in Welsh has to be as specific as the English. A tick box that says the user agrees to be contacted is too vague in either language. The form should name the organisation, the channels it will use and the purpose of the contact.

Where the campaign sends email or text messages, the The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 apply. The Welsh-language version of PECR 2003 is published on legislation.gov.uk, and it is the reference point for a bilingual consent sentence.

Keep the English and Welsh sentences next to each other, not on separate pages, so the user sees both before ticking.

For personal data more broadly, the Data Protection Act 2018 gives you the statutory wording to mirror. A privacy notice linked from the form should exist in both languages, with the same retention periods and the same lawful basis. If the English notice says six months, the Welsh notice cannot say something different.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) regulates both the Data Protection Act 2018 and PECR 2003, and its consent guidance applies in the same way to the Welsh page as to the English one. Keep the controller's ICO registration details and the complaint route in both versions of the privacy notice.

A worked example helps. Suppose a Cardiff public campaign collects emails for a recycling initiative. The form could show:

Both sentences do the same work. The consent record should store which language version the user saw, because that is evidence of what they agreed to. This is a small point that audit teams ask about later.

Form labels, error messages and the Welsh-language PECR text

Form labels in Welsh are where bilingual pages often fall down. A label like "Email address" becomes "Cyfeiriad e-bost", and a field for a phone number becomes "Rhif ffôn". If the label is shortened to fit a narrow column, the Welsh version can become ambiguous. Test the form at the smallest screen size you support.

Error messages need the same treatment. "Please enter a valid email address" has a Welsh equivalent that should appear in the same place, with the same styling. Do not leave error text in English only, because that is the moment a user is most likely to abandon the form.

If the campaign uses a Welsh-language PECR 2003 text for consent, keep the link to it visible near the tick box. The same applies to the privacy notice built on the Welsh-language Data Protection Act 2018. A user should not have to switch to an English page to read the terms they are accepting.

Accessibility guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission applies to both language versions. Colour contrast, focus states and screen reader labels must work in Welsh too. A Welsh label read by a screen reader should sound natural, not like a literal translation.

Your internal disclosure procedure should say who signs off the Welsh text and who checks the consent record. If a campaign is run with an agency, agree which side owns the Welsh copy and which side owns the English. That division belongs in the same document as your UK rules and compliance notes.

Search visibility for bilingual Welsh landing pages

Welsh language search visibility is not the same as ranking an English page with a Welsh translation bolted on. People in Cardiff search in both languages, and the queries differ. A Welsh speaker looking for a council service may type "ailgylchu Caerdydd" rather than "Cardiff recycling".

Give each language version its own title tag, meta description and H1. Do not use the same URL with a language toggle that hides the Welsh content from crawlers. Use a clear URL structure, such as a /cy/ path or a subdomain, and set the hreflang tags so Google understands which page serves which language.

Welsh content should not be a word-for-word translation of the English if the search terms differ. Research the Welsh phrases people use for the service, then write the page around those phrases. This is audience research in the literal sense: find out what people type before you write the headline.

Internal linking matters too. Link the Welsh page to other Welsh pages, not back to the English hub by default. A Welsh user who clicks through should stay in Welsh. If the campaign has a blog or news section, publish some posts in Welsh and link them from the landing page.

Search visibility also depends on page speed and mobile layout, which are language-neutral. A slow bilingual page loses users in both languages. Keep the form short, compress images and test on a mid-range Android phone, which is a common device in Cardiff.

Building bilingual Welsh landing pages with the right software

The software layer decides how much of this work is manual. A content management system or site builder that supports multiple languages — WordPress with WPML or Polylang is the common route for public-sector sites — lets the Welsh page have its own URL, title and metadata instead of being hidden behind a language toggle. Check that capability before the build starts, not after.

The form and consent layer is where bilingual campaigns usually stumble. A form builder or landing-page platform has to store the language of the consent record alongside the submission, and a consent-management platform has to show the Welsh wording in the same banner as the English. Cookiebot and OneTrust are widely used for consent banners; whichever you choose, confirm that it can render Welsh text rather than falling back to English.

Analytics and follow-up need the same care. Google Analytics 4 and a CRM or mailing tool such as HubSpot or Mailchimp should record the page language and the campaign source, so the Welsh page can be reported separately from the English one. For email and text messages, the consent record has to stand up to PECR 2003 in both languages.

A bilingual page checklist for Cardiff councils and charities

Use this checklist before a Cardiff public campaign goes live. It covers the points that most often cause problems after launch.

A short worked example shows the checklist in action. A Cardiff charity runs a campaign for a winter fuel payment. The English page uses a form with two tick boxes. The Welsh page uses the same two tick boxes with Welsh labels.

Both pages link to the same bilingual privacy notice. The charity records the language of consent and reports it to its board. That is the standard the Welsh language standards made under the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 point towards, applied to a landing page.

For teams that need to assign this work, team roles should be clear from the start: one owner for Welsh copy, one for the form build, one for the consent record. Without that, the Welsh version slips to the end of the project and launches late.

Common questions