At the BSI Standards Awards Ceremony 2026, held on 21 May at The Landmark Hotel in London, Dr Francesco Aletta received the BSI Societal Impact Award in recognition of the positive impact of his work on the Welsh National Annex to BS ISO/TS 12913-2. Read his reflections on the project, its development and its contribution to inclusivity, wellbeing and cultural sustainability.
Receiving the BSI Societal Impact Award was a great honour, but it was also a reminder that standards are never only technical documents.
They shape who can participate, whose experiences are recorded and how evidence is translated into decisions. In this case, a small set of words used to describe sound environments became the focus of a much wider effort involving acoustics, language, public policy and cultural inclusion.
The Annex, “Welsh version of the soundscape attributes”, provides Welsh translations for the eight perceptual descriptors used in Method A of BS ISO/TS 12913-2:2018, Acoustics — Soundscape — Part 2: Data collection and reporting requirements. These descriptors are pleasant, calm, vibrant, annoying, monotonous, chaotic, eventful and uneventful. They are used in questionnaires to capture how people perceive and experience an acoustic environment and can then be analyzed within a two-dimensional soundscape model organized around pleasantness and eventfulness.
That may sound like a narrowly specialist exercise. In reality it raises important questions about linguistic rights, data quality, wellbeing and the role of standards in public life.
From controlling noise to understanding soundscapes
Traditional environmental noise policy has generally focused on reducing unwanted sound, often through physical indicators such as sound levels. Those measures remain essential, particularly where exposure affects health. The soundscape approach adds a complementary perspective: it considers the acoustic environment as it is perceived or experienced by people in context.
This distinction matters.
A sound environment is not automatically positive because it is silent, nor negative because it is loud. A market square full of voices may be vibrant and socially meaningful; birdsong and water may contribute to calmness; a low-level mechanical hum may be monotonous; and an unpredictable mixture of traffic, alarms and construction may be experienced as chaotic.
Soundscape assessment therefore creates a structured way of understanding qualities that conventional decibel-based measurements cannot fully describe.
The ISO 12913 series provides an internationally recognized framework for this work. Method A of Part 2 uses eight attributes arranged around a “circumplex” model. The model describes perceived affective quality: whether a soundscape is pleasant or annoying, eventful or uneventful, and whether combinations of these qualities make it vibrant, calm, chaotic or monotonous.
However, the original instrument was available only in English. That presents an obvious problem when the method is used in multilingual settings.
Asking people to evaluate subtle perceptual qualities in a language that is not their preferred language can affect comprehension, participation and the reliability of the resulting data. A standardized questionnaire is only truly standardized across languages if its different linguistic versions measure equivalent concepts.
Why Wales needed a National Annex
Wales offered a particularly important setting for this work. Public bodies operate within a strong statutory framework for bilingual provision. At the same time, soundscape has moved from being primarily an academic concept to an increasingly important area of Welsh environmental policy.
The Noise and Soundscape Plan for Wales 2023–2028 promotes “appropriate soundscapes”, considering both positive and negative experiences of environmental sound rather than treating every sound only as noise to be controlled. It recommends targeted use of methods from ISO 12913, including soundwalks and questionnaires, where they can provide useful evidence for decision-makers. The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Act 2024 subsequently placed soundscape policy on a statutory footing, reinforcing its relevance to public authorities, planning and environmental management.
This created both a need and an opportunity. If Welsh public bodies are to use ISO soundscape methods, people should be able to respond in either of the country’s languages. Without agreed terminology, different organisations might produce ad hoc translations, making studies less comparable and potentially altering the meaning of the constructs being measured.
The National Annex provides a consistent, well-researched Welsh version for use in questionnaires, listening tests, policy evaluations and bilingual reporting. As an informative National Annex, it does not change the underlying international standard. Instead, it makes that standard more applicable to the linguistic, legislative and cultural circumstances of Wales.
Translation as a scientific and social process
Translating the eight descriptors was not a matter of opening a dictionary and selecting the closest equivalent.
Perceptual language is culturally embedded, and even apparently simple words carry multiple meanings. The aim was not literal word-for-word correspondence, but semantic equivalence: retaining the meaning of each dimension and its relationship with the other dimensions in the soundscape model.
The work formed part of the Soundscape Attributes Translation Project, or SATP, an international initiative coordinated at UCL. Earlier SATP research across more than twenty languages had shown why this matters.
For Welsh, we developed a four-phase process:
- First, the Welsh Government Translation Service prepared an informed set of candidate terms, drawing on established terminology sources, dictionaries, current usage and the intended perceptual meaning of each attribute.
- Second, Welsh-speaking civil servants who were not language specialists participated in a workshop to consider whether the candidates were understandable, usable and appropriate in everyday Welsh.
- Third, the UCL team reviewed the workshop discussions, examined linguistic and sound-studies literature, and compared the candidates with terminology already used in Welsh Government documents.
- Finally, a larger group of Welsh Government translators and Welsh-language scholars considered the revised set and helped establish the final proposal.
This combination was important. Professional translators brought linguistic rigour and knowledge of terminology practice. Non-specialist speakers tested whether the language felt natural and comprehensible. Welsh-language scholars contributed expertise in semantics, morphology and usage. Acoustics researchers ensured that the terms remained faithful to the perceptual constructs and the wider ISO model. The process was collaborative by design because no single discipline could resolve all these questions alone.
What the words revealed
Several of the translation discussions demonstrate why the process required such care.
For “calm”, the preferred translation was llonydd. A seemingly obvious alternative was tawel, but this often means “quiet” or “silent”. Its use could therefore lead respondents to rate sound level rather than the broader perceptual quality of calmness. Llonydd better captures stillness and tranquillity without reducing calm to an absence of sound.
“Vibrant” and “monotonous” produced relatively clear solutions: bywiog and undonog. Other descriptors were more difficult.
Welsh has no direct adjectival equivalent of “annoying” that works neatly in every context, so the Annex recommends niwsans and amhleserus together. Niwsans connects with established Welsh usage for nuisance and noise annoyance, while amhleserus provides a clear semantic contrast with pleserus, one of the terms proposed for “pleasant”.
“Chaotic” generated discussion about formal Welsh, spoken Welsh, code-switching and loanwords. Caotig was ultimately considered the most comprehensible and appropriate option, even though some participants initially worried that it might appear too close to English. This was a useful reminder that linguistic authenticity does not necessarily mean avoiding every borrowed form. Languages develop through use, contact and adaptation.
The greatest challenge concerned “eventful” and “uneventful”. Eventfulness is not an intuitive concept for many people even in English, particularly when applied to soundscapes. The final Annex therefore uses paired terms: cynhyrfus / llawn digwydd for “eventful” and digynnwrf / diddigwydd for “uneventful”. These alternatives reflect different ways of expressing activity, happening and the absence of events while preserving the intended opposition within the circumplex.
The final set is:
Dymunol / pleserus for pleasant; llonydd for calm; bywiog for vibrant; niwsans / amhleserus for annoying; undonog for monotonous; caotig for chaotic; cynhyrfus / llawn digwydd for eventful; and digynnwrf / diddigwydd for uneventful.
Where two Welsh terms are provided, the Annex recommends using them together rather than selecting one locally. This protects consistency and helps capture the full perceptual dimension.
Societal impact beyond the questionnaire
The immediate benefit of the Annex is practical: public bodies, researchers and consultants have a consistent Welsh-language instrument rather than having to improvise translations. Yet its wider societal value is more significant.
The Annex supports equity and participation. Language can determine whether people feel able to participate fully in research and consultation. Allowing respondents to use Welsh is not only a matter of fulfilling statutory responsibilities; it recognizes that people may describe subtle experiences more accurately and confidently in the language that feels most natural to them.
It supports better evidence for wellbeing. Soundscape data can inform planning, transport, public-realm design, green infrastructure and the management of rural and urban environments. Better evidence about how places are experienced can help decision-makers move beyond simply reducing harmful noise towards creating environments that are restorative, socially active or culturally meaningful, depending on the context.
Ultimately, the work contributes to cultural sustainability. A language remains living and useful when it can operate across contemporary domains, including science, environmental policy and technical standards. Developing agreed soundscape terminology expands the capacity of Welsh to describe emerging concepts and supports its continued use in professional and public settings.
The project also creates a route for the terminology to be incorporated into resources such as TermCymru, helping translators, policymakers and practitioners use the terms consistently in future work.
Standards are sometimes seen as instruments of uniformity. A National Annex offers a different model: the international framework remains intact, while national linguistic and policy needs are addressed transparently. This is not a weakening of standardisation. It makes the standard more usable, inclusive and robust.
What comes next
The National Annex represents the completion of the preliminary translation stage, but not the end of the scientific process. The next step is empirical validation through listening experiments with Welsh speakers. The methodology may also support future work with other minoritised and Celtic languages. The exact Welsh terms will not simply transfer to Irish, Cornish or Breton, but the collaborative process is transferable: combine technical expertise, professional translation, community comprehension, linguistic scholarship and empirical validation.
A collective achievement
Although the BSI Societal Impact Award was presented in my name, the work was fundamentally collective. It depended on colleagues at UCL, the Welsh Government’s Translation Service and Noise Regulators Forum, Welsh-speaking civil servants, professional translators, scholars and the wider Soundscape Attributes Translation Project network.
The most important lesson is that inclusion cannot be added to a standard as an afterthought. It has to be built into the way terminology is developed, evidence is collected and users are involved. The Welsh National Annex shows how a technical standard can become more socially meaningful when it respects the language, legislation and cultural context of the place in which it will be used.
Standards have societal impact when they help people participate, when they improve the evidence behind decisions and when they allow technical progress to reinforce rather than erode cultural diversity. That is what we set out to achieve with the Welsh version of the soundscape attributes, and it is what I hope this work will continue to support.
About the author: Dr Francesco Aletta AFHEA, MIOA, FDIRDI is Associate Professor in Building Physics & Soundscape at the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering, part of The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. His research focuses on the relationship between people, places and acoustic environments, with a particular interest in soundscape assessment, environmental perception and inclusive approaches to standards development.
