New Legislative Season, New Features

The leaves are starting to turn, the weather is begining to cool, and legislatures across the country are slowly returning from the summer recess.

With the exception of Quebec's newly-elected MLA's, as well as the handful of byelection winners, most members will be diving right back into the fire. Between the potentially-contentious bills left over from the spring session, upcoming budgets, and a whole host of emerging issues (cost-of-living, inflation, and global security, to name a few), there will be plenty for our officials to sink their teeth into.

Here at PoliTraQ HQ, we've been hard at work on a number of new tools and features to help you stay on-top of it all. I'm excited to announce three new tools and features:

1) English/French Translation (Powered by Localize.js)

Since the start of PoliTraQ, we've aspired to offer a solution that the entire Canadian Government Relations community could use. By implementing site-wide, real-time translation, PoliTraQ is one step closer to meeting this aim.

Localize is a cloud-based Translation Management System (TMS) that allows users to translate dynamic websites, apps and more using workflow tools that help streamline localization workflows.

Using state-of-the-art machine learning, Localize is able to seamlessly replace translated text (either human-translated or machine-translated) in the browser, while capturing new strings for translation.

Further, PoliTraQ has expanded collection of French language content. Where available, Hansard transcripts, committee notices, order papers, and other governmental publications will be offered in both English and French. Users will soon have the ability to specify language preferences as well, allowing national teams to work in the language of their choice.

While the translation service is high-quality, like anything else in life, it is far from perfect. If you come across an incorrect or contextually-flawed translation, please don't hesitate to reach out to us for a correction.

2) Provincial Hansard Keyword Tracking

Last year, we introduced Hansard keyword tracking for the House of Commons. This fall, we'll be rolling out addional jurisdictions - starting with Ontario and British Columbia, available now.

3) CanGov411 and the Delphic Research partnership

In the relaunch of this blog, we highlighted a new partnership with Toronto-based Government Relations intelligence firm, Delphic Research. Earlier this month, Delphic released its first mobile app, CanGov411 - putting contact info for more than 250,000 government officials at your fingertips.

CanGov411 currently includes contacts for the Federal, Ontario, and British Columbia government directories, with more jurisdictions coming online in the coming weeks.

We'll have more to say about CanGov411 shortly... Suffice to say, we have a feeling PoliTraQ Users will be very pleased!