Thank you, Mr. Chair, members of the committee, guests, and witnesses, for the opportunity to profile our organization and the challenges we face evaluating and recruiting interpreters for languages of lesser diffusion.
CISOC is a local organization. It was created in 1993. The purpose of the organization is to provide interpretation and translation services, language fluency assessment, and training for interpreters who work in the community. The organization is a charity; it's non-profit.
Some of the challenges we face, of course, are in identifying languages that need to be created and tested. Currently, we train interpreters all across the country, and we evaluate fluency for those interpreters in 50 languages. One of the challenges we face is often funding to develop new languages. At the moment, we already have a test for Kermanji. This is the Kurdish version, but of course, one of the difficulties we're facing with the community that has arrived in Canada is that many of them speak different dialects. Often we need to develop assessments for those dialects in order to better represent them.
As I mentioned, we have organizations that we support all across the country. The process we follow to locate interpreters is to ensure first that they have the fluency necessary to be able to provide the services in the communities. We need to provide the training necessary to educate them and to ensure that they follow the protocols we have put in place here in Canada, as well as build vocabulary in the different areas such as medical, legal, and social environments.
It is a bit of an involved process, but it's very efficient. One of the major difficulties, of course, is developing assessments for those languages that are in less need or less demand. Since we are a charity, we generate revenue ourselves to develop these assessments; thus, we tend to often go for languages where we feel that there is high demand and that we can recover some of the expenses we invest.
If we were to create assessments for all the different languages needed in Canada, it is doable, but we will need some type of support from the community to be able to develop these assessments.
All our training is online, so it is accessible from any province. That makes it much easier, and we are building a stronger capacity in the country.
Unless you have any questions, I think that summarizes what we do. Hopefully, we can collaborate.
Thank you.