Gaeilge
An Ghaeilge ar an ardán nua
Tá an t-ardán tógtha le bheith dátheangach ón tús. Below: the same commitment in English, and the technical model that makes it deliverable.
Ráiteas
Tá ailtireacht dhátheangach mar chuid den ardán ón gcéad lá. Beidh leagan Gaeilge ar fáil ar chomhchéim leis an leagan Béarla, le seoladh gréasáin dá chuid féin do gach leathanach, agus lasc teanga le feiceáil go soiléir ar gach scáileán. Nuair nach bhfuil aistriúchán foilsithe fós, míneofar sin go soiléir don léitheoir.
Is é an tÚdarás Áitiúil a shocraíonn raon feidhme an ábhair Ghaeilge faoin Acht na dTeangacha Oifigiúla (Leasú), 2021. Ní chuirtear aon ábhar Gaeilge i láthair anseo mar ábhar deiridh: is samplaí struchtúracha iad na téacsanna seo.
What we build, in English
Language-aware content model
Every content type carries a language variant from the outset. Irish is a first-class variant of the same record, not a separate site that drifts out of date.
Equal prominence
The language switch sits in the primary header on every page, uses the same styling in both directions, and returns the reader to the same page rather than to the homepage.
Correct markup
Pages declare lang="ga" or lang="en" on the document, and inline lang attributes mark passages in the other language so screen readers switch pronunciation correctly.
Distinct, indexable URLs
Irish pages have their own /ga/ paths with hreflang alternates and self-referencing canonicals, so search engines index both languages without duplicate-content penalties.
Diacritic-tolerant search
The search index normalises fadas, so a search for "gniomhu" finds "gníomhú" and vice versa. This is already implemented and unit-tested in the prototype search library.
Translation workflow
Editors request a translation from the English record; the CMS tracks status, shows a side-by-side view, and flags an Irish page as stale when its English source changes.
Graceful fallback
Where an Irish translation is not yet published, the reader is told plainly in Irish and offered the English version, rather than shown machine output or an empty page.
Accessible in both languages
Alt text, form labels, error messages, PDF titles and email notifications are all translated. Accessibility is not an English-only feature.
What changes against the current site
The Stage 0 crawl found no published Irish-language route and a single culture setting of en-GB across the estate. Retro-fitting a second language onto a single-language content model is expensive and tends to produce a stale parallel site. Building the language variant into the content model now means the Authority can commission translation at any point in the eight-year contract without a re-platform.
ProvenanceThe contractual extent of Irish-language coverage is a tender clarification item (A05). No claim is made here about which pages will be translated or when — that is the Authority’s decision under its language scheme.