Official Languages Committee on April 11th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

I call the meeting to order.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are continuing our study on the Translation Bureau.

Today, we will be hearing from Louise Brunette, a professor at the Université du Québec en Outaouais.

Welcome, Mrs. Brunette.

Then we will be hearing from another group of witnesses.

Mrs. Brunette, you have 10 minutes in which to make your presentation. After that, committee members will ask you questions.

[Louise Brunette, Professor, Université du Québec en Outaouais]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I am not very well versed in procedure, so you will forgive me if I forget to use your proper titles, like Mr. Chair and so on. It could well happen.

I would like to start by giving you a little biography of myself, to justify my appearance before you today.

I know this might not seem to be the case, but I have very close to 50 years of experience in translation. I started very young, around 25 years old, working in translation in areas as varied as banking, heating, and the media. So I have a good idea of what a really intense and varied translation practice can be like.

I have worked as a translator, a terminologist and a translation services manager, which gives me a good overview of the profession as a whole.

After 30 years of that varied practice, I decided to do a PhD, because I wanted to be listened to when I spoke. I have been teaching since that time. I teach translation, the basic element, as well as revision, which, in translation, is quality control. That led me to machine translation. I have also taught machine translation and post-editing, which I will talk to you about later.

I am going to let others deal with the political and sociolinguistic issues. I will not be talking about that at all. That is not my goal today. Instead, my goal is to rehabilitate the translation software. I will probably be one of the only ones to do so, but that is not the crux of my message.

The crux of my message is to show that present circumstances do not really allow us to use what I consider to be an excellent machine translation system in the best way. That does Portage no favours, a system of which Canada can be proud. In international competitions, this system regularly places first. It is one of the jewels in the crown of technological innovation.

Contrary to what the media has been saying recently, the problem has absolutely nothing to do with the performance of the machine translation software. I would like to point out that all the examples that I have read in La Presse and in other media are completely inappropriate. Let me give you one. People have been laughing themselves silly about the expression “it's raining cats and dogs”. No one uses that expression in the public service. I do not see why we are hung up on it. It is an old-fashioned expression that I feel has no place in the current language of public servants.

Let me read you a commercial definition of the system that exactly reflects how I feel about it.

Portage is a statistics-based software system that yields far better results than earlier attempts to automate the highly nuanced art of translation.

We are not talking about linguistics. Machine translation software does not translate languages; that is not what it primarily does. You end up with a translation, but the system works by statistical analysis. This is about mathematics, not about language. The system understands nothing. It just understands the data it is given and the data it has already stored. It makes comparisons.

However, I am less in agreement with the words “highly nuanced art”. The software works on binary coding: 1,0,1,0,1,0. There is nothing highly nuanced about it. The program depends on the machine learning statistics. It really is “garbage in, garbage out”. It absorbs what it is given and it gives back what it is given. If what you give it is not good, then the product it gives you will not be good either. Really, it is no more complicated than that.

Why did I decide to come here? Because, with things as they are at the moment, I was wondering where we are going. This is a three-fold distortion of machine translation.

First, I feel that the use the Translation Bureau itself had in mind was not the generalist role the system currently has. For example, translating emails comes under the heading of general texts, whereas that is not what the system was intended for. Nor is it what its designers intended it for. They always have been conscious of the fact that, just like at the very beginning and all through the 1960s, machine translation of general texts will never reach the quality that humans can achieve. The designers say so too, they are not kidding themselves. There really has to be preparation from below and from above.

From below, we have what we call the corpus. I have told you that it is a statistical analysis system. It is going to analyze in terms of what it already has in its memory. There is the machine translation process, the computerized translation process, which ends up as a linguistic product, a text, which then also has to be refined by humans in a process that we call machine text editing, or more commonly, post-editing. So, if there are no humans on both sides, the results are certainly going to be terrible. The software designers recognize that themselves: they never thought that they would end up with quality translations. However, it seems that some other people believe that you can do so, and that is why they want to install the software at all costs.

The other distortion is that, by implementing the system immediately, we are going to deliver a fatal blow to the development of machine translation, in my opinion, because we are harming it a great deal. But, as I was telling you earlier, it is one of the jewels in the crown of the country's technological innovation. So if we want to kill off all the enthusiasm for machine translation at the outset, as a discipline itself, we have found a good way to go about it. If we put the system into operation now, we will certainly end up with gibberish, just as we have read in the press, and that will harm the reputation of Canadian machine translation researchers.

Now I am going to talk to you about post-editing. I am less familiar with corpus development, which is an area that has much more to do with linguistics, than with quality control. Post-editing is a quality control operation. I will not go into the details, but I also feel that, even with post-editing, we are not completely assured of quality machine translation.

There are various reasons for that. Among them is that post-editing as it is presently conceived is all about speed. So, the quicker you work, the less freedom you have, for example, to work with the sentences or to make the texts more idiomatic in the target language. I am not even talking about French. It must be said that current software like Portage is not so bad at translating idiomatic expressions. Language that is more idiomatic in general poses the problem, in fact, not idiomatic expressions themselves. However, post-editors are working at such a rhythm that they cannot restore the idiomatic aspects every time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Mrs. Brunette, can you perhaps conclude your remarks so that we can take questions from committee members, because we have to hear representatives from a second group now. Then we will—

[Louise Brunette]

Can I give my recommendations? I will be quick.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Go ahead.

[Louise Brunette]

Here are my recommendations. First and foremost, machine translation must be dealt with as a long-term pilot project overseen by professional, certified translators, such as those in the Translation Bureau, for example. Then, post-editing workshops need to be established, because few people know how to post-edit, since my university is the only one to teach it. There must also be investments in corpus development and, above all, experts other than software designers must be consulted, since they are pretty focused. You certainly need to be considering the machine translation experts at the Université de Montréal. I can even provide you with names. Finally, contacts must be established between the software designers and those who use machine translation. That means translators, not the public.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Thank you very much, Mrs. Brunette.

We are now going to hear from the representatives of the second group and then we will move to questions.

We are pleased to welcome Emmanuelle Tremblay, who is the national president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees, and its vice-president, André Picotte.

We are all ears, Ms. Tremblay.

[Emmanuelle Tremblay, National President, Canadian Association of Professional Employees]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Forgive me, I hope that I am not going to have a huge coughing fit. I am not in very good shape today.

Thank you for inviting us.

The Canadian Association of Professional Employees essentially represents a large group of 12,000 members who work in economics, statistics and policy analysis. We also represent all the government's translators, interpreters and terminologists, who are all employed by the Translation Bureau. I am testifying today on behalf of that group, accompanied by our vice-president, who represents the terminologists, interpreters and translators.

They are all directly affected not only by the implementation of the machine translation tool, but also by a series of changes made over the years that make us wonder whether the Bureau has lost its way a little. We are wondering whether it is still wondering whether it should be a commercial undertaking or whether it is the institution that should be the guardian of linguistic duality and compliance with the Official Languages Act in Canada.

There is clearly a great dichotomy between these two visions and it would seem that the first approach has prevailed in recent years to the great detriment of the quality of the Bureau's services and of its members who have seen their numbers decrease drastically in favour of subcontractors and what we call phantom translation units. It is hard to imagine not paying doctors and not hiring new doctors, but that is exactly what is happening in the Translation Bureau. No one new has been hired for five years. Through this inexorable attrition, about 33% or 34% of the translators have disappeared.

Professor Jean Delisle declared that, in some minds, translation was ”the necessary evil of Confederation”. In his view, the actions taken by the Bureau's management and the economic straightjacket strapped on it by the previous government only reinforces this prejudice.

[André Picotte, Vice-President, Canadian Association of Professional Employees]

The Official Languages Act of 1969 gave the Translation Bureau the mandate to ensure linguistic quality throughout the machinery of government and to develop expertise and tools that would give it an international reputation. That was in 1969, and, at the time, it was a government service that was responsible for all translation activities in the federal government.

As a result of the program review at the beginning of the 1990s, the Bureau was transformed and, in 1995, became a special operating agency. That is when the dichotomy arose between its mandate to protect Canada's linguistic duality and the need to recover its costs. It must be said in passing that the Bureau was essentially asked to be a special operating agency and to function as a private business, but inside government. It is therefore not a crown corporation, but it is also not a government service in the classic sense. To use a vulgar expression, one could say that it is a bastard organization.

The Bureau is therefore forced to compete with the private sector, which does not have anywhere near the same operating costs. The Bureau had no choice but to adopt a mercantile approach that led it astray from its core mandate.

By comparison, Passport Canada, another special operating agency, has a monopoly on passport production. It is therefore free to set prices for its services that allow it to offset its costs. Unlike us, it has no clients.

The Bureau provides its language tools, such as Termium Plus, at no cost to private translators and translation companies that do not have to contribute to the cost of operating them. The Translation Bureau, for example, pays for the work of the terminologists who keep that tool up to date.

In addition, the Translation Bureau establishes annual service agreements with the federal departments and agencies. These are not really contracts, just simple agreements. For example, if there is a one-year agreement with Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada for the Translation Bureau to translate its texts, and, right in the middle of the year, the department decides to go to the private sector and tells us about it out of the blue, it means that the Bureau has just lost a client. That prevents the Bureau from planning in the medium and long terms. It also explains why, as Emmanuelle said, we have lost 400 employees since 2002 and why the 140 people who will soon be retiring will not be replaced in 2017-2018. The translators and the administrative staff with whom they work in close cooperation will continue to do quality work, but they often do it at the expense of their physical and mental health.

Political and economic choices are undermining the ability of the Bureau's employees to produce quality work. They do it, but it is becoming harder and harder. Bureau employees are the victims of an unsustainable model. Sooner or later, the machinery will break down. Our members are devastated by this new reality, even more so because the Bureau management does not hold translators in any regard. For them, we are simply production numbers. There is also a lack of contact between senior management and the employees.

To save money, the Bureau has also been reorganized into affinity groups. Previously, we used to work with federal departments and agencies. That therefore developed expertise among the translators working with, for example, Employment and Skills Development Canada, Public Safety Canada, or the Department of National Defence. At the moment, with affinity groups, various areas, various departments, are grouped together. So it is much more difficult to develop that expertise and translators have to do it on the job.

Another problem has existed for some time: departments are creating phantom TR positions. They do not call them TRs; they go by other names, such as language quality advisors. Really they are discount translators, in violation of the Treasury Board directive, which gives the Bureau the monopoly on translation in the federal government. Essentially, departments have been told to either go to the private sector or to use the Translation Bureau, but not to create independent departmental translation services.

[Emmanuelle Tremblay]

Another major blow to the Translation Bureau is the result of all the budget cuts imposed on various departments. For many of them, translation is the first thing to be eliminated due to budget cuts. The number of documents being translated is therefore reduced.

Francophones are already often as a disadvantage. I come from CIDA and the Department of Foreign Affairs. I had very little opportunity to use my first language in working documents, but now, I have almost no opportunity at all. English is the only language of work in every possible draft imaginable of a working document, thereby reducing the ability of francophones to exercise their right to use the language of their choice in the workplace.

Since 2000, the population of Canada has increased about 17%. It has gone from 30 million to 36 million. Departments therefore have increased demands. Instead of responding to that with good quality jobs and by hiring translators and interpreters who are recognized for their great skill and their great professionalism, they go increasingly to freelancers and to the private sector. I am not saying that all freelancers are not good. On the contrary, I think some freelancers are excellent, but others are not so good. Not only are we seeing a pernicious deunionization—we have already lost almost a third of our members—but the uneven quality of the freelancers also means that our members now have to correct the mistakes made outside. That ends up costing the Bureau a great deal and forces our members to salvage the institution’s reputation by doing revisions for which they are often not adequately compensated.

[André Picotte]

Over the years, the Bureau has acquired great expertise in scientific and technical translation. Unfortunately, that expertise is fading away as people retire. As for multilingual translation, the Bureau’s expertise is now external, and provided at discount prices.

[Emmanuelle Tremblay]

We now come to the machine translation tool, which Mrs. Brunette talked to us about at length.

I am going to add something to her very eloquent comments. The broad use of a tool designed for language people is having a clear and detrimental impact on the Bureau’s image.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Ms. Tremblay, could you move to your recommendations right away?

[Emmanuelle Tremblay]

Sure.

The Bureau will have to ask itself whether its basic mandate is to achieve savings for the government or to uphold linguistic duality and the Official Languages Act.

Mr. Picotte will talk about our first recommendation and I will talk about the second.

[André Picotte]

The first recommendation is to make the Translation Bureau the sole government agency responsible for translation services within the federal public service. If it were responsible for managing translation on behalf of all departments, the Bureau could plan in the medium and long term, something it cannot do currently because of the permanent state of uncertainty.

It could also start to hire employees again. This would also lead to a reduction in the administrative costs associated with awarding translation contracts and would ensure that language expertise is maintained.

Moreover, entrusting the Bureau with the responsibility of overseeing the management of all the government’s translation would make it possible to eliminate the phantom translation units or the phantom translator positions that exist in some departments that the Bureau is aware of, thereby also achieving savings.

The Bureau plays an important cultural role. It would be good for it to report to Canadian Heritage from now on rather than Public Services and Procurement Canada, because the latter department provides solely utilitarian services, wheras Canadian Heritage has a cultural role to play.

[Emmanuelle Tremblay]

Second, we suggest that the Translation Bureau be given all the financial and human resources it needs to fulfill its mandate. It is important to put an end to the policy of attrition at the Bureau, to give it the resources required to fulfill its mandate to support Canada’s linguistic duality and to stop making it bear the brunt of untenable budget cuts.

In many of its mandate letters to new ministers, the present government has indicated that they must help to protect the Official Languages Act. This is just wishful thinking unless this desire is matched by concrete actions, such as restoring the budget so that the Bureau can fulfill its mandate.

In addition to hiring new employees once again, the Bureau must implement a program to restore its lost expertise in the areas of technical, scientific and multilingual translation. It must also develop a succession plan that will make it possible for experienced employees to pass on their expertise by helping to train new colleagues.

The time has come to make wise budgetary choices and to stop sacrificing the official languages on the altar of austerity.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Thank you.

Because our time is flying, we are going to start the questions immediately, starting with our vice-chair John Nater.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank the witnesses for providing us with this useful information.

I am a former member of CAPE. I brought my union membership card just to prove it. I do appreciate the work you do on behalf of your members.

I want to touch on a few questions about the machine translation tool. I'll open it up to both of our groups of witnesses. Is it something where the train has already left the station in terms of machine translation? I use Google Translate all the time. It does not give perfect translation; I acknowledge that.

Madame Brunette, the comment about needing the people side of things, the pre- and post-editing.... Is that something that the translation bureau should be undertaking, more so in conjunction with a machine translation tool, that pre- and post-editing function on top of it? The President of the Treasury Board talked about encouraging more millennials into the workforce. As a millennial, I think we do need a viable machine translation tool. Maybe you can comment on how you see that.

[André Picotte]

I am a practitioner, a translator, actually. In our business, we are using computerized tools more and more, which is not a problem in itself. However, you really have to understand that those tools must be in the hands of professionals, people who know the area, not to just anyone at all, as is the case at the moment. With some texts, machine translation does not work at all. It just gives gibberish. For other texts, however, it helps translators to work much more quickly. Whatever the case, this tool must be in the hands of professionals, not of people who are not translators. Otherwise, we are going to be looking at a disaster. We are starting to see it already.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

My challenge with that, though, is that if it is only in the hands of the professionals, people are going to be using other tools in the workforce on a daily basis. People are going to be using Google Translate, if you are not opening it up to the public service as a whole. I know from my time in the public service that we used alternate means to translate on a fast basis.

French is not my first language, as you can well tell, as I struggle with using my second language on a regular basis. I rely on things like Google Translate on a daily basis to function. I am a little concerned that we are limiting the use of machine translation only to professionals, which I think we certainly have an important need for.

Madam Achimov, who spoke to us a few weeks ago, implied that the budget cuts have not had a major impact on her organization, and staff have left because of attrition. Would you like to address those comments?

I certainly found her comments interesting.

[André Picotte]

To be perfectly frank, I do not understand why Ms. Achimov said that. The truth is that people are under extreme stress, both administrative staff and translators. They are being pushed to the limit in order to do the work that they have to do. The organization itself is under stress. If you talk to Transition Bureau employees, you will see that they are constantly complaining about being pushed to the limit and given deadlines that are too tight. Administrative staff is being asked to perform miracles.

Given the attrition that is still in effect, the situation is only going to get worse. Fewer and fewer people work at the Bureau. A 2014 survey of public service employees revealed that the Bureau has the worst record in terms of workplace satisfaction.

For Ms. Achimov to say that everything is going well and that people do not have problems is almost unbelievable.

[Emmanuelle Tremblay]

Maybe I can specify what she meant when she said that there have been no cuts. What she probably implied was that nobody left involuntarily. There was no one who was given a letter to say that they were out the door, but she used the demographics to basically erode the core staff of the TRs, and to an extent that is seen nowhere else. I have not seen any other department where you have a 34% reduction in personnel over a four-year period. I'm sorry, that doesn't exist. You cannot stand here and say that nobody has been cut.

No, nobody has been shown the door, but nobody who left has been replaced. That is a profound erosion.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

I have a very quick final question. One of your recommendations is to move sole responsibility for any translation in the public service to the translation bureau. Do you have any sense of what the staffing needs to do that would be and what the costs may be to redirect all translation strictly to the bureau?

[Emmanuelle Tremblay]

We haven't prepared the costing but it's definitely something that we can work on, and we can establish some parameters for making the translation bureau, the service, embody what it should embody for the Canadian public service as a whole. We can work on models. We have plenty of economists to work on that.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Right on.

Thank you.