Ottawa's AI push must translate into savings

Globe and Mail

2 days ago

Widespread adoption of language-generating AI tools is expected to put many professions at risk. None are more exposed than the business of translation and interpretation.
That's according to a list published in July by Microsoft of the 40 occupations most threatened by the technology (#2 is historians, followed, soberingly for this space, by news analysts, reporters and journalists at #16). Telephone operators, ticket agents and mathematicians also make the list.
If you're a dredge operator, rest easy – your occupation will be the least affected. Orderlies and motorboat operators also have little to worry about.
The news should embolden efforts under way by the federal government to deploy AI at scale, as per orders from Prime Minister Mark Carney, and in turn create some obvious cost-cutting (read: bureaucracy downsizing) opportunities.
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Fittingly, the 1,350-person Translation Bureau is leading the way in the federal government in experimenting with AI. It is developing the first project under Ottawa's AI strategy meant to serve as a showpiece for what government can do with technology: a self-serve automated translation tool for civil servants.
If the government is serious, the bureau should set itself on a mission to all but put itself out of business, and to drastically cut the amount Ottawa spends on its services to fulfill its Official Languages Act obligations. If the translation profession is largely disappearing, so too should government spending and employment in the area, showing that AI could deliver meaningful cost savings and operating efficiencies. But it must not come at the expense of service quality or integrity to the public.
Public servants love to hate the Translation Bureau, which provides translation and interpretation services across government and to parliamentarians. It is expensive and can hold up government business as departments wait weeks or longer for translated documents. According to its parent department, Public Services and Procurement Canada, just 74 per cent of linguistic services requests were processed by the bureau within initial deadlines in fiscal 2022-23.
Many bureaucrats instead look outside. Spending on third-party translation services by government in fiscal 2023-24 ($237-million) exceeded the $132-million charged by the bureau to its government clients. The bureau itself outsources much of its volume.
Those costs don't include the time that bilingual staff at commissioning departments spend reviewing and correcting the work.
Increasingly, the clients have turned to free generative AI tools to do the translations themselves – or have even developed their own, according to transition materials prepared this year for incoming PSPC Minister Joël Lightbound.
That raises concerns about feeding Crown secrets into foreign data centres. It has also alarmed the Translation Bureau, which forecasts it will shed 339 of its 1,350 positions by 2030 due to declining demand. The bureau 'is completely rethinking its funding model and service offering now that AI is part of the equation,' the briefing book reads.
That is a good thing. Translators are no strangers to machines; they've been using computer tools for decades. But they have often warned that the programs are imperfect and nowhere near good enough to replace them. 'At times, a ChatGPT translation will make sense,' Joachim Lépine, co-founder of LION Translation Academy in Sherbrooke, Que. wrote in a LinkedIn post this month. But ''sometimes useful' is not good enough for high-stakes situations. Only humans have professional judgment. Period.'
However, new generative AI tools are rapidly improving in quality and are good enough to competently handle routine translations of mundane texts such as policy documents, press releases or memos. The more the programs learn from the language fed into them, the better they should become – although more critical documents such as laws and court rulings should continue to be handled by humans.
A centrepiece of the bureau's rethink is its AI project, a program called PSPC Translate, which draws from the government's data and language storehouse. It could serve as a bellwether for further government efficiencies and savings using AI. True success would be if the initiative translated into real savings and allowed government to slash the size of the bureau.