Official Languages committee  Thank you for inviting me.

Official Languages committee  Absolutely.

Official Languages committee  That is a prerequisite.

Official Languages committee  Me neither.

Official Languages committee  Yes.

Official Languages committee  I would say the biggest advantages are quickness and understandability. I will give you an example that has nothing to do with the government. I have food allergies. If I travel to China, I will be very glad to be able to take a photograph of a Chinese menu to get an idea of what it contains, as I do not understand Chinese.

Official Languages committee  Yes. There are various reasons behind that. You have to understand what the costs for the bureau are when it develops these kind of tools. The question was asked earlier about Termium. The bureau's costs for developing and updating Termium, for example, are not part of the costs for which departments are billed, as parliamentary votes cover that.

Official Languages committee  Absolutely.

Official Languages committee  I see.

Official Languages committee  Yes. For example, when it was decided, with Parliament's approval, to make Termium and the entire language portal available to all Canadians, a cost was attached to the decision. In fact, anything posted on the web is accessible not only to Canadians, but to the whole world. So there is a cost to making the servers capable of absorbing the future demand.

Official Languages committee  There already is one, Google Translate. It's quick. It's a matter of 400 million pages per day, while the bureau produces 1.5 million pages per year. I can assure you that the quality of the 400 million pages cannot hold a candle to the quality of the bureau texts. That gives you a bit of an idea.

Official Languages committee  It may encourage the use of both official languages as long as it is limited to understanding and not communication, and as long as it remains limited to personal use. If it went beyond personal use, it would raise the issue of compliance with the Official Languages Act.

Official Languages committee  In any case, it's already widely used. Your colleague who was here earlier said that he was already using Google Translate when he was a public servant.

Official Languages committee  It first started using them in the 1970s to translate weather reports. The automated translation tool Portage started being used very recently. I would say three or four years ago.

Official Languages committee  Yes.