Mr. Chair, thank you for inviting the National Research Council to appear before the committee today. My colleague, Charles-Antoine Gauthier, and I are pleased to provide you with a report on NRC's initiative related to the Roadmap for Canada's Linguistic Duality.
With your permission, I'd like to start by telling you about the National Research Council Canada. As a research and technology organization, NRC is providing strategic research, as well as scientific and technical services to develop and deploy solutions to meet Canada's current and future industrial and societal needs. NRC has a mandate to undertake, assist or promote scientific and industrial research in different fields of importance to Canada. We do this by leveraging our talent and world-class facilities that reside across the country to create further value and wealth for Canada and to help raise the nation's level of innovation performance.
Now, more specifically about NRC's initiative on our share of the Roadmap for Canada's Linguistic Duality 2008-2013, let me begin by providing you with some background.
In March 2003, the federal government announced the action plan for official languages, known as APOL. The action plan identified the need for the language industries to invest in language technologies to compensate for the increasing shortage of the needed qualified workers. It also identified that language technology and translation industries lack the R and D capabilities and financial resources to make significant investments in the development of innovative language tools and technologies.
From April 2003 to March 2008, NRC received $10 million over five years from APOL to increase investments in research and development in language technologies. To deliver on these commitments, NRC created the new interactive language technologies group and participated in the establishment of the Language Technologies Research Centre, which I'll just refer to as the centre. It is housed on the campus of the Université du Québec en Outaouais.
The Language Technologies Research Centre was created in partnership with the Translation Bureau of Canada and the Université du Québec en Outaouais. The centre is a not-for-profit organization with the mandate to incubate and help small and medium-sized language technology firms obtain funding and other resources for internal R and D projects. The centre is now operational, and NRC played a key role in launching the R and D projects.
Through the Roadmap for Canada's Linguistic Duality 2008-2013, NRC renewed its commitment to expend $10 million over five years, meaning about $2 million per year, in R and D to support the language industry.
The roadmap includes a horizontal results-based management and accountability framework managed by the Department of Canadian Heritage's Official Languages Secretariat. As such, NRC reports annually on its expenditures on R&D activities in direct support of the roadmap, as well as on its progress against the performance measures.
NRC's investment was used to create and operate its R&D programs and specifically to respond to the needs of two types of clients that constitute two different segments of the broader language industry. These are language technology companies and the end users of language technologies.
Language technology companies are Canadian SMEs in the information and communication technology sector that can license the NRC technologies with the intention of developing commercial products that will be, in turn, offered to the end users.
End users include translation firms, freelance translators, as well as users of language technologies.
NRC used the majority of the funding to produce a machine translation technology called PORTAGE that actually works, meaning that it is clearly among the best products available in the world today. It is used at the Translation Bureau of Canada and at CLS Lexi-tech, the largest private sector translation bureau in Canada.
Funding was also used to produce a translation aid tool called WeBiText, which is licensed to a Montreal-based Canadian start-up company called Terminotix. While targeted at translators, WeBiText also allows anyone to find a translation for a term by looking through millions of pages of multilingual parallel text on the web. It is particularly effective on French to English and English to French because it has access to the vast number of bilingual web pages of the Government of Canada.
Over the last three years, NRC's interactive language technology group has developed or improved six core technologies and tools. The group has also filed for four patent applications to protect the intellectual property generated by these research projects, and they continue to increase the commercialization of innovative technologies.
NRC has met its immediate targets specified in the road map logic model and results structure of the horizontal results-based management and accountability framework, and that was to strengthen the capacity of the Canadian language industries through the transfer of its language technologies. The transfer of the PORTAGE machine translation system to the Translation Bureau of Canada and to CLS Lexi-Tech promises to reduce the cost of translations, and could significantly increase the capacity of the government and the private sector to work in both official languages.
NRC played a pivotal role that no other organization in Canada can play in support of language technology industries.
The presence in Canada of a strong language industry is an essential factor in preserving Canada's linguistic duality. Clearly NRC's contributions to language technologies were a key solution to maintaining the competitiveness of the Canadian language industry.
In conclusion, I would like to say that NRC is proud of its accomplishments in this initiative. Together with our partners, we have built a world-class team creating jobs and bringing value to the Canadian language industry by providing them with a global competitive edge. Thank you.
Thank you very much for your time.