Iqaluit (Oct 20/03) - The cost and the extent of translation and interpretation services being charged to the Nunavut government in Inuktitut, Inuinnaqtun and French is not being tracked.

There is no way of finding out what each department's budget is for translations, or how much work they actually get translated and interpreted each year.

"We're not tracking things like how many pages they're doing or what percentage of the work is being contracted out," said Chris Douglas, director of the language bureau.

"We're just trying to get the job done."

According to Douglas, it's "really difficult to get a handle on what government is actually spending on translations."

"The bureau does a piece of it," said Douglas. "But I couldn't even tell you what percentage of the government's total translation work it is doing."

"It would be nice to have that information. We're working towards collecting that. Our challenge has been to get the bureau operating up to full capacity."

The bureau's job is to provide service to all government departments. It employs four interpreter-translators for Inuktitut, three for Inuinnaqtun and one for French.

When there is an overload, the work is contracted out by departments. The Justice department has it's own interpreting-translating team.

Eva Aariak, the Nunavut's language commissioner, said it would be "quite helpful," if the government had better documentation on interpreting-translating.

"It is an important component to keep a good record of the numbers," Aariak said, but the department has been short-staffed for five years.

"They said they are trying to make it so that the numbers are being monitored. But they don't have the mechanism to do that," Aariak said.

The translations required by each department are "enormous," she said, and departments should be keeping track of them, even if they are being contracted out.

Keeping a good record of what is being done goes hand in hand with quality control, Aariak added.