Last week, the Government of Canada’s new “Language Portal of Canada” website popped up. It’s a site aimed at providing Canadians with “free access to the language tools that will enable them to use and understand both official languages more easily.”
What’s most interesting about this is that Termium Plus, the government’s gigantic translation dataset, is now freely accessible. Termium has long been a resource for public servants who couldn’t remember the official translations for program, agency or committee names, or who needed to know the other-language equivalents for technical terminology, or wanted to find out what obscure bureaucratic acronyms stood for.
How huge is this resource? Four million terms in English, French and, more recently, Spanish — that’s a gigantic pile of info. And it’s constantly being updated, with 50,000 modifications to the database annually.
Until last week, if you weren’t a GoC employee, you could only access Termium via an annual subscription that (if memory serves) was in the hundreds of dollars. This pretty much limited it’s use to professional translators and editors who could write it off as an expense. But now, anyone can get at it for free.
And if you’ve already paid your subscription for this year? You’ll get a refund:
Have you paid a subscription fee for TERMIUM Plus® this year?
If so, read this message.
If you paid to subscribe to TERMIUM Plus® and are eligible for a refund, you will receive a cheque in the mail by December 31, 2009. You do not need to contact the Translation Bureau: we know how to get in touch with you.
Thank you for your loyalty throughout the years.
So it’s great that such a huge government resource is now freely accessible to everyone. But why not take it further?
Here’s some ideas for future development:
- offer up access to the database in machine-readable form so that third party developers can build interesting and possibly useful things from the dataset.
- allow public contributions to the data set, so that it can be expanded and improved in an efficient way.
- loosen licensing restrictions to maximize how far and wide the data can be reproduced and re-used.
(h/t David Eaves, who’s three laws of open data provide a convenient framework for thinking about how to develop government databases like Termium.)
Aside: Termium records are presented in a rather highly evolved interface, with URLs that are full of parameters. I wonder if the records can be spidered or indexed by search enginges?
Finally, some more info on Termium from around the web:
- The press release, from October 8th.
- Blog post from technical writer Diane Harms, pointing out that this also means that The Canadian Style is now freely available in searchable form.
- Quickie story from ITBusiness.ca. Dunno about that $1.1B dollar figure, seems more than a tad high — I’ll bet that amount is for some larger pot of money out of which came the funding for this project.
- Item on Digg.com from earlier this morning.
long been a key resource for public servants who needed to know definitions and other-language equivalents for technical terms, wanted to find out what government acronyms stood for, and couldn’t remember the official translations for program, committee or organizational names.
About a year ago, I 
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We Still Haven’t Learned How to Use Social Media
8 October 2009 by Peter
During yesterday’s GTEC session on the Public Sector Social Workplace, I tweeted:
At the time, this sounded like a good tactic to keep in mind when selling social media adoption in the workplace. After all, not needing training means lower costs associated with the roll-out of social tools in the org.
But then I opened up the paper (yes the print kind – gasp!) this morning to the following headline: “27% blind to online legalities – Many Canadians don’t know they’re liable for comments: Poll.”
So, a good reminder — at least some of us haven’t really learned how to use social media after all.
I’d say that this is due to the mental models we bring to participating online. Often we approach it the same way as if we were having a face to face conversation. To wit:
But sometimes we use online mediation as a shield, thinking we can get away with being more outspoken online:
I’d wager that it’s a rare person who hasn’t tweeted something they never would have said out loud to another.
Bottom line: social media is not the same as face-to-face conversation. When you comment online, your words can have real-world consequences. People will still need to be reminded of this as the org goes social.
Getting back to the question of training: while it might be true in a strict sense that people won’t necessarily need training on how to use social media (with most social software, it’s blindingly obvious where you are supposed to click or type), it’s still pretty key to educate users on the norms and risks associated with participating online.
Posted in bureaucracy, government, social media | Tagged comments, legal liability, online commenting | 5 Comments »