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Citizenship and Immigration committee Absolutely not. I don't agree with that.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford
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
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford
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.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford
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.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford
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.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford
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
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford
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
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford
Citizenship and Immigration committee Once again, it's interpreting we're talking about, not translation.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford
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
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford
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.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford
Citizenship and Immigration committee We have had federal funding in the past. Yes, I think so.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford
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
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford
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
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford
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
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford
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
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Andrew Clifford