A leavers hoodie is a printed object, and printed objects are unforgiving about spelling. For the Welsh-medium schools we work with across Cardiff and South Wales — the Ysgol Gymraeg primaries and the Ysgol Gyfun Gymraeg secondaries among the ninety-plus schools we supply — that raises problems an English-only order never encounters, and almost none of them announce themselves before the garments arrive.
None of this is difficult. It just has to be dealt with deliberately, at the artwork stage, by someone who reads Welsh.
Start with the school's own name, in the school's own form
The single most visible thing on a leavers hoodie is the school's name, and it is the element most often set from memory rather than from source.
Welsh-medium secondaries generally take the form Ysgol Gyfun Gymraeg followed by the school's own name; primaries generally take the form Ysgol Gymraeg followed by theirs. Those are not interchangeable, and neither is a shortened version somebody uses in conversation. Take the wording from the school's own letterhead or website rather than from an enquiry email, and note that where a school has both a Welsh and an English name, the two are often not literal translations of each other. Nobody should be translating a school's name at artwork stage. It already has one.
Bilingual is a decision, not a default
Before anything is drawn, the school needs to settle three things, and they are the school's decisions rather than the supplier's.
- Is the design in Welsh, in English, or in both? Many Welsh-medium cohorts want it in Welsh alone; others want both.
- If both, which appears first, and are they given equal weight? Most schools already have a settled convention for signage and correspondence. Follow it rather than inventing one on a hoodie.
- Who writes the Welsh? The answer should be a person at the school, not a supplier and not a translation tool.
There is a practical consequence too. A bilingual design carries roughly twice the wording, and a back print already holding a year group's names has limited room. That usually means a simpler layout and a decision about what gets dropped, resolved early rather than by shrinking everything to fit at proof stage. Small text is also where embroidery struggles most, so a bilingual element is often better printed than stitched.
A spreadsheet will not sort a Welsh name list correctly
This is the one that catches people, because nothing looks wrong.
Welsh treats ch, dd, ff, ng, ll, ph, rh and th as single letters, each with its own position in the alphabet: ch after c, dd after d, ff after f, ng after g, ll after l, ph after p, rh after r, th after t. A spreadsheet sorting in English sorts character by character and has no idea any of that is true. Sort a Welsh name list with the standard A to Z button and you get something that reads as alphabetical to an English eye and is simply wrong to a Welsh one.
| Sorted A to Z in English | Sorted in Welsh alphabetical order |
|---|---|
| Cadwaladr | Cadwaladr |
| Charles | Charles |
| Lewis | Lewis |
| Llewelyn | Llewelyn |
| Rhys | Roberts |
| Roberts | Rhys |
| Thomas | Tudor |
| Tudor | Thomas |
Roberts comes before Rhys, and Tudor before Thomas, because rh and th sit after r and t rather than inside them. Across a hundred and fifty names the effect is not two swapped rows but a list that is visibly out of order to everyone reading it.
The same applies to first-name lists, which is how many leavers designs are set out. It is also not purely mechanical: n and g sometimes meet without forming the digraph, so this is a task for a Welsh speaker with the list in front of them, not a formula.
Accents that vanish somewhere between the file and the garment
Welsh uses accented vowels — â, ê, î, ô, û, ŵ and ŷ — and they are part of the spelling rather than decoration. A name such as Siân or Llŷr is misspelled without them.
Two things go wrong, and both are silent.
The first is fonts. Plenty of display fonts, particularly the heavy decorative ones leavers designs gravitate towards, do not contain ŵ and ŷ. Some software substitutes a glyph from another font, producing a letter in the wrong weight that is easy to miss on a small proof. Other software drops the character altogether. Uppercase is worse, because leavers designs are often set in capitals and Ŵ and Ŷ are missing from font files more often than their lowercase equivalents. Check the accented characters specifically, in the actual font, before sign-off.
The second is file handling. Name lists exported from a school system and passed around as CSV often come out in the wrong text encoding, turning â into a pair of unrelated characters. If you see anything resembling â, the encoding is wrong, and retyping those names by hand will not fix the underlying file. Ask for it as UTF-8, or send the list as a document instead.
Every retyping of a name list loses accents. Supply it once, in one file, and check the version that reaches artwork.
The proof should be read by the school, not by the printer
A supplier can flag a suspicious character. A supplier cannot tell you whether a name is spelled the way a family spells it, or whether the Welsh on the back reads correctly. That has to be a named person at the school with fluent Welsh, given the job explicitly rather than assumed to have looked.
Two conditions make that check worth doing. Look at the proof at full size on screen, at the scale it will print, rather than as a thumbnail in an email — accents disappear at thumbnail size, and so does the difference between a substituted glyph and the real one. And check the artwork proof, not the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet may be perfect and the artwork still wrong, because all of this happens in the gap between the two.
Ask for the proof as a PDF with fonts embedded, or the text converted to outlines. Once type is outlined it is a shape rather than a character, and nothing downstream can substitute it.
Quoting a Welsh-medium leavers hoodie in Cardiff and South Wales
Being local matters more here than on a standard order, because none of this survives a form and a ticket number. A Welsh-medium school in Cardiff or South Wales can be dealt with directly rather than through a national call centre, and proofs can be looked at in person. Schools and parents find their own school's uniform through our schoolwear collections for South Wales schools.
Leavers hoodies are made to order and quoted individually. Send us the year group, the rough numbers, the design as you want it worded and the name list in whatever state it is in, and say plainly whether the design is Welsh or bilingual so it is handled that way from the first draft rather than corrected later. Request a leavers hoodie quote and we will come back with options and a proof you can put in front of the right person.