Cymraeg in the Click Path: Short Links That Don’t Treat Welsh as a Translation Layer

In Wales, a short link is rarely just a tidier URL. It is a public-facing decision. If you run campaigns for a council, health board, university, housing association or a brand with customers across Wales, the link in the poster, tweet or text message has to behave properly in Welsh and English. Under the Welsh Language Standards, that is not a nice-to-have bolted on at the end. It is part of how the service meets people.

This is not legal advice, and it is not a language-policy lecture. It is link hygiene. The sort of thing that saves a campaign team from discovering, two days after print, that the Welsh QR code points at an English-only page with a broken cookie banner.

Start with the destination, not the slug

Before anyone opens the link shortener, check what sits at the other end. Is there a genuine Welsh-language destination, not a machine-translated page with half the navigation still in English? If the answer is no, do not label a link as Welsh. A short link cannot fix a content gap. It can only make the gap easier to share.

There are two common patterns. One short link takes people to a clear language-choice page, with Welsh and English given equal weight. Two short links go directly to separate Welsh and English destinations. Neither is automatically better. A single link is tidier for a poster or radio mention. Separate links are cleaner when the Welsh and English campaigns have different calls to action or different landing-page layouts.

Write the choice down. A link audit should record the short URL, the destination, the intended language, the campaign owner and the review date. If that sounds basic, it is. Basic is what stops a Welsh page being quietly overwritten by an English template in six months’ time.

Slugs that survive diacritics and copy-paste

Welsh uses characters that can cause trouble in a slug: â, ê, î, ô, û, ŵ, ŷ, and the occasional apostrophe. Short-link slugs are not the place for a purist test. They are read aloud, copied from print, typed from memory and scanned as QR codes. Raw diacritics can be mangled by systems that were never designed with Welsh in mind.

Use lowercase ASCII slugs with hyphens. That usually means a sensible transliteration or a neutral campaign code. Do not strip characters so aggressively that the word changes meaning or becomes nonsense. If the slug needs a Welsh word, check it with a Welsh speaker rather than relying on an automatic slug generator. Keep the Welsh display label separate from the technical slug: the link can be gwyl-2026 while the poster says Gŵyl 2026.

Avoid apostrophes and spaces in slugs. Avoid clever wordplay that depends on a mutation or a pun that disappears when the URL is shortened. And do not use a Welsh word just for decoration if the destination is English. That is the link equivalent of a bilingual welcome sign on an English-only building.

QR codes: one code, one promise

A QR code should encode the short link, not the long destination. That gives you one stable printed asset even if the destination changes. But stability is not the same as suitability. If a poster carries one QR code, it should not dump Welsh speakers onto an English page by default. It should either go to a genuine language-choice page or to a Welsh destination that clearly offers English.

If you are printing separate Welsh and English leaflets, use separate short links and label them. Do not rely on the same QR code plus a language toggle that depends on a cookie from a previous visit. People scan in libraries, on buses and in sports centres with different devices. Test the code on at least two phones, in poor signal, from the distance someone would actually scan a poster. Check the quiet zone around the code, the contrast and whether the printed URL underneath is readable. A short domain is a gift here. Long, hyphen-heavy URLs are not.

Redirect rules that respect preference

Automatic language redirects are where good intentions go wrong. Browser language, device language and location are clues, not declarations. A Welsh speaker may use an English-language phone. An English speaker may live in a Welsh-speaking household. Do not force a language based on an IP address and call it personalisation.

The safer pattern is explicit choice plus memory. Let the short link point to a page where Welsh and English are equally visible. Once someone chooses, remember it with a cookie or account preference, but keep a visible way to switch. If you use language-specific short links, make the difference obvious in the slug and in your analytics. Do not bury cy and en in a query string that a campaign manager will forget to copy.

Keep redirects to a single hop where possible. Chains are slow, hard to audit and easy to break. Use temporary redirects for campaigns rather than permanent ones that browsers will remember long after the campaign has ended. And check that language parameters survive the journey from short link to landing page to thank-you page. Nothing is more deflating than a Welsh-language form that submits to an English confirmation screen.

Test with Welsh-speaking audiences, not just translators

A translation check is not a usability test. Recruit a small mix of Welsh speakers: first-language speakers, learners and people who switch languages depending on context. Ask them to read the link aloud, scan the QR code, find the Welsh version and complete the main task. Watch where they hesitate. It might be the slug, the language toggle, the cookie banner or the fact that the Welsh page uses a different form layout.

Test on a phone with a cracked screen and a slow connection, because that is real life. Check what happens when the Welsh page is missing. Check the error message. Check the analytics labels so you can tell whether the Welsh campaign is actually being used, rather than assuming it is a minority add-on. Keep a simple audit trail: what was tested, who tested it, what changed and when it will be reviewed.

At CutURL, we like links that do a quiet job. They should be short enough to read aloud, stable enough to print and honest enough to send people to the language they expected. In a bilingual campaign, that means treating Welsh as part of the click path from the start, not as a translation layer added after the English version has already gone live.