The federal government is piloting an artificial intelligence (AI) tool in six departments and agencies to help translate official languages for the public service.
On Monday, Minister of Government Transformation, Public Works and Procurement Joël Lightbound announced CGtranslate as the “first flagship project of the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy.”
The technology was developed by the Translation Bureau at Public Services and Procurement Canada. No start date was given for the pilot.
Prime Minister Mark Carney and his government have been trying to integrate AI in hopes of boosting the public service’s productivity.
A previous version of the tool was tested in June and translated more than 60 million words in three months, or about 3,000 pages of translated content per workday, according to a news release.
“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. “This is about putting technology to work for Canadians so services are delivered faster, smarter and in both official languages.”
But the head of one major public service union argued full automation of the government’s translation service is “a very bad idea” when it comes to protecting Canada’s officials languages, especially French.
“I think this is going to have a negative impact directly on francophone communities,” said Nathan Prier, president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees. “[AI] loses a lot of the nuance of the language. A francophone reading an AI translation knows they’re reading an AI translation.”
He said the project is chiefly driven by cost-cutting, and said its implementation has been problematic.
“A lot of that has happened in a very chaotic, very unsupervised way, sacrificing the quality of French in the meantime,” he said. “It’s French that pays the price.”
Prier said the technology is best employed alongside human translators — not as a replacement for them.
“These are people with like decades of experience in translation who know how to integrate these things without sacrificing quality,” Prier said. “They’re the foundation of bilingualism in Canada. They should be at the front line of this conversation, instead of hearing about the plans after the fact.”
According to the government, GCtranslate was evaluated by professional translators and uses the Translation Bureau’s catalogue of roughly eight billion words.
The Translation Bureau also plans to explore how AI can support translation into Indigenous languages, the news release said.
GCtranslate will be tested in six federal departments and agencies, with the ultimate aim of government-wide implementation.
These government departments and agencies will pilot GCtranslate:
