Thank you, Ms. Barbot.
You are quite right. We should not post poor quality text. That is not the intention of the system. I will explain to you why we moved to an automated system.
First of all, there were financial considerations. At the time, without automated translation, it cost $25 million to translate the offers. There were 450,000 at the time. Currently, we receive over a million and the number increases by 30% per year.
The limited life span of postings on Job Bank is another reason to move to an automated system. Job Bank is a transactional service. It allows employers to post their job offers across Canada. For them, the priority is to receive applications from job seekers as early as possible. It is the same thing for job seekers. They want to become aware of an offer, apply for the position and be matched with an employer as quickly as possible. The goal is to allow people to find employment as quickly as possible. Is that an excuse for poor quality? No.
We adopted an automated system after having consulted experts in the field. We took the existing translations and incorporated them into a translation memory. Every time a text goes through the memory and corresponds to another text held in the memory, it has no errors and can be posted directly without revision.
We have also begun to use pre-translated checklists. Using the National Occupational Classification, which is recognized throughout Canada, we have put together pre-translated checklists of skills. When employers post their job offers, they consult this list and check off the skills they require. All of this is pre-translated and there are no errors in the text.
It is in free text that we find errors. Free text is limited to 300 words. This is a space that is made available to employers so that they can add particular details concerning the offer, details that do not appear in our pre-translated checklists. Errors slip into this text.
When we started doing automated translation in 2002, we had a level of quality of only 20%, which was a poor result and things could not continue in that way. The deputy minister at the time approved a budget to refine our translation system. We went from 20 to 87% quality. We therefore have made enormous progress.
There are still 13% of the offers that cannot be revised. Some days, we revise them all. Other days, we receive up to 5,000 offers and we cannot revise them all. This is why we still have some of poor quality. Today, we are proposing not to post job offers that have not been revised, so that there will be no more poor quality texts in the system.