The federal government is piloting an artificial intelligence (AI) tool in six departments and agencies to help translate official languages for the public service.<\/p>\n
On Monday, Minister of Government Transformation, Public Works and Procurement\u00a0Jo\u00ebl\u00a0Lightbound announced CGtranslate\u00a0as the “first flagship project of the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy.”<\/p>\n
The technology was developed by the\u00a0Translation Bureau at Public Services and Procurement Canada. No start date was given for the pilot.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Mark Carney and his\u00a0government have been trying to integrate AI in hopes of boosting the public service’s productivity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A\u00a0previous version of the tool was tested in June and translated\u00a0more than 60 million words in\u00a0three months, or about 3,000 pages of translated content per workday, according to a news release.<\/p>\n
“GCtranslate strengthens the use of both official languages across government and supports a modern public service that keeps pace with the digital age,” Lightbound said.\u00a0“This is about putting technology to work for Canadians so services are delivered faster, smarter and in both official languages.”<\/p>\n
Fears of ‘negative impact’ on French<\/p>\n
But the head of one major public service union\u00a0argued\u00a0full automation of the government’s translation service\u00a0is\u00a0“a very bad idea” when it comes to protecting Canada’s officials languages, especially French.<\/p>\n
“I think this is going to have a negative impact directly on francophone communities,” said Nathan Prier,\u00a0president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees. “[AI]\u00a0loses a lot of the nuance of the language. A francophone\u00a0reading an AI translation knows they’re reading an AI translation.”<\/p>\n
He said\u00a0the project is chiefly driven by cost-cutting, and said its implementation has been problematic.<\/p>\n
“A\u00a0lot of that has happened in a very chaotic, very unsupervised way,\u00a0sacrificing the quality of French in the meantime,” he said.\u00a0“It’s French that pays the price.”<\/p>\n
Prier said the\u00a0technology is best employed\u00a0alongside human translators\u00a0\u2014\u00a0not as a replacement for them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“These are people with like decades of experience in translation who know how to integrate these things without sacrificing quality,” Prier said.\u00a0“They’re the foundation of bilingualism in Canada. They should be at the front line\u00a0of this conversation, instead of hearing about the plans after the fact.”<\/p>\n
8 billion words<\/p>\n
According to the government,\u00a0GCtranslate was evaluated\u00a0by professional translators and\u00a0uses the Translation Bureau’s catalogue of roughly eight billion\u00a0words.<\/p>\n
The Translation Bureau also plans to explore how AI can support translation into Indigenous languages, the news release said.<\/p>\n
GCtranslate\u00a0will be tested in six\u00a0federal departments\u00a0and agencies, with the ultimate aim of government-wide implementation.<\/p>\n
These government departments and agencies will pilot GCtranslate:<\/p>\n
Public Services and Procurement Canada. Privy Council Office. Department of Finance Canada. Canadian Heritage. Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada. Royal Canadian Mounted Police. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The federal government is piloting an artificial intelligence (AI) tool in six departments and agencies to help translate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":180970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-180969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}