Can I build a Welsh-language website with AI? Yes, and here is what to check

AI can write Welsh. In the Welsh Language Commissioner’s regulatory policy statement on AI and the Welsh language, the Commissioner says many modern AI systems, large language models among them, can already process Welsh to a high standard. The Welsh Government announced a data partnership with OpenAI in June 2024 to improve how AI technologies work in Welsh, and Microsoft has announced Welsh support in Copilot.

The same statement carries a warning that matters to anyone building a site: that ability is not always switched on. Sometimes a model can answer correctly in Welsh while the product built on it restricts Welsh, by design or by default. The Commissioner’s example is a chatbot on a popular platform that replies in Welsh at first and then says it does not support the language.

Expect the same pattern when you build a website with AI. The text you asked for comes out in Welsh, because you asked for it. The text you did not ask for, the label on a button, the message when a form is filled in wrongly, the email confirming a booking, the name of the month, comes from somewhere else: the tool, a theme or a service plugged into the site, and that text may exist only in English.

So the answer to “can I?” is yes, on two conditions: a fluent person reads the Welsh before it is published, and someone checks every part of the site a visitor sees, not only the pages you wrote.

Ask a chatbot for the code. ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini will write a bilingual site as code if you ask, and the Welsh in its pages can be good. Every word on the site then lives in the files, so a Welsh error message exists only if somebody asked for one. You also take on the hosting, the editing and the repairs, which our guide on AI-built websites covers in full.

Use an AI website builder. The builder’s AI drafts the pages and its editor keeps them, which makes later changes easier. The question is how far its Welsh reaches. Can the menu, the buttons and the form messages be set in Welsh? Does the confirmation email go out in Welsh to someone who filled in the Welsh form? Does each language get its own address? Ask to see it working in Welsh rather than for a promise, and read the builder’s own help pages for the languages it supports.

WordPress with a translation plugin, or an agency. WordPress with a translation plugin can run two languages, and AI can draft the Welsh you paste into it. The plugin looks after the pages; the forms, the shop and the emails may come from other plugins, each with its own translation settings, and each needs checking separately. A good agency with Welsh speakers will write or check the Welsh and test the whole journey in both languages: ask who reads the Welsh, and whether they test the forms and emails in Welsh too. AI being part of how they work is fine, as long as a person signs the Welsh off.

Safle, which publishes this guide and is in pilot, is another option. It builds bilingual sites with Welsh and English as first languages: each language has its own address, the navigation, forms, errors and emails follow the language the visitor chose, and no Welsh page goes live until a person has approved it. Where a provider it relies on has no Welsh, it says so.

AI-written Welsh can read smoothly and still be wrong. The faults that matter are the ones an English speaker cannot see and a Welsh speaker sees at once.

Mutations. Welsh changes the start of a word after certain words: “busnes” is “fy musnes” for ‘my business’ and “ei fusnes” for ‘his business’. A missed mutation, or one in the wrong place, stands out to a Welsh reader, and it is one of the first things a fluent checker looks for.

Register. Welsh has two ways to say “you”: “chi”, which is polite or plural, and “ti”, which is familiar. Choose one, tell the tool which, and check it has kept to it on every page, the buttons included, where a short instruction can slip into the other form.

Place names and terms. The tool may invent a Welsh form for a town that has none, or translate a name that should stay as it is; the official list is the place to check, as our guide on Welsh place names explains. Trade and legal words need the same care: the established Welsh term, not a word built from the English. A translator or a good dictionary will tell you which term is usual.

Someone fluent who did not write it. The Commissioner’s statement, written for organisations that must meet the Welsh language standards, suggests review by competent Welsh speakers, and gives automated translation without human review as an example of AI use that is not appropriate. The standards apply to organisations named in regulations, and over 130 now implement them. If your business is not one of them, the standards are not your duty, but the advice is sound for anyone.

For a small business, the Welsh Government’s Helo Blod service is the obvious place to start. It checks Welsh you have written, up to 1,000 words a year free, and translates up to 500 words a month into Welsh free, returning the work within four working days. It cannot check material that must be published in Welsh to comply with the standards, and it takes requests only for your own organisation, not for work you have been hired to do for someone else.

A whole website can run to more than that, so spend the allowance where a mistake costs most: the home page, the contact form and its messages, and the emails the site sends. For more, Helo Blod points to Cymdeithas Cyfieithwyr Cymru, the association of Welsh translators and interpreters, where you can find a translator to check the rest.

Whoever checks it, give them the English too, and ask them to read for sense, not only spelling: whether the Welsh says what the English means, and whether it sounds like something a Welsh-speaking customer would say. The Commissioner’s statement asks for the same in other words: review for accuracy, and for the cultural context of Welsh speakers.

Work through this with the site open in Welsh, on a phone, as a customer would. Fill in every form wrongly on purpose, then correctly, and read every message and email that comes back.

Two of the checks are in the code. W3C, which writes the web’s standards, says to declare a page’s language with a lang attribute on its html element: lang="cy" on a Welsh page. Speech synthesisers, spelling checkers and translation tools use that information, which is how a screen reader knows when to switch to Welsh.

Google says something different about itself: it works out a page’s language from the visible content, not from lang, and recommends one language for the content and navigation of each page. So a Welsh page with English menus and buttons makes it harder for Google, as well as the reader, to tell what language it is in. Google also recommends a separate address for each language, and hreflang links in which each version names the other, both ways; our guide to AI visibility for Welsh websites explains those.

The free assessment on this site checks a page’s language declaration and whether its other version is named, for any one address, in either language.