Citizenship and Immigration committee  Absolutely not. I don't agree with that.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't work specifically with Kermanji. I said at the outset that there's a restricted number of languages that our program trains for specifically. I can comment more broadly on what it means to try to train people who work with languages of lesser diffusion. One of the things

Citizenship and Immigration committee  What is my budget? I'm not sure that I'm at liberty to discuss that in such an open forum.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, I could give you a couple of numbers, for example, that might put things into perspective. For example, the financial people here at my faculty tell me that a classroom needs to have a minimum of 40 students in it before the university breaks even.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  With all of my languages combined, I would never have in the classroom more than 15 people and, with a specific language pair, usually no more than five. I consistently operate at a loss.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It would take the sort of system that I was talking about before, whereby a number of institutions decide to pool their resources and, over a remote platform, decide to share classes. That's being done on an ad hoc basis, with a little bit here and a little bit there. It's most

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We're talking about $10 million invested within a broader area and divvied up among universities and institutions. That would certainly help. One thing we are trying to do as well is figure out what are the mechanisms by which we can help graduates bridge from training to actua

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Once again, it's interpreting we're talking about, not translation.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, is the short answer. One of the things I can tell you about the field in general is that there is a very strong movement towards the remote delivery of interpreting services. As an interpreter, about half the work that I do is remote from my clients, and increasingly there

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I won't lie to you; this is not a money-making proposition for a university. The program that I run could not exist without external funding.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We have had federal funding in the past. Yes, I think so.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's an excellent question. I wish I could give you a number to say, if x number of people were settled, then that would spill over into x number of interpreters. Unfortunately, I can't. The one thing I can do is point out some of the issues that are facing languages of lesse

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Sure I can. I'm going to start though by making a distinction. You said two things that I just want to make very clear. What we're talking about here is not language training. When people come to an interpreter training program, the assumption is that they already have a very st

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'll start by saying that we don't work with Kermanji. We work with the languages I mentioned at the outset. The closest and most relevant language we work with might be Arabic. But I can talk generally about how difficult it is to find people who have the qualifications. We're

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. I intend to make some initial comments in French. Then I will change to English, if that works for you. Mr. Chair and members of the committee, first, I would like to thank you for inviting me to talk to you about interpreter training, which is close to my heart. In