The article you are referring to is an article I was very despondent to read. An RCMP detachment in British Columbia was forced to pull down I think it was 2,000 old press releases, because they weren't available in both official languages. They had previously been using Google Translate to translate the English releases into French. I'm floored by the fact that what we have functionally done is made our government more opaque. So now no one in either English or French can ever see these documents, right? This is a terrible outcome.
At the same time, I am a product of bilingualism.
My French is less than satisfactory, but I can understand and speak a little.
So then we've said, okay, you can't use Google Translate. The danger is that you're looking at Google Translate as it exists now. That's right. Google Translate 12 months ago was far worse, and Google Translate 12 months from now is going to be significantly better.
Look at what Google did with spell check. In a very short period of time, they built the most effective spell checking system in the world, simply because everybody was constantly updating it for them. They were able to draw on millions and millions and millions of users. They are doing the exact same thing with Google Translate. So the rate of improvement of Google Translate is logarithmic. It's probably getting better faster and faster.
We've actually extricated ourselves from a system just as it's about to get phenomenally better. If we actually want to make Google Translate better still, someone should call Google and say that this is a system that gets better when you can compare documents. There is one organization in the world that has an enormous quantity of documents in both English and French, and that's the Government of Canada.
If we really want to make Google Translate very effective tomorrow, someone should call Google and say, “Why don't you take all of our documents that we have in both English and French and put them into your computers? It will dramatically improve the effectiveness.”
I think it also has a nice piece as part of it, which is that Canadian French and Canadian English would then become even more predominant within the Google ecosystem. That aside, if we want to make Google Translate better, it's in our power. At least we could ask Google. In fact, we probably don't have to ask. Someone could just create a software program that fed both into their systems without their desire, and we would make Google Translate significantly better.