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If it's such a great idea, the Canada and the employees can buy the shuttered auto plants and make them crown corporations. Everybody wants to buy a car or truck from "Government Motors". Nationalize the plants....like Cuba !

You mean like the cell phones that everyone already carries around almost everywhere?

Also, what happens when the machine breaks down in an emergency? Would we accept pilots and ships' captains relying on this technology with the possibility of the battery dying all of a sudden or the machine getting damaged due to rain or impact, etc. It would need to be a physically robust system too, which would just add to the cost.

But you leave out one point. Most human languages, and especially English, are too grammatically vague for the purpose. If I worked in the field of professional machine translation, I'd focus on translation from Lojban and expect professionals to learn that language. When precise translation is less important (i.e. where misunderstanding wouldn't risk a person's safety in anyway and at most could cause some inconveniences), then translation from ambiguous languages like English would suffice. Again, the problem is not with the tech (we have that already), it's with the language itself. English is not suited for cybernetic communication.

Even a human might need to ask the original speaker which he meant between different possibilities, though we could program a machine to do the same. Now if you want a machine that has the same interpretive capabilities as a human, you'd have to walk around everywhere with a GPS cap on your head with audio and video to record every aspect of your life so that when you refer to an inside joke you heard, or referring to the party you attended yesterday, etc. it could always know which you meant between different possible meanings. That would be an extremely expensive system. Also, I can't imagine government employees consenting to walking around with these things strapped to their heads daily and I can't imagine the taxpayer being willing to pay for it. If we want a world with efficient machine translation, we'd all need to learn Lojban, but that would defeat the whole point of machine translation, wouldn't it?

Immigration into a country like Canada is totally artificial and it wouldn't happen at all if it were not considered desireable by the people who govern Canada. Namely, Canada has no natural immigration which is about people from neighbouring countries immigrating. Canada has only one neighbour and the urge to immigrate from there to Canada is not that great. That certain neighbour not only has a long border with a country which has an average living-standards of 1/10 but that certain neighbour is the most wanted country in the world to immigrate into from all over the world.

That's true but that's the power of technology and computation. You only need one set of experts with the right linguistic and technical skills to solve the problem once. After that, the power of what they have created is available to everyone else, expert or not.

Real people also have to guess which of the possible meanings of a phrase is actually meant when speaking to each other in the same language. This guessing is based on the context. There is no reason that machine translation cannot, with further development, be able to use context as deeply as humans do to inform its understanding (and therefore translation) of phrase meanings. That's why I gave a time of 10 years in the future, not this year or next year, because there's still a ways to go until the algorithms exist to do deeply context-aware translation.

And even to produce the technology, we'll need people who possess the necessary linguistic and technical skills. Just like budgets don't balance themselves, technology doesn't just produce itself either.

The problem is not with the technology but with the language itself. For example, we already possess the necessary technology to create a program that could produce a reliable academic machine translation from Lojban to another language. The reason for this is that while Lojban is a human language, it is also designed as a cybernetic language, so grammatically hyperprecise to be precise enough to avoid ambiguities. Even that would not allow literary translations, but it certainly could produce reliable scholarly ones. English stands among the grammatically vaguest languages. English speakers rely more on context to understand the meaning, and even English speakers can misunderstand one another outside of the needed context. The technology today is already advanced enough to tell the machine that the phrase can mean different things. Then we need to choose how to program it. Most machine translators will make the machine choose the more common meaning by default. In other words, it's programmed to guess. I suppose we could create a system whereby the machine would interact with the English speaker to ask for clarification as to which of different possible meanings he means. That would greatly frustrate translation but certainly increase its reliability. If we're looking for speed and efficiency though, we can't have the machine asking us at every sentence which of different possible meanings we intend. For that, we'd probably all want to learn Lojban and machine-translate from that. The government could invest in producing a high-quality translation system from Lojban for the purpose. But then that raises another question. If English and French Canadians would all need to learn Lojban so that they could use machine-translators more efficiently, then why could they not just communicate directly in Lojban as a common language? And if they have to learn a common languge anyway, then given how the average person doesn't need such a grammatically precise language (except maybe for machine translation) and Esperanto is easier to learn than Lojban, then why not just have them all learn Esperanto instead, leaving more difficult cyber-languages like Lojban to the experts?

The solution to this problem, as to most social problems, is technology. In 10 years, automatic realtime translation will be seamless and extremely accurate. Once technology allows an anglophone who has never learned a word of French to interact as effectively with a francophone as another francophone, there will be no need for bilingualism requirements. Then it will just be a matter of governments changing policies to accept the new reality. They will be slow and resistant to do this, but sooner or later reality triumphs over politics.

Success rates in French immersion even in New Brunswick sit at around 10%. In core French, 1%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_bilingualism_in_Canada#Success_rates_in_second-language_instruction Both Quebec and Ontario can't find enough competent second-language teachers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_bilingualism_in_Canada#Access_to_adequate_teaching_resources In my like of work, I sometimes have to call businesses around the world. I know four languages (English, French, Chinese, and Esperanto), and occasionally face a language barrier when calling a hotel in Austria or a regional airline in Brazil for example. Having taken an interest in language policy, I'm reasonably well read on the subject. Research shows that on an hourly basis, all other factors being equal, an adult learns a second language faster than a child does since he can refer to his own linguistic knowledge for help. What some people ignore is that the hardest language to learn is your first language since you have no point of reference. The reason a child learns his first language seemingly easily is because firstly, he has no choice and secondly, he's totally immersed in it. When a family moves abroad, the child spends his day at school just learning his second language whereas the parent might be working in English for some multinational company in the day and then might just take a weekly course on weekends. That still doesn't change the fact that the father would be learning more quickly on an hourly basis, but his child would just be investing many more hours daily in learning the language. That's why experts in pedagogy recommend that for the sake of efficient use of a child's time, the child start to learn his second language at the age of 11 or so. Some recommend 10, some 12. One exception is Helmar Frank who makes distinctions between languages and suggests that a child could efficiently learn Esperanto quite efficiently starting at the age of eight and more difficult languages starting at the age of 10, after he has some grounding in his first language as a point of reference. If you read the statistics, even in Europe, only around half of Europeans know a second language, and it's not necessarily English, and it's often only at a conversational level. travel off of the beaten path, and most Europeans don't know English well at all. We need to distinguish between individual language knowledge and language policy. There's a reason for example that we don't encourage multilingualism in aeronautical and maritime radio communication. There's a reason why different organizations will adopt a common language of internal communication. I know four languages, but I use only one at a time according to my environment and circumstances. When we talk about language policy, the government can't take someone with a knowledge of fifty languages as an example for the rest. It has to look at statistics. Statistically, most fail to learn their second language well, and that has real-life consequences. I don't care that I know four languages. All I care about is that I share at least one common language with the person with whom I'm communicating. When I read police or CBSA reports or IRB hearing transcripts in broken English, that's not acceptable. When I witness colleagues in the same office in the Government of Canada struggling to communicate with one another, that's not acceptable. They might individually be multilingual, I don't know. But all I care about is how well they know their language of work. I work in the language industry, so I know what's actually happening. Again, you can't take one multingual person as the basis on which to base state language policy.

The Red Hen Restaurant follow-up: Red Hen Nightmare: Restaurant That Refused To Serve Sarah Sanders Is Torpedoing The Town’s Tourism Business https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2018/09/03/red-hen-nightmare-restaurant-that-refused-to-serve-sarah-sanders-is-torpedoing-t-n2515501

MP Grewal changed his mind.

Greg, Charles. Thanks. 1000x thanks. What did you guys do to solve this problem? ====== Make no mistake, this was not "fake news". This was foreign characters.

A mob of cretins attacks a buddhist because they don't understand that the 'swastika' on his t-shirt is not a Nazi emblem. Police have to intervene and hustle him aboard a bus to get him away. London's famous 'civility' is a thing of the past.

It's pure insanity: signing-off on this. But sanity isn't the question, apparently. Letting unchecked immigration from failed states into the West...at Western taxpayer's cost. Designed to make you poor. I do...and the UK can't leave even though the people voted to leave...

Exactly. I don't trust the U.N. one iota and all of those words are designed to appear benign but are not which is why most countries are now backing out of it.

Designed to make us strangers in our own homes.

Translation: trust us, we know what's good media and what's bad media...and be clear...we'll decide....oh...with all due respect to...(laughing)...freedom of speech. (laughing harder)

So, criticism of migration will become an extension of hate speech so will prosecuted as such. Though the pact is supposedly non-binding, it does establish the groundwork for an Orwellian type crusade to bind in stone, mass migration as a human right which would be legally, above any type of criticism. Sure they say it's not binding, but if it is as benign as the liberals would have us believe then why are so many countries refusing to sign on. I agree with the U.S. that argues such multinational agreements subverted the power of individual governments to control national borders. The U.N. Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner posted on its website a speech given Andrew Gilmour. The title of the speech alone shows they are not even trying to hide itheir agenda: “Words Matter: Role and Responsibility of the media in shaping public perceptions about migrants and refugees and promoting inclusive societies.” A primer on how to spread propaganda really.

This is the act of a traitor to his fellow countrymen. Right-up this POS PM's alley.

As seen on Youtube? Argus, wtf? ==== I may have noted/posted this idea before, even in this thread. The world changes: people can now use a telegraph to transmit a message across an ocean.