LinguaSkin case study

How the ICO meets its legal obligations and increases engagement with Welsh speakers

Who the ICO are

The ICO’s Welsh Affairs team ensures that matters specific to Wales are appropriately reflected in the work of the wider organisation. The Welsh Affairs team is also responsible for delivering Welsh language services to the ICO's Welsh-speaking stakeholders in Wales.

What the ICO needed to achieve

The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 makes Welsh an official language in Wales. This means it must be treated no less favourably than English and that certain publicly funded organisations must allow people to engage with them in Welsh if they wish to.

The ICO is one of several organisations that must comply with this Measure. The set of standards imposed on the ICO requires that it makes certain content on its website available in Welsh so people can access information and submit data in their preferred language.

Key challenges

Although the ICO’s Welsh Affairs team employs staff who can communicate with people in Welsh on the phone or by email, the ICO did not have a solution for meeting the Measure's requirements on its website.

As a UK-wide organisation, the ICO needed language technology that would 1) provide bilingual capability; 2) enable the Welsh Affairs team to translate and publish content; and 3) flag changes to the English content, and critically achieve this without affecting the English language version of the ICO’s website.

Large public organisations generally use sophisticated content management systems (CMS) on their websites. While CMS often support multilingual content, the reconfiguration and migration effort and ongoing challenge to synchronise content across languages can be time-consuming and hence expensive. Therefore, a quicker, easier and more cost-effective approach is compelling.

The ICO wants people ‘to feel safe and confident in how their information is used.’ This means that the ICO’s own website must be secure and not compromised by any third-party technology it uses.

Why the ICO chose LinguaSkin

1. Provided bilingual capability with no changes to the existing site or CMS
2. Did not compromise the website’s integrity or security
3. Enabled the ICO to translate content at its own pace
4. Spotted and flagged up changes to the English language content
5. Was easy to implement
6. Was cost-effective

LinguaSkin was the only product evaluated by the ICO which the ICO concluded delivered in respect of all six criteria.

Implementation

While some initial technical effort was required from the ICO's IT team to implement LinguaSkin, little change was needed to the existing English language site, which the ICO maintains as normal.

The whole process has been very smooth, both in terms of the initial implementation and ongoing day-to-day operation. The ICO’s Welsh Affairs team say the support they’ve had from the LinguaSkin team has been helpful and flexible throughout.

How LinguaSkin works

LinguaSkin is implemented as a ‘software proxy’ in front of the ICO website.

First, the English text is scraped, translated and configured as a replacement. A language selector is added to the site, which allows users to switch to their preferred language. For the ICO, this means Welsh speakers can choose to see all configured pages in Welsh. On a multilingual site, it would allow users to choose from several languages.

LinguaSkin then scans the ICO's website content every week (the frequency can be changed to suit the organisation's needs, for example, to daily or monthly). LinguaSkin spots any changes and, where appropriate, applies existing translations in the same font and type size as the original English content so they look the same on screen.

Where updated copy needs a new translation or translation in context, this content is flagged up on an intuitive user interface. The Welsh Affairs team get a weekly list of text changes that need translation or review, which they can then do in their own time.

LinguaSkin can also produce a set of changes to download and send to an external translator. Once the translator has completed their work, it can easily be uploaded to LinguaSkin.

Translation technologies, such as machine translation, can introduce quality, security, reliability, performance and other IT concerns. However, LinguaSkin is a language technology that allows organisations to seamlessly achieve a bi or multilingual website with full quality and security control. As the ICO can’t accept any loss of quality that an automated translation tool might cause, the technology offered by LinguaSkin was the preferred choice.

For the ICO, using the approach offered by LinguaSkin means the ICO is in day-to-day control and can apply its knowledge of both information rights legislation and the Welsh language to make sure translations are accurate and appropriate.

Support

The LinguaSkin team has given the Welsh Affairs team valuable advice on how they can efficiently and effectively make what was an English-only site work bilingually, using their expertise in enhancing monolingual websites and online applications to be multilingual.

The Welsh Affairs team describe LinguaSkin as working in partnership with the ICO and taking an informal and accessible approach while remaining professional.

Benefits

LinguaSkin’s main benefit is that it makes it easy to give a site multilingual capability. The Welsh Affairs team say an additional benefit is how easy it is to maintain the Welsh language section of the ICO website because LinguaSkin automatically repurposes stored translations while flagging up those that need a human to make sure the context is locally, culturally and factually correct.

The team find LinguaSkin especially helpful with complex documents such as the ICO's privacy policy, which is tens of pages long and updated frequently. LinguaSkin automatically picks up changes and updates to the policy to help the team ensure the Welsh version is up to date.

LinguaSkin’s benefits at a glance for the ICO:

What changed

The ICO often communicates with people who have been traumatised by nuisance, abandoned or scam calls. One of the questions they ask in these situations is, 'How did this experience make you feel?' The Welsh Affairs team feel that people find it much easier to answer this question and express their feelings when they can communicate in their mother tongue, even when they are fluent in English.

Before the ICO used LinguaSkin, people who prefer to use the Welsh language would generally report potential data breaches, nuisance calls and messages via phone or email and may not have felt comfortable using the relevant parts of the ICO’s website in English. However, LinguaSkin allows them to make these reports on the website in Welsh, which many people now choose to do.

The ICO has also had positive feedback about the Welsh language functionality of its website, with comments including 'It's lovely to be able to engage with you in Welsh.'

Going forward

The Welsh Affairs team are looking at how they can use LinguaSkin to enhance some of their internal processes and procedures (such as HR functions) to increase opportunities for Welsh-speaking staff to use their preferred language when they access internal systems.