Supporting Documentation: Percentage of translation and interpretation services that comply with established quality standards

Linguistic service categories

The Translation Bureau offers three categories of linguistic services.

Translation services:

This category relates predominately to translation, revision and editing services as applied to written content. The Translation Bureau offers these services to the Parliament of Canada, as well as federal departments and agencies, in the following languages:

Both official languages (English and French)
Indigenous languages
Foreign languages

The Translation Bureau can also assess the quality of texts that have been previously translated, revised, or written in either English or French, using recognized criteria that ensure the fairness and objectivity of that assessment.

Data related to the quality of this category of linguistic service can be found in this dataset, in records where the value in the Service-ENG column equals "Translation services" and the value in the Service-FRA column equals "Services de traduction".

Interpretative services:

Interpretative services refer to linguistic services which relate to spoken or visual input. The Translation Bureau offers interpretative services to the Parliament of Canada, and to federal departments and agencies in:

Both official languages (English and French)
Indigenous languages
Foreign languages
American Sign Language (ASL)
Langue des signes Québécoise (LSQ)

Data related to the quality of this category of linguistic service can be found in this dataset, in records where the value in the Service-ENG column equals "Interpretation" and the value in the Service-FRA column equals "Interprétation".

Terminology services:

Translation Bureau terminologists provide a variety of services and advice to the Government of Canada, including:

Conducting terminological research to provide clients with an equivalent for a specialized term in the other official language
Making terminological recommendations on issues requiring in-depth terminology analysis
Creating customized glossaries: preparing or updating specialized glossaries in electronic format
Participating in terminology committees to support the standardization of terminology relevant to a given department or agency
Delivering other terminology projects developed in consultation with clients

Terminologists also produce a variety of quality terminology tools and resources that are available free of charge to Canadians, including:

TERMIUM Plus® (termiumplus.gc.ca) is one of the largest terminology and linguistic data banks in the world, giving access to millions of terms in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. You can find terms, abbreviations, definitions and usage examples in a wide range of specialized fields. The data bank is an essential tool for understanding an acronym, checking an official title, finding an equivalent in another language, and much more.
Other publicly available Glossaries and vocabularies

Data related to the quality of this category of linguistic service can be found in the Percentage of terminology services that comply with established quality standards dataset.

CSV file restructuring

As of the release of the 2021/2022 data, the structure of the CSV file has been updated. The original CSV file has been retained, but is has been labelled as archived and will no longer be updated.

A summary of the changes applied to the new CSV file can be found here:

The Language_Langue-ENG and Language_Langue-FRA fields have been renamed to Source-language_Langue-source-ENG and Source-language_Langue-source-FRA respectively.
The Source-ENG and Source-FRA fields have been renamed to Service-provider_Provenance-du-service-ENG and Service-provider_Provenance-du-service-FRA respectively. The values for these fields can be either:
- "Internal" | "Interne", meaning the service was delivered by the language professionals at the Translation Bureau
- "External" | "Externe", meaning the service was delivered by a non-governmental service provider via a contract with the Translation Bureau (3rd-party_3eme-partie)
- "On-Site" | "Détachés", meaning the service was delivered by a Translation Bureau professional tasked to provide dedicated support to a given client
- "Parliamentary services" | "Services parlementaire", meaning the service was provided by the language professionals within the sector of the Translation Bureau dedicated to serving the Parliament of Canada.
  Note: the provision of Parliamentary services can be further broken out across the following service delivery teams: "Parliamentary committee services", "Parliamentary debates", and "Parliamentary documents".
The Document-length_Longueur-de-document-ENG and Document-length_Longueur-de-document-FRA fields (which differentiated between Long and Short document lengths for language services) has been removed as this differentiation is no longer tracked. Records that were only differentiated by these values have been combined together in the new version of the data file.
Linguistic services that were previously labelled as Parliamentary (under the old Service-ENG column) or Parlementaire (under the old Service-FRA column) were rolled into the main "Translation services" service category and, as mentioned above, the values in the Service-provider_Provenance-du-service-ENG and Service-provider_Provenance-du-service-FRA columns can now be referenced to differentiate this sub-category of service.

Departmental Reporting Results (DRR) Calculation

The "Percentage of linguistic services that comply with established quality standards" indicator as reported in PSPC's annual DRR publication combines the percentage of time the Translation Bureau meets their established quality standards in the delivery of the above-mentioned linguistic services. The percentage of time each of the three categories of service achieved their intended quality standard is calculated independently, and then these three quality assessment values are averaged to derive the overall value for all linguistic services delivered in that fiscal year.

Note: Due to the level of effort required to gather and interpret the data used to perform these calculations, this DRR indicator is reported 18 months in arrears. As such, the value reported against the "Percentage of linguistic services that comply with established quality standards" indicator in the 2022 to 2023 Departmental Results Report were based on data from the 2021/2022 fiscal year (as reported in this dataset and the corresponding Percentage of terminology services that comply with established quality standards dataset).

Translation service quality assessment

To calculate the quality of the Translation services delivered in a given fiscal year, filter for the relevant fiscal year in the Fiscal-Year-Année-Fiscale column and for "Translation services" in the Service-ENG column. Total the values in the Excellent and Good_Bon columns and divide that amount by the total of all values across the Excellent, Good_Bon, Average_Moyen, and Low_Faible columns. Multiply this value by 100 to create a percentage. This value represents the percentage of assessed Translation services that comply with the desired quality standards.

Interpretation service quality assessment

To calculate the quality of the Interpretive services delivered in a given fiscal year, filter for the relevant fiscal year in the Fiscal-Year-Année-Fiscale column and for "Interpretation" in the Service-ENG column. Total the values in the Excellent and Good_Bon columns and divide that amount by the total of all values across the Excellent, Good_Bon, Average_Moyen, and Low_Faible columns. Multiply this value by 100 to create a percentage. This value represents the percentage of assessed Interpretation services that comply with the desired quality standards.

Terminology service quality assessment

The details on how to complete the quality assessment for Terminology services can be found in the supporting documentation for the corresponding dataset.

2021/2022 data

Results related to interpretation services were not included for this fiscal year. These statistics could not be assessed that year due to resource constraints. The corresponding performance indicator value reported in the DRR 2023 publication was calculated using only the values related to the terminology services and translation services.

2019/2020 data

Due to COVID-19, the evaluations for this indicator were delayed

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