Post #3993801
2026-07-21 19:01 UTC
"Since he launched his campaign, Mark Carney’s position on the French language has been clear: it’s a nuisance. Even now, he continues to treat Canada’s official bilingual status as a problem to solve rather than a point of pride. And francophones across the country are paying the price.
Just this month, Carney arranged for one of his constituents – a consultant not registered to lobby the government – to meet with high-level officials and outline his plan to use artificial intelligence and technology to eliminate the bilingualism requirement across the government. His reasoning? AI is ready to handle all that pesky translation work, and we don’t need to invest a penny into making sure Canadians all have access to information of equal quality.
Is that really the case? Of course not.
Translators have been using AI for years and have incorporated it into their work. But it is far from a magic solution. To ensure consistent quality and accurate translations, human input is still absolutely essential. When we talk about doubling or tripling processing speed, what we are really talking about is lowering quality standards.
Even without this consultant in the mix, we were already seeing AI being put forward as a panacea. GCTraduction, the government’s internal tool, was rolled out across several departments as a solution to the “problem” of translation, but instead of helping translators do their jobs, it is replacing them."
https://www.acep-cape.ca/en/news/despite-carneys-efforts-canadas-bilingualism-not-problem-solve
Replies (1)
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@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange 2026-07-22 07:48
@stephanie@ottawa.place Machine translation is great for low-stakes work, where inaccurate translation is not a problem. So he is arguing that no text that the Canadian Government produces is of any importance. It might just be me, but that seems like a fairly urgent problem to fix.