Gunma eyes cellphone-based translation for people helping foreigners

MAEBASHI, Japan, Dec. 16 Kyodo -
The Gunma prefectural government plans to launch a cellphone-based translation
program in fiscal 2009 to help teachers and officials in local municipalities
communicate properly with the growing number of foreign residents in the
prefecture, prefectural officials said Tuesday.

The envisaged program would be the first such service in Japan to be organized
by a local government, though some nonprofit organizations already provide
similar services, according to Gunma Prefecture and other local governments
that host large communities of foreign residents, especially Brazilians of
Japanese descent.
The prefecture, where many manufacturing plants are located, has seen an
upsurge of foreign residents over recent decades and has faced problems such as
misunderstandings between officials and teachers, and foreign residents with
limited Japanese language skills.
Under the envisioned program, a teacher or government official having
difficulty conversing with a foreign resident would be able to call a
designated center run by a NPO based in the city of Maebashi, and the center
would select one of its registered volunteer translators to translate the
conversation.
Teachers and government officials will not be charged for the service.
The prefectural government plans to recruit a total of 60 translators for six
different languages including Portuguese and Chinese, and to enlist more
translators later.
The cellphone-based program, which is expected to save time and costs for
translators, will start in January on a trial basis.
''It seems that there are some translators who would be willing to help if they
can do it while staying at home,'' a prefectural government official said. ''We
will examine the challenges facing this program during a trial period and will
consider the possibility of cooperating with other prefectures in the future.''
Angelo Ishi, a Japanese-Brazilian associate professor at Tokyo's Musashi
University, said, ''In the long term, the program will need staff who can
exclusively work on this program instead of volunteers.''
''It would also be ideal (for the prefecture) to train bilingual teachers at
school and for the teachers to be able to cope with foreign children without
any translators,'' he added.
A total of around 47,000 foreign residents lived in Gunma Prefecture as of
December 2007.
==Kyodo