The question
Why is it still unusual for a Welsh business to do its books in Welsh?
Welsh is an official language in Wales, more than half a million people speak it, and a company can file its accounts at Companies House in it. Yet a Welsh-speaking business owner almost certainly does their bookkeeping in English. That gap has causes, and none of them are that it is difficult.
The duty falls on public bodies, not on software companies
The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 gave Welsh official status and created a system of standards. Those standards apply to public bodies - councils, government, the health service, regulators. A company selling accounting software to businesses is under no equivalent obligation, and never has been.
So the pressure to offer Welsh in this corner of the market is commercial rather than legal. That is exactly why the Welsh Language Commissioner runs Cynnig Cymraeg as a voluntary scheme for organisations that choose to offer a Welsh service: in the private sector, choosing is the only mechanism there is.
The market is small enough to be nobody's priority
The 2021 Census recorded 538,000 people aged three and over in Wales able to speak Welsh, 17.8 per cent of the population. For a product sold across the United Kingdom, and usually well beyond it, that is a line that loses every roadmap argument it is ever in.
It loses that argument on arithmetic that is perfectly sound and a conclusion that is still wrong, because the people in that number are not a percentage of a market to themselves. They are running the business in the language they think in and then doing its books in another one.
Bilingual is not a translation layer bolted on afterwards
The part that looks like the work - translating the buttons - is the part a machine can nearly do. What it cannot do is know that the Welsh for a company-secretarial term is not a matter of judgement. Companies House publishes an English-to-Welsh glossary under its Welsh Language Scheme, and those are the words that appear on a Welsh filing. A product that translates them freshly produces Welsh that a Welsh-speaking accountant would not recognise on a form they have filed for twenty years.
Dates are the small example that gives it away. A Welsh page showing an English month is the sort of thing that tells a reader, instantly and without them having to articulate why, that nobody who speaks the language has looked at this.
- Statutory terminology, not a translator's best guess
- Dates and numbers following Welsh convention
- Both languages in the same product, for people who work in both
It costs the same to build for five hundred as for five hundred thousand
Almost all of the work is fixed. Getting the terminology right, building the language switch, keeping the two halves from drifting apart as the product changes - none of that gets cheaper because more people use it, and none of it gets more expensive because fewer do.
Which means it never happens by accident. A product is bilingual because somebody decided it would be, early, and then kept paying the small recurring cost of keeping it that way. There is no version of this that gets added later when the numbers justify it, because the numbers never will.
What we have found, and what we are doing
We have not found a complete Welsh interface in any of the mainstream bookkeeping products we checked. We would be glad to be corrected on that, and if you know of one we would like to hear about it.
Alwen is being built in both languages from the start rather than translated later, with the Companies House glossary as the source for statutory terms and an automated check that fails the release if the Welsh drifts from it or an English string is left untranslated. The work is not finished, and the page on Welsh in Alwen says plainly what is done and what is not.
Read next
Would you keep your books in Welsh?
We would like to hear from Welsh-speaking business owners, bookkeepers and accountants, including about what we have got wrong.