this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
33 points (92.3% liked)
Wales (Cymru)
231 readers
5 users here now
All things Wales/Cymru – Discussion, Politics, News, Art and Media are all welcome.
Rules:
- Keep discussion civil.
- Wales-centric or adjacent posts only.
- Try post non-paywalled links wherever possible.
- No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Follow Lemmy/Lemm.ee rules at all times.
News Sources:
Note – the above are not personal recommendations.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm a nurse in the US. For legal reasons, even if you're able to speak a second language(like Spanish) you must be certified to use that language in medical settings if you want to not have to call a translator. You can use it for small things, but not for explaining medical issues. It's to prevent liability if something gets misunderstood. Same thing is happening here but for insurance law. The customer determined she was fluent but the company did not.
That said, I think it's likely the company isn't even bothering to certify their new hires at call centers who are fluent and instead using a strict system where only a certain department can speak Welsh. That IS language colonialism.
The only difference here though, is that it would be like being a nurse in Spain, and being told you can't speak Spanish to people, despite literally being in Spain, talking to a Spanish speaker.
You're right, but I did want to clarify my comment a bit too. Spanish could be your primary language over here at home and you'd still be barred from using it to explain medical concepts until you're certified because it's assumed you received your medical training in English. With how it sounded like she was reading off of cue cards with her English, I think something similar may be going on .
I'm not saying this to excuse the marginalization of Welsh speakers, however. This business should be adapting to where it's doing business, not forcing an anglocentric policy.
Wales is legally bilingual. Edit: I believe Welsh is the only language - besides English - that is allowed to be used in an official capacity in the UK’s parliament.
There's probably an option at the start of the call where you press one for English and two for Welsh, to choose which language you use during the call, and he seems to have chosen the English option.
I might be wrong, but that seems like the most obvious explanation.
EDIT: Reading it again, it sounds like there was a misunderstanding, and she had to read the legal stuff in English:
.....
I wouldn't put it past a big company to break the rules, but this sounds like it could go either way..
This issue is more complicated than following corporate policies. This is about the erasure of a language in its own home country.
Man in Welsh-language parking penalty battle claims company ‘harassed’ him
I know what the issue is. What I'm saying is that it sounds more like a case of miscommunication instead of deliberate erasure in this case, but nation.cymru has jumped straight to the worst outcome. Possibly because it gets them more clicks.
Who else would you expect to report a Welsh problem other than the Welsh? It’s not like Al Jazeera has the erasure of the Welsh language on their radar right now.
You may have knowledge of the issue but no real understanding. It’s clear you’ve never had the displeasure of watching your cultural identity and heritage erode away over simple misunderstandings. You have to catch the small actions before they balloon into more sinister consequences. Today it’s you can’t conduct your business in your home country in your native language tomorrow it’s let the language fall into obscurity until the war machine has need of code talkers.
What? So I'm not Welsh enough now because I think that this was more likely to be a bit of miscommunication rather than a conspiracy? What a load of bullshit.
I've worked in a call centre, and cases like this, where an agent has got the facts wrong*, happen quite regularly. I've been on the receiving end of plenty of rants from angry customers who have been told something that's completely incorrect by someone who didn't want to admit that they didn't know the right answer.
I didn't say anything about who should report on this either, I said that nation.cymru seem to have jumped straight to the worst case scenario, and it's my opinion that they've done that because it gets them more clicks.
But, of course, the only thing that could possibly be true is that we're being oppressed and victimised, and there's no such thing as human error...
*Not that that's definitely what's happened here.
As a professional in the industry how complicated would it have been for you to acquiesce to a client’s simple request; to be serviced in his native country in his native tongue? It’s rhetorical, either you would have the ability to do so because the company you worked for cared about providing the best service they could or it would be difficult because it would be easier to bend clients to their own standards.
There aren’t many conclusions that can be drawn from this situation and your insistence that this is more innocent than it appears calls into question not your nationality, culture nor ethnicity but the depths of your gullibility.
It wouldn't be complicated, that's my point. What reason would the company have to stop the customer service agent from speaking in Welsh? As I've said every time, it's far more likely that it was a misunderstanding.
I'm not insisting that it's innocent, I've repeatedly said that it seems more likely.
The conclusions are, either the company is preventing its staff from speaking in Welsh, or one or both of the people on the call misunderstood something.
As the customer said that the agent sounded like she was reading from a script, it's possible that she had to read something word for word for legal reasons, like a contract, for example. We had to do that as a regular part of the job in the call centre. If she was part of the English speaking team, whether she could speak Welsh or not was irrelevant - her script would have been in English, and she would have had to read it word for word.
So, again, as I said multiple times, I think this is more likely to have happened than a company randomly banning their staff from speaking Welsh.
EDIT: I've just realised that it's almost 3AM, so I'm going to bed. Have a good night :)
I’d agree with you if it was an isolated incident.