Supporting Bilingual Accessibility

Swansea Law Clinic is assisting the Law Society by translating their pro bono manual into Welsh. The aim is for the manual to be able to reach and assist solicitors who are Welsh speaking, and those who are helping Welsh-speaking clients too.

We’re carrying out this translation work with a group of Welsh-speaking volunteer students who are currently studying in the School of Law, Swansea University. The manual is split into four Parts: Part 1: Planning, developing & maintaining a programme, Part 2: Procedures & practice issues, Part 3: Precedents & pro formas and Part 4: Information and resources. The students each work on translating small segments of one of the Parts individually, then, when they’ve collectively completed translating one of the Parts, the complete translated draft is sent on to Eversheds Cardiff, where several of their Welsh-speaking solicitors have volunteered to check the translation.

Part 3 of the manual, Precedents and pro formas, contains lots of letter templates, and because of this, we started with this segment as the pilot for the project, as this would be useful to be distributed even if we weren’t able to complete the entire manual.

We’ve now completed both Part 3 and Part 4 of the manual, and are currently working on translating Part 2 of the manual.