I was listening to Mr. Godin and I was, frankly, embarrassed. Since coming to Ottawa—which is recently—I find that the services provided to members of Parliament are excellent. I have met with officials who provided high-quality services in both languages.
Today, I find myself laughing at a job posting in which candidates for a meat cutter's job are asked to work on a “seedling”. Ms. L'Espérance, this is so ridiculous that I can only say, as Mr. Godin did, that it is unacceptable.
I worked in the field of electronics for many years. You said that your software has a translation memory. Perhaps you should add a bit more memory, because there are problems. If the quality of texts is currently in the order of 87%, I would be afraid to find out what it was when the quality stood at 20%. What a joke. When everyone is laughing, from the Bloc Québécois members to the members from the New Democratic Party, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party, it's because it truly is a joke.
Today, I would be embarrassed to say that I was the head of your service, and I would be embarrassed to present this to the committee. I'm normally a calm person, but as one of my colleagues said, “It gets my goat.”
This is not rocket science. If the quality of a text is in question, it would not be difficult to get a red light to flash. So instead of proofreading every single text, people could at least concentrate on the 13% which are at issue.
We must also be careful. If ensuring that an adequate translation is provided means that it takes four or five days longer for French-speaking candidates to apply for a job, they are the ones who risk being at a disadvantage. So should a job posting be delayed by five to seven days if it is to appear simultaneously in both languages? Again, it's a problem.
Please understand that you have a responsibility. On page 5, you say that you are not legally bound to translate these texts because they come from third parties. However, they are posted on your website. So don't tell me this is not your responsibility. It is your responsibility. If something falls into my jurisdiction, I am responsible for it. So you are responsible because these things fall under your jurisdiction. Regardless of the source of a text, you have to make sure that it makes sense. Perhaps an idea might be to create 175 standard sentences which people can select to correspond to their criteria. This might not result in a fantastic description, but at least, with 175 or 200 sentences, the content might be about right.
I'm embarrassed. I'm portrayed as an idiot in the foreign press because people say that our translations are idiotic. Ms. L'Espérance, we are in Canada. It's your job to make sure that the texts make sense.
Since I have to ask you a question, I have a good one. Out of the 800,000 job postings which are on your website, how many have been machine-translated?