Japan is facing a massive influx of tourists, so to facilitate exchanges with foreigners, a company is developing technology that allows instant translation, in a dozen languages, which is displayed on a window.
Japan now welcomes three million foreign visitors a month. And that creates some confusion with a population that has a very low level of foreign language. To try to make exchanges easier, a Japanese company is now installing instant translation windows. We are starting to see this new technology in Tokyo’s main stations. It is about transparent windows 40 centimeters high by 60 centimeters wide. They are placed in front of the counters where you buy your train ticket or bus card.
On each side of the window there are small microphones and two tablets where you can choose your language. You arrive, you press “French” and you start speaking in French to the ticket seller on the other side of the road. And what you say comes alive in white letters on the window, sort of like comic bubbles. It is in French on your side and in Japanese on the employee’s side. He reads your question and answers you in the same way. He speaks Japanese and the answer appears in white letters in French. It is extremely fluid and the translation is often very accurate.
This allows direct visual exchange between people. You are not bent over your phone waiting for an answer. The company that developed this solution is called Toppan, which explains that it offers an almost perfect translation, since the system was developed directly in Japanese. This is the difference with other translation systems that are often built on an English basis.
That is, if you request translation from French to Japanese from a free app on your phone, most systems will translate Japanese to English, then English to French, so there are more errors. There, the translation window was developed to directly understand 12 languages (English, French, Chinese, Korean and even Thai).
And there is a big demand for these windows in Japan, because some cities in the country are a bit overwhelmed by tourists. The number of visitors increased 2.5 times in less than ten years. The Japanese currency, the yen, collapsed against other currencies and thus Japan became an affordable destination for foreigners. And this mass arrival is somewhat destabilizing for employees in the service sector who are not comfortable with foreign languages. The level of English tends to decline in Japan. In the list of non-English speaking countries that speak English best, Japan fell to 87th place out of 113 countries. For comparison, France is 43rd in this ranking.