Recording lectures in Welsh

My history of teaching in Welsh has been a bit up and down. When I started out, I was basically just another pair of hands in a practical session. This session was led by my colleague Paula. And we were very overstaffed, so it was more to get me used to it, than that it was to have me make a considerable contribution to the teaching. But then things changed! 

Paula retired, and the next year, Dei was module organiser, but he was so busy doing other things that suddenly when that same session came up, I heard through the grapevine that I was expected to lead it. I would have liked to have been informed of that a bit earlier! I think it was the week before. But I just took Paula’s material and ran with it.

This year, our official welsh language lecturer is module organiser. This is currently Claire, while Mollie is on parental leave. Claire is a lot more organised. So we sat together well in advance, looked at what needed to be done, and how we would do it.

The thing is that we are teaching on a module that is just the Welsh language version of an English language module. But there hadn't been much communication between the modules, and they had started to diverge. We didn't think that was a good idea. And we decided that as good as Paula’s material was, what we would teach from was the material from the English language module, but then translated by the university’s official translation service. I had already translated the first lecture myself with the help of a tutor, but I didn't mind that; I would not be using that translation now, but at least all students would be taught the same thing. And it had been great practice!

I still had the Welsh language script for the one lecture I had already narrated. This year I will do three. So I made sure my script was adjusted to the new version of the slides that I had, and I narrated it again.

For the other two lectures my strategy was: copy over the automatic captioning of the original English version lectures, clean them up (automatic captioning can go quite wrong), then write a Welsh version of these myself, and then narrate those. My Welsh isn't good enough to improvise this. There are too many terms in there I don't normally use. The lectures are about data analysis, and that just comes with vocabulary I don't use very often.

All in all it is quite a lot of work, but then they are done! The principles of data analysis don't change very much over time, so for the foreseeable future, the students would be able to use this resource. And then I can use the practical to just teach them how to bring the material into practice in Excel. I think that practical will be a lot shorter than last year!

Creating an English script

https://mmmmargot.blogspot.com/2023/10/teaching-in-welsh-into-higher-gear.html