In the run-up to my jury duty some new commitments ended up in my timetable. I didn't really have time to think too much about them. It was two Welsh language tutorials in our marine fieldwork module, that I had rarely been involved with before. There were four students on the Welsh version of that module. And it would be our new PhD student James, who is a native speaker, and me, doing these.
Beforehand I tried to figure out if there was anything in particular we needed to cover. No idea! There was quite some interesting vocabulary in the module information on the module website, but other than that, the site contained very little information. It mainly referred to the English language version. Which I didn’t have access to.
I hoped maybe James knew more. But when he appeared, it turned out he wasn't quite sure about any particular requirements. We had to improvise! We asked if the students (we had three turn up) had requests. We checked they knew where to find technical terms in Welsh. James realised he had access to an old version of the Welsh language website, opened a lecture, and started going through it. Any terms people didn’t know in Welsh?
He also asked the students to translate a few sentences from it into Welsh. And we answered some questions about the practicalities of doing assessments in Welsh.
I think it went ok! I learned the Welsh terms for things like filtration and suspended sediment and suchlike. And the others realised the Welsh word for relationship (be it personal or statistical) has no plural. The atmosphere was good. Maybe we weren’t perfectly prepared but it may not have mattered…
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