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"Language campaigners have welcomed a decision by council leaders in Cardiff to support a plan to give Welsh-only names to new streets in the capital."
St Fagans National Museum of History is the most visited heritage attraction in Wales. Photograph: Marc Aktins/Art Fund 2019
An open-air heritage attraction praised for living, breathing and embodying the culture of Wales has been named the UK’s museum of the year.
St Fagans National Museum of History last year completed a £30m redevelopment project and was rewarded on Wednesday for showing “exceptional imagination, innovation and achievement”.
The artist Jeremy Deller announced that the heritage attraction near Cardiff had won the Art Fund museum of the year 2019 award at a ceremony at the Science Museum in London. It comes with a £100,000 prize, the largest art award in Britain.
Stephen Deuchar, the director of the Art Fund and the chair of judges, said the museum had been transformed by a redevelopment project that had involved the participation of hundreds of thousands of visitors and volunteers.
A display of traditional wares at St Fagans. Photograph: Marc Aktins/Art Fund 201“St Fagans lives, breathes and embodies the culture and identity of Wales,” he said. “This magical place was made by the people of Wales for people everywhere, and stands as one of the most welcoming and engaging museums anywhere in the UK.”
One of the 2019 judges, Bridget McConnell, the chief executive of the charity Glasgow Life, praised the devolved Welsh government for being such an enthusiastic supporter of St Fagans.
“Everyone I met and saw at St Fagans was in constant, lively conversation about their shared history, culture and lived experiences,” she said. “This is their place, and it is strongly felt on every visit.”
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St Fagans has more than 50 buildings that were moved to the site from locations around Wales allowing visitors to take a walk through Welsh history, from prehistoric times to the present day.
"We must look at what's happening there [online], what isn't happening there, and what is the solution to ensuring that Welsh language content is seen by our children and our young people, and people of every age."
According to Cymdeithas yr Iaith, the new digital initiative would:
research the accessibility of existing Welsh language content, the demand and the ability to create content
create and support new platforms to increase the presence of Welsh online
improve awareness among individuals, groups and organisations of what is available and what is to come.
'Older people too'
In another event, organised by the Welsh language movement Dyfodol i'r Iaith, the chief executive of S4C, Owen Evans, said digital content needed to appeal to a broad audience.
Speaking afterwards, Mr Evans said: "I think digital is for everyone.
"Digital services are for older people too - older than me, even - who want to watch it, and the number of people consuming digital content is growing and growing."
Image copyrightS4CImage caption S4C chief executive Owen Evans said digital content needed to appeal to a broad audience
He said the traditional channel was still very important for S4C's audience, but more co-productions crossing between the TV channel and its digital platforms would be broadcast in future.
"The challenge for S4C is to bring the two together."
Welcome to Source Notes, a Future Tense column about the internet’s knowledge ecosystem.
If you say, “Alexa, faint o’r gloch yw hi?” the smart speaker will not understand that you are asking for the time of day. That’s because Welsh is not one of the eight languages currently supported by Amazon’s Alexa-enabled devices. Gareth Morlais, a Welsh language and digital media specialist for the Welsh government, has argued for years that this language gap is disturbing. In a 2017 presentation, Morlais noted that the Welsh language, then ranked 172nd in the world by number of speakers, was not supported by Alexa, Twitter, or Google’s search interface. At the time, Alexa only spoke and understood two languages: English and German. “The technology actually tells you which language your family can speak at home, which is a horror story,” Morlais said. “What we need to do here is try to shape the technology so that it speaks the same language that we want to speak.”
Although Alexa still does not speak or understand Welsh, the Celtic language’s presence in tech has increased dramatically within a short period. Google announced in February that it had expanded its offerings in Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive to include Welsh. And Google Translate—infamous since 2009 for its Scymraeg, or scummy Welsh—has, according to the BBC, recently taken a great leap forward in terms of the accuracy and quality of its Welsh translations. Morlais and others attribute this in part to the fact that there are now more than 100,000 articles on the Welsh version of Wikipedia, known as Wicipedia.
Like other language editions, Wicipedia is a separate website with its own content, not simply a translation of English Wikipedia, a distinction that matters for both users and big tech companies. Back in 2017, Morlais observed, “There appears to be an indication that there is a link between the languages with the most Wikipedia articles or pages and the languages that are supported by the digital giants.” Google Translate and other technologies use artificial neural networks to learn from example, training themselves with language data from rich internet sources like Welsh Wikipedia.
The Welsh community is not alone in using wiki-technology to promote its language. This year’s Celtic Knot conference in Cornwall, England, included several indigenous languages with their own Wikipedia editions. The original idea, as the name suggests, was to focus on Celtic languages, including Irish, Scots, Breton, Welsh, and Cornish, which was declared extinct merely a decade ago. But as word got out about a Wikipedia minority language conference, others began to join, representing, for example, the Sámi language spoken in parts of Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia; the Berber family of languages spoken in Northern Africa; and the Basque and Catalan communities. (In his 2017 presentation, Morlais noted that Catalan was one of the few minority languages supported by Google search, an accomplishment he linked to the fact that Catalan already had more than 500,000 articles on its language edition of Wikipedia.)
At the Celtic Knot conference, these smaller language communities gathered together to discuss strategies to improve the content in their specific editions of the Wikimedia projects, such as making more medical content available in their local languages. One popular session this year involved setting up Wikidata infoboxes so that these smaller language encyclopedias could source common structured data from the shared Wikidata hub. So, for example, English Google searches for a “list of largest cities” would return this article, Welsh searches would surface the article “Dinasoedd mwyaf y byd,” and both language editions pull data from this central repository.
The National Library of Wales appointed Jason Evans to the position of National Wikimedian nearly two years ago in a formal announcement that recognized Wicipedia as the most popular Welsh website. (The U.S. National Archives also has a Wikipedian in residence to foster collaboration between the National Archives and the English Wikipedia community.) Since his appointment, Evans has developed collaborations and partnerships to help advance the representation of Wales and the Welsh language on Wikimedia projects, like sharing open-access content such as the Peniarth manuscript collection of Welsh history, culture, and verse, thousands of landscape prints, and the laws of Hywel Dda, an influential Welsh king in the 10th century.
I asked Evans why he believed it was so important Welsh have its own language version of the encyclopedia. With the updated translation technology, wasn’t it technically feasible to have a single encyclopedia, and then translate that centralized information into the reader’s specific language? Would that not be more scalable?
“If everyone just had the same generic article, it wouldn’t promote cultural diversity—you know, all the things that make us human,” Evans said. He provided some examples: The English-language Wikipedia article about the Game of Thrones television series notes that the fictional languages Dothraki and Valyrian have reportedly been heard by more people than the Welsh, Irish, and Scots Gaelic languages combined, which suggests the popularity of the show and the relative tininess of Celtic languages. But the Welsh Wikipedia article on the same topic exhibits considerably more Welsh pride. It highlights the roles of two Welsh actors (Iwan Rheon as Ramsay Bolton, Owen Teale as Ser Alliser Thorne) and the series’s use of Welsh and Welsh-sounding names.
The different language editions also reflect ideological differences. English Wikipedia states that Catalonia is an autonomous community in Spain. But Welsh Wikipedia describes Catalonia as a European country, based on its declaration of independence in 2017. Where information is consistent across cultures—like the populations of the world’s largest cities—it perhaps makes sense to pull from a standardized source. But philosophers make fine distinctions among data, information, and knowledge, which is not necessarily machine-readable. It’s understandable that the Welsh language community would support the Catalonians’ independence if this position better reflects the Welsh community’s universe of knowledge.
Harnessing technology is an important part of the Welsh government’s goal to have 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050. (In the most recent census, in 2011, there were 562,000 Welsh speakers in Wales.) Children in the 19th century were punished for speaking Welsh by being forced to wear a shameful wooden plaque around their necks called a Welsh Not. “There was this phase in Welsh history where it was seen as the language of poor, uneducated people, so people tried desperately to rid themselves of their Welsh,” Evans said. “Now bilingualism is generally encouraged through the educational system.”
That has also created an unusual challenge for Wicipedia: Many of the contributors are children learning Welsh in bilingual programs. “They change things, or write a rude word in, just to be funny,” Evans said. “Most of the IP addresses that are blocked [from editing] in Wales are schools.” But the occasional prank job is not a terrible problem (and it’s also something that happens on lots of other language editions). When Evans or his colleagues visit a school to teach students digital literacy skills and how to edit the site, they can lift the IP address ban.
La commune de Plonevez-Porzay étant jumelée depuis bientôt 30 ans avec Newcastle Emlyn au Pays de Galles, le comité de jumelage a trouvé opportun de participer au financement de la statue de saint Dewi taillée dans ce même pays, saint patron Gallois connu sous le nom de saint Devi en breton et saint David qui va être érigé à la Vallée des Saints.
Après un passage au Festival interceltique de Lorient ,elle gagnera Carnoet pour y être définitivement installée.
En route pour la Vallée des Saints, la statue de Saint-
Dewi fera escale à la distillerie des Menhirs à
Plomelin/Ploveilh jusqu’’au 30 juillet 2019. Haute de 4
mètre et d’un poids de 5 tonnes, elle a été réalisée par le
sculpteur gallois Paul B. Kincald après avoir traversé la
Manche/Mor Breizh.
Le convoi a ensuite emprunté le canal de Nantes à Brest
à bord d’une péniche entre Port-Launay et Port-Carhaix.
Il a été accueilli à la Distillerie des Menhirs de
Plomelin/Ploveilh par un public enthousiaste qui a
entonné le Bro Gozh ma Zadoù.
Après son passage au Festival Interceltique qui honore
cette année le Pays de Galles .La statue de Dewi-Sant y
restera jusqu’au 30 juillet : une série d’animations
organisée en son honneur !
Ensuite la statue reprendra la route jusqu’à Carnoët, son
lieu de destination : là elle sera implantée parmi ses
compagnons, les autres saints de pierre bretons, pour y
rester des siècles et siècles...
David de Ménevie (° vers 500 – vers 589 ou 601), ou Dewi ou Divy, ou Evy, l'un des saint David, connu en gallois sous l'appellation Dewi Sant, est le saint patron du Pays de Galles. Sous le nom de saint Ivi (ou Ivy, Yvi, ...), plusieurs saints semi-légendaires, non reconnus officiellement par l'église catholique, lui ont été substitués pour désigner des moines issus de l'émigration bretonne en Armorique qui ont christianisé la Bretagne entre le Ve siècle et le VIIe siècle1.
