Declaration of Emergency Committee on Feb. 27th, 2024

[Jean-François Lymburner]

Madam Chair, as I mentioned, at the translation bureau, in total we translate about 350 million words a year. That's for the entire translation across the government, including Parliament.

We have 700 translators, and 100 of those are assigned to the work of Parliament per se. Of course, for these types of requests, we have to augment our staff, not only through the people who are under Mr. Ball here, who are here to support you, but we're also looking elsewhere in the translation bureau for people who are offering other services to augment.

As we mentioned, we are just operating based on the request for a quote that we got, so we haven't seen the documents. I want to be prudent here. This is why we said that for 124,000 pages, we estimate work for 10 months. That's taking into consideration all the other work that we're doing for other committees that is currently ongoing.

[The Joint Chair, NDP, Matthew Green]

I do recall you making an analysis, but for my sake you have to maybe break it down even more simplistically.

How many people and how many person hours would that be in terms of the time?

[Jean-François Lymburner]

I'll turn to Madame Plouffe just for the number of hours, per se, that a translator can do.

One thing I would like to clarify is that when the document comes in, the translation doesn't start immediately. We have to receive the document, and you have probably all seen that a lot of documents contain pictures, graphs and all kinds of tabulation. There's a project management team that tries to assess what needs to be done in the document before it goes to the translator. We do have a team of people who make sure that the pre-production is being done.

In our quote, not only do we have the time of the translators, Madam Chair, but we also have the time of the people who will have to unpack that. As we mentioned, in the volume that we see, we're getting more social media, video, handwritten stuff, pictures and screen grabs. The format is getting more complex, before we can pass it on to a translator who can use the translation and automation tools to do their work.

At the end, depending on the type of document, we also have a quality control check that is done on those documents.

That's kind of the chain of work before the document comes back to you.

[The Joint Chair, NDP, Matthew Green]

While I appreciate that, can we maybe get a scope on what that looks like? I'm trying to get a sense of.... You have your regular complement that's delegated to Parliament. What was the ask? I want to know what it was that we asked of you over and above that and what that would look like as a percentage of your regular work.

[Annie Plouffe]

In terms of hours, we've calculated that to translate the 124,000 pages—that's our final estimate that we've provided—it would take us 160,000 hours, if we do it all in one shot. That represents—with all the force of the translation bureau, including our freelancers—about one month of work. We suspend everything and we do it within one month.

[The Joint Chair, NDP, Matthew Green]

Let us be fair—it would be impossible to suspend everything.

[Annie Plouffe]

Exactly.

[The Joint Chair, NDP, Matthew Green]

If you were to just give me the snapshot in terms of pure numbers, what would it look like to do that? What is the number of workers?

[Annie Plouffe]

I don't have the exact number of workers, but I can get that.

[The Joint Chair, NDP, Matthew Green]

How many freelancers do you typically engage? You said your regular numbers plus your freelancers.

[Annie Plouffe]

We have 252 contracts in place right now that we use when we need to. For work like this, depending on the types of documents, we will have a different contract. Those 252 contracts help us do about half of our work annually. They produce 160 million words per year.

[The Joint Chair, NDP, Matthew Green]

Forgive me, again, but if it's 700 plus 250, are we talking about 950 employees who would be working on this for a month?

[Annie Plouffe]

No, I would say contracts. It's more than that. It really depends, because for some firms we will have access to dozens of translators. It also depends on their availability.

[The Joint Chair, NDP, Matthew Green]

I see. Thank you.

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface]

Thank you, Mr. Green.

Will you take the chair?

[The Joint Chair, NDP, Matthew Green]

Happily, and I have my little timer here for you.

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface]

Thank you very much.

I'd like to follow up on Mr. Green's points.

I am particularly interested in understanding the impact, because we say we can do it in a number of ways, but I'm trying to figure out, as we go into the next few months, how that impacts the translation bureau, given that you're probably anticipating, outside of this committee, a large number of documents coming through.

Can you just give me a sense of that?

[Annie Plouffe]

Madam Chair, I'm not sure I understand the actual question, but I'm going to try to answer it. You're trying to understand the scope of the work.

Right now, we have 600 of our translators who would be available to work on that, presuming that we don't do the rest of the work, and we would capitalize on our contracts and freelancers to be able to do that.

However, as we've evaluated the work that we have, without any recourse to artificial intelligence—because we do not have the format of the documents—presuming that these are not classified, so we're not talking about secret, we feel we'd be able to do that in about 10 months—the 124,000 pages—without major impact or changes in the rest of our operations.

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface]

If you're giving this committee your best advice, all things considered, perhaps narrowing the scope might be of benefit to getting some of the work done sooner. Would that be...?

[Jean-François Lymburner]

Maybe I can answer that, Madam Chair. That's a very good point.

As I mentioned—and I've listened to the previous committee—there was reference to an index, a table of contents, but in fact what we spoke to you about today is for the entire documents to be translated. If there is a prioritization exercise that can be done, it would be extremely helpful, and then we could prioritize.

The only thing I would add to Madame Plouffe's comments is that, as I mentioned, we can use the support of the private sector for documents that are not classified. I understand that lots of those documents may be classified at a certain level.

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface]

Thank you.

Mr. Shea, can you explain how the translation of documents carried out by the Public Order Emergency Commission met the Official Languages Act standard?

[Matthew Shea]

The translation was for external-facing documents, such as on their website. Everything but the evidence—and I understand that is in keeping with the Canada Evidence Act—was translated into both official languages. The report itself is in both official languages, and interpretation was provided for all of the individual events.

They are a federal organization, and they have internal obligations as well. I can't speak to whether they adhere to all those, because I was not there in terms of managing their employees and those pieces. However, in terms of the external-facing documents, everything that I've seen implies that they have met their obligations.

Perhaps I could add some precision to what my colleague said. The $16-million quote, which I think we just quantified as 10 months, is for 8,000 documents. It's for the evidence that is on the website that was in one language—to translate it. That is already a subset of the 152,000 files.

If we were to extrapolate out the same number of pages—and we don't know that until we look—we would multiply that by 19. That's why we said in our first letter that it would be over $300 million and many years, because you see the cost. That is why, from the start, I've been saying that we would really like to find a solution that allows us to narrow that down in a way that is acceptable to this committee.

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface]

I have just about a minute left.

I'm not sure who mentioned the use of AI. This has been raised before at this committee, as to what degree AI helps. Could you just explain how that works?

[Matthew Shea]

I will turn to the experts at the translation bureau to explain how they use AI.

[Jean-François Lymburner]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I made the reference to automation and automated translation. We hear lots of comments about artificial intelligence at the translation bureau.

I would like to remind the members that in the seventies the translation bureau was one of the first organizations to use the dictaphone. We were also one of the first organizations to use word-processing devices in the eighties, and obviously we are looking at every possibility to use automation or artificial intelligence.

The complexity comes when we need to move into the secret environment, where, of course, we cannot tap into all the information that is available. That being said, AI is not perfect yet. Things like “receiver general” might mean something in the football world for some, so we really need to make sure there are experts who are going through this. Yes, it's helping us to go a little bit faster in certain documents. In the classified.... I'm not saying we're not going to get there. We are working with Shared Services Canada and other partners to try to leverage the intelligence.

Other countries, as mentioned by another member, obviously are facing the same challenges. As long as it is safe to do it, we're going to use it.