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Carmarthenshire County Council is the local authority serving the people of Carmarthenshire in West Wales. 43.9% of the population speak Welsh. The Council actively promotes use of the Welsh language and encourages its 9,000-strong workforce to use Welsh in their day to day work.
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The need for a multilingual website
The Council has a statutory obligation to provide all its services to the public in both Welsh and English. During 2015, the forthcoming Welsh language standards will likely require the Council to provide this internally for its staff as well. The Council is keen to pre-empt any new policy requirements so that it can manage the process effectively.
LinguaSkin could potentially help us to deliver this bilingual policy internally.
LinguaSkin is being piloted on the Council’s Internal Transfer System. This is an in-house system which allows the various departments to buy and sell services between themselves. Printing is an example of such services.
I think staff will see this as the standard of what they can expect.
Why LinguaSkin?
The Internal Transfer System is around ten years old and was originally developed prior to any bilingual policy. To redevelop the system without LinguaSkin would involve tying up the Council’s limited resources. As in all local authorities, Carmarthenshire County Council has to juggle its priorities, and decide where to expend its resources.
When it was introduced to LinguaSkin, the Council recognised its potential to cut the time and cost of redevelopment. It was convinced that both the financial and technical risks of implementing LinguaSkin were very small and were happy to go ahead with the implementation.
The product is unique. I’m not aware of anything else that works in quite this manner.
Quick to implement
The Council was happy to give Interceptor Solutions remote access to their web server. A test site was created so there would be no issues with the live system during LinguaSkin’s implementation. Although the system is compatible with Google Translate, the Council largely chose to use an in-house translator. Interceptor Solutions extracted the text which was given to the translators, after which it was added into LinguaSkin’s configuration.
From an IT perspective it hasn’t been that disruptive. Interceptor Solutions said they were going to do most of it and they have.
Easy to use
Once the translations had been completed, the Council were required to do very little maintenance, although the IT team may decide to add more screens and extra functionality within the Internal Transfer System in the future.
We’ve had to do a little bit of testing but you’ve got to do that with any project. It’s been pretty smooth from our perspective.
Cost-effective
Although the Internal Transfer System was developed in-house, it was not designed to be bilingual, and would take up huge resources to redevelop the site. LinguaSkin represents a considerable cost saving.
From an IT perspective, it could save us a considerable amount of development time.
The Council also runs many other systems, including third party applications. Given the forthcoming obligations to provide a bilingual service, cost is a very real issue. It is clear that in the future LinguaSkin could save money and help the Council deliver its bilingual policy..
Key Points
- Capability - comprehensive bilingual capability that is easy to maintain
- Flexibility - implemented on a fully functional application developed in-house.
- Risk – minimal disruption to existing site
- Cost - cost-effective to implement due to Welsh Government funding.
Technical details
| Deployment: | Inline on Microsoft IIS 7.0 |
| Web Server: | Microsoft IIS 7.0 |
| Application Platform: | ASP Classic, Active Directory integration |
| Application Vendor: | Simply Personnel |
| Content Types: | HTML, CSS, Javascript |
| Languages: | EN, CY |
| Num replacements: | 535 |
Acknowledgement of support
Through its Welsh-language Technology and Digital Media Grant, the Welsh Government has funded several LinguaSkin implementation case studies to research the potential of multilingual software interfaces. Carmarthenshire County Council and Interceptor Solutions acknowledge this support.
