It's a brand name so you can't translate it (into Welsh)

Brand-name : “a trade or proprietory name” (OED); otherwise “a name which must not under any circumstances be translated into Welsh”.

“It can’t be translated because it is a brand name”: this is the all-too-familiar protest of those who have perhaps had a bright idea but haven’t included the fact that their business or presence is in Wales in their plans before launching the said idea on the public. Cue, questions as to where the Welsh identity of the “brand” is to be found; response, wriggling, occasionally leading to a reversal (which very often turns out to be quite painless, after all), but sometimes determined refusal to consider the Welsh language (more likely if the parent company is not based in Wales and orders, or not-so-bright ideas, have come from elsewhere).

Although I have mainly worked in the public sector I must put my hand up here and confess to a family background in PR and advertising, so although it is at one or even two removes I do know a little bit about what a brand name is supposed to be and some of the principles of successful marketing. The name must be memorable, easy to associate with the product, and fairly simple. Over time a good brand name will become well-known. An unsuccessful name might close doors (such as names which work in one language but not in another, for instance – the reason why we never saw that refreshing drink Pschitt! for sale on this side of La Manche, at least not under that name. “Pour vous, cher ange, Pschitt orange”, its early slogan, would have been a challenge to English marketing in translation …)

I am talking here in terms of business because that essentially is where terms like brand truly belong. A brand is not the same thing as the public image of a public sector operation, although business language, terms and ideology creep in there all the time. It certainly is not the correct term for a room with a functional name in a building. It is also not the correct term for an advertising slogan or campaign. A business is free not to translate its advertising (although it may be losing a trick by not doing so), but a government agency does have to provide Welsh language versions of its public information. Some slogans are easier to translate than others, and in some cases something may be lost or gained in translation (slogans are the product of a creative mind, after all) but there is no reason for not making the attempt. So, Cardiff Council’s brilliant “Tidy Text” can be and is translated into Welsh (but loses the joke in the process), whereas “Gwener y gwario gwirion” is a witty, and alliterative, improvement on “Black Friday”, although perhaps not quite conveying the meaning which businesses want!

Two examples of “brand name” oddity spring to mind at once.

The Royal Mint, formerly in the Tower of London but based in Llantrisant in Wales since 1968, would surely count as most people’s idea of a public body. It recently opened its doors to the public, and you can go there for the Royal Mint Experience, during which you can enjoy the Royal Tea Experience. In Welsh (once you have found the Welsh version of the website) you are invited to enjoy the “profiad y te brenhinol”, but it is part of something translated as “Profiad y Royal Mint” – a strange and distracting hybrid. (The Welsh name has slipped in in a few places, for further confusion). “Profiad y Royal Mint” appears on all the yellow directional road signs.  Next to the name “Royal Mint” a little ® appears, so it seems that this is now considered a “brand name” – yet the Welsh name “Y Bathdy Brenhinol” has existed for years, and is easily found elsewhere both on the Internet and in print. It’s not as if anyone would have to pay for a special creative translation, as the Welsh name is already known and established. If one really has to treat a name as a brand name (I’m not convinced, but so it seems to be), isn’t it possible to have two? It’s not as if anyone else can claim to be either “Y Bathdy Brenhinol” or “The Royal Mint”, after all! (the current penalty for counterfeiting money is 10 years’ imprisonment).

Another recent example, this one from the private sector and apparently unresolvable, involves Marks & Spencer, or M & S, which appears to have undergone a recent rebranding exercise. Out with the green, in with the black and white; out with the full name, too, in lots of places; more contentiously, in with the weird new coinage “foodhall” (one word), which indicates, if I have understood correctly, the smaller, mainly food outlets, which also sell such things as flowers, newspapers and magazines, and a small selection of kitchen and bathroom consumables, but no clothes or household items. This is problematic even without the Welsh question. Clearly the words “food hall”, which are more correct in English, could not be a “brand name” because, well, they are just words – in this case words which have been used for the same concept by other well-known stores for many years. Where there is a larger M & S, that is with the clothes and shoes and so on, the words “food hall” appear on the store guidance signs, and in Wales they are translated as “neuadd fwyd” along with the other names of different departments in the shop. However, it appears that a “foodhall” is not the same as a “food hall”, and that we are being asked to regard “foodhall” as a brand (let’s for the sake of argument think of these shops as M & S with no knickers). When M & S opened its new “foodhall” in Aberystwyth, the council objected to the lack of Welsh, but was told that “foodhall” was an untranslatable brand name. Several people pointed out on Twitter and elsewhere that the large shops do translate the two words. Ah, but the two words are not a brand name, you see. Clear? Well, no, obviously not, since once you get into having to explain the difference between two words (named department in a bigger store) and one word made out of two words run together (the no-knickers shops) you have obviously failed to get the concept across to the customers, and the name isn’t meeting the requirement of being simple and easily understood. It doesn’t work particularly well in English, because you either have to pronounce it as two words (in which case you have moved away from the brand name) or make something up – should it rhyme with Goodall? Should it have an Old Norse slant and become the Fuđhall?

I haven’t managed to come up with a creative solution, so perhaps it’s just as well I didn’t follow other family members into this field, but I can’t believe that there isn’t something which would work better than this, both for clarity, better English, and, of course with a Welsh version too: or, if the idea of a Welsh brand is unacceptable, another clearer name or word which would work for everyone, including in Aberystwyth where the % of people who speak Welsh is higher than those who do not. Many years ago my grandfather actually worked for Marks and Spencer in just this type of work. I wonder what he might have suggested?

Welsh has official status in Wales, which does not affect the status of English but does mean that Welsh should not be treated less favourably. The law is weak in the area of private enterprise, stronger in the case of public bodies (but in these days of semi-privatisation and arms-length agencies, what exactly counts as a public body?)

Private companies have more freedom to ignore the language, but might like to consider how excluding Welsh from their “brand” comes across to their potential Welsh customers. Basically, if you are saying that your “brand name” cannot or must not be in Welsh, you are really saying that you would rather people didn’t speak Welsh, and you perhaps cannot even comprehend that they might be thinking in Welsh.

Yr wylan deg: seagull nursery time

Gull, n.
Etymology: Perhaps < Welsh gŵylan, Cornish guilan = Breton goelann (whence French goëland), Old Irish foilenn (modern Irish faoileann) < Old Celtic *voilenno-; compare Breton goelaff to weep.
- OED


"Yr wylan deg ar lanw, dioer ..."




The poet Dafydd ap Gwilym wrote his famous poem to the seagull in the fourteenth century. It's really not about the seagull, of course, but about the lady to whom the gull is free to fly, whereas he is not. Centuries later, the gull is an all-too-familiar presence in Wales, including in inner Cardiff, and for a few weeks this summer we had the mixed pleasure of finding ourselves living in a seagull nursery, as after an absence of some years a gull pair decided that our street, with its high but unused Edwardian chimney pots, is an ideal place for the rearing of seagull young (it isn't).
The first high pitched cries of the young chick were heard at the beginning of June, and a tiny head could be seen sticking out on the roof of a neighbour's house. So far, so good: however, seagull chicks hatch apparently already able to walk, but unable to fly, and the tiny amount of space among the chimney pots is wholly inadequate for the next stage. Sure enough, very soon the small fluffy one had reached the ground (how? do they just float down somehow?) and was now in someone's back garden, with its parent still settled on the roof, about 30' higher up. In no time at all, it found its way out of the back garden (where it was safe from cars but not from cats) and eventually round to the busy street, where it took up residence, mainly sitting in the gutter, on the pavement, and in the road.
Having had an unsuccessful episode of seagull rearing in the street before, we knew more or less what to expect - but I had certainly forgotten aspects of human behaviour which gulls inspire (even small fluffy brown ones which look more like ducklings). At a rough guess, I would say that the country is divided absolutely and forever on the subject of seagulls, rather like Brexit. 48% of us seem to be able to co-exist with them, whereas the other 52% really hate them. The internet is full of rants about seagulls and suggestions for getting rid of them: firms offer (illegally) to exterminate chicks. The press regularly carries stories about gull-on-human attacks (I won't name names for likely newspapers, but let's just say there seems to be a common thread here: think, fear - whether of groups of "other" people, various, or wild birds or animals. Squirrels come in for quite a bit of negative attention too).
Seagulls are noisy, they make a mess on your laundry, head and car, and they will swoop at you if they perceive you as a threat, but they do not, in fact, usually actually attack you. They don't like small dogs, small children, or men in hard hats. The presence of a chick in the vicinity ups the likelihood of diving, and it seems that many people do not recognise the young for what they are and do not realise that the big white bird is angry because they are going too close to an apparently unrelated brown one. However much you might dislike wildlife in general, and this sort in particular, chicks and birds with young should be left well alone. They are protected by law, and you not liking them isn't a good enough reason for disturbing them. (There's more information about the legal position here). It's not easy to identify the young ones but after observing the adults I think ours are lesser black-backed gulls (so, not particularly endangered, but their numbers are falling).


Gwylaneg = Gullish
Not in the OED! but gulls definitely communicate with each other and have a number of different cries which, living right in the middle of them, we found we were getting to know. There's a quacking, which sometimes seems to be a gentle alert (e.g. from the parent to the chick, if I left the house - just to let him know that someone was coming, but not a full-on warning of danger); the cries with which they maintain contact with each other; the full head-thrown-back shout; the very high-pitched and insistent sound which the chicks make; and the quite different sounds the adults make when there is immediate danger or threat (partly distress and partly intimidation). We soon learned to recognise, and respond to, this one, as it is quite different from usual gull talk.
During the next few weeks we had our sleep disturbed late at night by the terrible cacophony of one of the adult birds as two men who were old enough to know better danced around in the road throwing sticks and stones at it and tried to catch it as it swooped - possibly unaware of the nearby chick, of course, but FFS! (as they say) - quite apart from unnecessary provocation, how about some consideration for people trying to get to sleep? On another evening the same noise turned out to be reaction to a boy of around 13 stalking the chick with a huge stick, also quite late at night. I spent some time talking to him and eventually, reluctantly, he gave up, insisting that "I'm not going to hurt it" (huh? what was the big stick for then?). Seagulls seem to settle down for the night at around 10 p.m., unless people are throwing things at them or threatening their young.
Not everyone hates seagulls, but those who don't can be a bit of a threat too, unintentionally: some people want to take the chicks away and "save" them, but even though one has to agree that a busy urban street is a bad place for a chick, removing it from its parent is not a good idea. (The parents tend to stay up on the rooftops and don't spend very much time down on the ground with the young, but if you are at close quarters with them you will know that the chick has not been abandoned. Feeding often takes place last thing at night or early in the morning). I ended up having a long chat with a nice lady with a lidded bucket who wanted to take the chick to a vet. "He is being attacked by the other seagulls", she said. (No, they are attacking you because you are trying to take their baby away in a bucket ...) Amazingly she accepted my point and the chick stayed put under the watchful eye of the parents.
About two weeks after arriving on the ground, the chick was joined by another, smaller chick. We guessed that they were from the same nest but not the same age. It was at this point that even the hardest anti-gull heart would begin to melt - surely? - because it became obvious that the two liked each other's company and that gull chicks are probably never meant to be on their own on the ground waiting to fledge. The bigger one looked to sentimental humans like a proud older brother showing his younger sibling his new school. They waddled around everywhere together, snuggled up to each other to sleep, and started doing sensible things like spending the night on doorsteps (instead of in the road).

Sadly, the big brother wasn't able to prevent the little one from wandering out under the wheels of a van pulling away from its parking spot a few days later. It was interesting, if distressing, to watch the reaction of the survivor, and its parent whom it summoned: again, while not wishing to be super-anthropomorphic about it and ascribing human emotions to birds of, presumably, very little brain, both birds displayed agitation and then what seemed like grief, bending their heads down so that their beaks were vertical to the ground and staying motionless like that for a short while.The adult flew off, low, but the chick wandered about with its head down for days, going back every now and then to look at the remains and even moving the dead one off the road.
Just a few days later, one morning we saw the chick sitting on a gatepost, having finally got off the ground (earlier attempts were funny to watch - jumping up and down on the spot flapping its wings), and a few days later still he was seen flying low over the road, as if it were the sea. In fact I wondered whether the gulls think of the road as a version of the sea, as the young one also tried several times to settle down right in the middle for the night. It had not yet had the chance to experience landing on water, yet its behaviour around the water put out for it to drink suggested that it wanted to get in. We did not put any food out for it, reckoning that it seemed to be growing without it and, however gross we found the regurgitative process by which the adult transfers food to its young, felt that they probably knew what they were doing.
The silence in the street on the Sunday morning after seeing the chick flying along the road was eerie and unnerving. Early in the morning we had heard a great deal of seagull vocalising, high up above the street rather than close at hand, but could see nothing. There was no sign of any of the group, and for several days it stayed like that (not wholly quiet, in fact: the magpies and crows which had been keeping a low profile soon started to reappear). This time, at least, there was no mangled feathery corpse anywhere to be seen. The absence of seagull noise made me realise how much their sounds had become the background to everything, and also how alert we had been made by them, looking out all the time for dangers, chasing the chick out of the road, and so on. We convinced ourselves that the chick had flown (although I did start to wonder about sparrowhawks, which have been seen in inner Cardiff preying on smaller birds). Nearly a week later, the family returned, parents back on their usual chimneypots and - yes - the fully fledged brown juvenile seagull up there on the roof with them. I felt as proud as if I had taught him to fly myself!
They are still visiting occasionally (especially on bin day) but seem to be spending most of their time elsewhere. The young one's cry is still the insistent high-pitched shriek of the young, and he is a bit clumsy landing on the roof, but he has otherwise mastered his beautiful brown wings and soars above the rooftops. While the adults do come down to the ground the young one hardly ever does. I wish the other little one could have joined him up there, having spotted a few other more complete family groups with young ones sociably sticking together, but at least he made it in spite of all the odds.