Kirk here. Today I’m feeling quite happy to be a resident of Kumamoto City – a community with a municipal government that really listens!
The screenshot of Kumamoto City’s web site you see shows how machine translated pages currently appear. Machine translation is nothing new on the website but the ability to move quickly and easily between a machine translation and the Japanese original is (note the “Japanese” link under the other languages).
Here’s the address of the City’s page:
Try it for yourself. The machine translations are still rather funky but now, if something seems to be important to you, you can easily find the original Japanese and, if you can’t read it yourself, show that to someone who can help you figure out the details.
This is something I requested about a year and a half ago. Here’s a link to the copy of a letter (in Japanese) that I submitted to the mayor:
https://www2.kumagaku.ac.jp/teacher/~masden/2021/Kumamoto/提案書.pdf
I got the idea to write this letter from discussion we had on this page:
https://www.facebook.com/Kumamotoi/posts/2840263016047112
That discussion was prompted by a post from Atsuko. Thanks Atsuko!! I’m SO glad I invited you to edit / post to the page.
My next target is Kumamoto Prefecture. They use the same machine translation service but, as was the case with Kumamoto City’s page in the past, there’s no obvious way to move between translations and the original pages – just a warning that the translations may be wrong.
So, to sum up, although I do a fair amount of griping and carping on this page, here’s at least one example of my complaining leading to something positive. :)