I would really like to know whether she gave you an answer, because our unit has already taken part in several rounds of negotiations; we are asking the employer to give us an idea of the way in which it calculates costs when it signs an agreement with a department. We are trying to find out the basis on which costs are calculated and how it can then claim that costs are fair for Canadians. In an ideal world, we should exclude all kinds of costs which do not relate directly to the words to be translated—hoping that there is no garbage in or garbage out—in order to find out about the whole infrastructure involving terminology, post-editing, revision and so on. I am not referring to basic revision, which should be part of the per word cost.
That is where the Treasury Board must intervene in order to protect all those aspects of the Translation Bureau's costs so that they can be excluded. When you come down to it, adding a cost to those services is a disincentive for departments to use them. The intention was clearly to reduce costs, but they went so far as to violate the fundamental rights of employees to work in the language of their choice.
The Bureau should also comply with the Official Languages Act and protect the linguistic duality of public servants in their workplace.
