Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I would like to thank the witnesses for their presentations.
As you can hear, French is not my mother tongue. I am taking French courses, but I don't have the vocabulary to speak fluently in French. So Google Translate is my best friend. I use it often. It's an aid for me, and for my colleagues. I was a public servant at the Treasury Board for two years, and I would have liked a translation tool.
For me, any tool that can help promote bilingualism is useful, especially for those of us who may not have had the advantages of French immersion or the opportunity to use our second national language when we were growing up and had to find alternative means to use our second language.
We've heard opposition to tools such as this from a couple of witnesses now, and I'm a little concerned about that. It will never replace translators or the professionalism of translation. I accept that 100%. We've used the services of the Translation Bureau in our office. I used them as a public servant, and they provide exceptional quality. There's nothing I could say wrong about that.
I want to focus on a couple of things that Madame Cardinal spoke about.
The comparison to social media is actually a worthy comparison, but I come to a conclusion that is different from yours. Yes, there are differences between social media and journalism, but they go hand in hand. We see the tools and the way in which social media are being used as a journalistic tool in the same way that professional public service-endorsed translation tools could find worthwhile use in the public service.
Do you see any role for a machine translator tool that could be used by public servants themselves in our day-to-day operations or in our day-to-day lives as public servants?