I know, but equality among diverse linguistic groups, so that they would now insist not just we translate into Philippines or French, but also to Hakka, and Hoklo, and other Han ethnic groups in Taiwan. They’re language too.

There are mayors who still look up to Singapore to say that this is the destination where we’re going to. After Sunflower Movement, 2014, I think the general populace just said, "You know, it’s better to have equality first."

At some point, the previous administration wanted to be.

I think the machine translation’s pretty good now, seriously. We’re not Hong Kong or Singapore, that’s for sure.

For business, we do a lot of business with the French office in Taiwan, and by necessity, we use English for a lot of documents, but they always prefer if we have French versions and so on. This is a political, it’s not a technical issue. We’ll do what we ...

For science and technology, of course.

English is one way of doing this, but in our southbound strategy, many of our trading partners actually prefer their local language over English for many of trade related things. We do have to take that into consideration also.

We also solve that for Philippines, Tagalog, and the other southbound languages. The whole idea is to make the government websites multilingual so that no matter which language you are, you see it in your native language.

...we also solve that for...

The thing is that if we solve this through AI...

I know.

Sure. Of course, we’ll still need humans to proofread it, in which case you are to proofread it for your own use. [laughs]

No, it’s the first pass. It saves repetitive work.

Like, I don’t know, 24 hours depending on how fast the AI works.

We’re partnering with some private sector people to do that. That will be one of my priorities this year, is to automate the hell out of those manual stuff. I am working on that.

The whole idea is of course you have to have professional proofreaders who are preferably native speakers, instead of just Taiwanese people who learn English. The professional proofreader is one thing. It’s another thing to have a good enough translation AI that could magically make all the websites.

Yeah, it’s about three percent different. We’re working on that, but it’s getting really close. That’s because of a few breakthroughs that happened just a couple of months ago. We’re getting on that.

I think it will need a lot of machine learning AI work. I do believe in getting better AI translators as a professional translator myself.

If you go Chinese first, what I’m saying is that machine translation is at a point where you can get OK English, it just don’t feel as good. We’ll continue making our website as planned and then see if other agencies start to catch up.

We’re pretty unusual in that. For many other governmental websites, as you said, it’s like that.

...really, really good, especially for the Chinese‑English pair, so that we can get away with this.

Machine translation is actually getting...

In our own website, PDIS.tw, we have a English website. We don’t have anything else. This is our team’s website. It’s completely in English. For the Chinese‑speaking people, we have Google Translate to translate it to Chinese, and leave it at that.

I’m aware of that.

No, it’s a pleasure.

I’m doing the same thing, whether as a digital minister or not. I’ll probably still do open government work and stuff, but whatever title, I don’t really care.

I don’t know.

If they do approve it, we do hope to get this done in the next four years, which is about my term, anyway. If we don’t get this special budget, then we have to work with regular budgets, eight years at least, to do more or less the same thing. ...

I think automatic translation would probably work pretty well for things like these, in any case. The digital part is just one part of it. There’s five parts in this special budget plan. We just sent it out to the legislation last week.

Thank you, yes.

It’s a four‑year plan for the digital part, but the total plan is 880 billions NT dollars. It’s some amount of money. You can locate the whole plan ‑‑ at infrastructure.ey.gov.tw. There’s this huge amount of pages and PDF files, but it’s in Chinese.

It’s good. We’re proposing a special budget plan just for furthering that because our regular budget is multiyear. They don’t really contain sufficient funds for working toward that direction.

Yeah.

That’s the idea, including remote islands.

In theory, we can get all the people in all counties everywhere to use VR to study IoT, to study all kinds of hands‑on curriculum, and then become empowered. We’re doing that as well. That is much more welcome than an economic zone part of...

Which part of the ASVDA plan aims to have this virtual academy and a very fast Internet connectivity, which by the way, Taiwan is in the top spot too, in the world for those last‑mile broadband readiness.

On the issue of left and right, I don’t really have a position.

No, it’s a left/right decision. In any case, I’m not taking sides for socialist or capitalists. I’m anarchist, by the way. My political agenda is just to get the civil society and the private sector to do as much work that currently the public sector is doing as possible, until ...

The digital elite, basically.

In salaries, social housing, everything. They don’t want something that would enable just one percent of the young populace who has the good English.

Why, though? Because the young people here, they want a free economic zone that could at the same time solve the inequality problem. That is to say social enterprise oriented.

The previous administration tried that idea. It got shut down by the general populace, so no.

You mean a free economic zone?

The thing is that Berlin is Berlin. Everywhere around Berlin, the counties and so on, they’re not moving as fast as Berlin. What we’re seeing is the first tier of super‑connected super‑cities that are, as you said, moving very fast, and also free economic zones. The one in, for example, ...

Yeah, but you mention cities. Taiwan’s not really a city.

Depending on which curve you’re looking at.

No, it’s fine. It’s all like that.

In my activities?

In what?

I’m sure that they already have a telephone line or an email. Of course, you’re free to CC me or whatever. The other issue is, of course, we will have a public transcript. After you confirm with them, you can have a URL of your discussion with me, and then ...