Kirk here. Over the time that I (with lots of help from others) have been trying to feed relevant and (hopefully) useful information to this page, I have come to notice that English information is often presented on the web with no links to the Japanese information it is based on. Discussion of that issue here eventually led me to write a letter to Mayor Onishi that, to the mayor’s credit, resulted in a significant improvement in machine translation on the Kumamoto City website: users can now toggle directly between foreign-language translations and the original Japanese.
The mayor fixed the issue on the Kumamoto City site (see URL at the end of this post), but the vast majority of municipal / governmental websites in Japan continue to present poor-quality machine translations with no clear way of accessing the original Japanese text. That led me to write an academic paper (in Japanese) that came out in December of last year:
https://cir.nii.ac.jp/crid/1520013485571215616
The motivation for the article and a significant portion of the discussion relates directly to this Facebook page so I would like to share a pdf here but staff at my university tell me that the pdf won’t be published on the web until June. I’ll post about that when the time comes.
At any rate, the main idea of the article is “Why the %*@# do so many people in Japan assume that foreigners ONLY need information in foreign languages?” In other words, why is it assumed that foreign residents have no need for information in Japanese, even when the quality of the translation is clearly poor? I gave a paper copy of the article to Mr. Yagi of the International Center and he was kind enough to arrange an opportunity for me for me to present the contents of my paper to the staff at the International Center. Mr. Yagi has asked me to address some issues that go slightly beyond what I wrote in the paper I so I decided to make up a short little Google form questionnaire to get some feedback from readers of this page. Here are the URLs of the form and of the post I made about it yesterday.
https://forms.gle/qbrEMjKfV6A6mDH29
I’ve already gotten 13 responses. Thanks!!! I hope more of you will share your perspectives so that I can share them with the folks at the International Center and then with readers of this page. Yoroshiku!!