I’ve recently been asked what qualities a bilingual content designer needs.
Oddly, I hadn’t considered this as a list of duties or qualities, even though I’ve had many broader discussions with colleagues that have mentioned duties, qualities and skills of a bilingual designer, or bilingual content designer.
I even call myself one on LinkedIn!
This is partly because the role “Bilingual Content Designer” is a bit of a unicorn role – and I’m not sure if there are actually many people in a role of that name. I know a couple have been advertised but I’m not sure if the roles were filled.
This also led me to think about what might be making recruitment hard.
The answer to many of these observations and questions are probably ‘it depends’. It may depend on an organisation, their resource and their needs. These are, as always, some thoughts to consider.
Defining what’s bilingual about a role
- Is it that you need a designer to have a particular focus on Welsh language users, service delivery, and stakeholders?
- Is it someone who can write or design in both Welsh and English?
- Is it someone who can build relationships and work collaboratively, specifically with translators, regulators, and user researchers?
All these things are valid and would benefit users and the organisation. Not all of them need a Welsh speaker to do the role.
Obviously, a Welsh speaker is ideal. How, therefore, do we attract Welsh speakers into such a role?
Recruitment is hard
In Wales, we haven’t widely adopted user-centred design (UCD) roles. As a result, the word ‘design’ is not commonly understood to mean writing roles.
Many Welsh speakers work in translation or communication roles – they therefore have transferable skills but may not be familiar with a UCD role, or interested in one. They would be perfect for career pivots.
The catch-22 is that the bilingual design jobs I’ve seen are often advertised at a senior level. This might be to cover for the additional expertise and value added, but does this deter people from career pivots who don’t have UCD experience?
Is it scary? That is, would a Welsh speaker think that they’re expected to do double the work – designing for a wider audience, in 2 languages, whilst colleagues are not? If colleagues expect the bilingual designer to be solely responsible for this, it could quickly become overwhelming. Is this putting too much responsibility on one person?
Is it just that content designers who are bilingual (Welsh and English) are, at the moment, extremely rare?
Duties for the role
From my personal experience, it inlcudes:
- All the skills of a regular content designer
- Advocate for Welsh language users and influence stakeholders to understand how UCD can help organisations meet compliance requirements, user needs and business goals
- Influence stakeholders and colleagues about why Welsh language considerations should be part of organisational decision-making, not an afterthought. (I’ve previously written about truly effective Welsh in the Workplace)
- Work with UCD, delivery and product colleagues to embed bilingual UR, testing and design in roadmaps
- Advocate to colleagues that bilingual design is a collective responsibility
- Work with user researchers to develop specific plans to understand Welsh language users and their needs
- Make sure that the Welsh language is considered in service design. For example, how would an organisation deal with requests submitted in Welsh?
- Design Welsh-language (and English-language?) user-centred content
- Design content strategies that consider how content is designed and maintained bilingually (or translated) during the content lifecycle
- Work with user researchers to include Welsh language users and services when testing prototypes or live services
- Build relationships with translators to involve them in bilingual design process – for UR activities, content development, peer reviews or co-design work
- Ability to develop and maintain common terminologies and style guides across disciplines such as design and translation
- Provide and share real-world expertise about the Welsh language, its users, context and worldviews.
- Have a good knowledge of compliance needs and risks that relate to the organisation so that they’re applied
Skills
- Advocacy, influencing and persuasion with stakeholders, partners and colleagues
- Clear communication skills
- Collaborative working
- Understanding of user-centred design, the value of research, testing and learning
- Strategic thinking
- Working knowledge of agile working
- Ability to write in English and Welsh to a high level
- Real-world knowledge about Wales, the Welsh language and societal contexts.
A collective of one?
In all of these duties and qualities, I think it’s obvious that one person can’t do all of these things. It needs buy-in and collaboration.
For an organisation to provide effective bilingual services, there needs to be a wider understanding of what this means for how services are designed and delivered.
Welsh-language services are not the responsibility of a translator.
Bilingual services are not the responsibility of one designer.
Longer-term answers
How could we work with colleges and universities to attract talent to design modern public services?
How could we start offering apprenticeships, junior or career change roles to Welsh speakers, with a career path for bilingual staff to work on key bilingual services?
Where AI might streamline some elements of translation work, how might other roles evolve into more “Translator (UCD/content design)” roles?