Multilingual information for foreign residents in Japan: a survey of government initiatives
Abstract
In Japan, translation of important information for foreign residents into community languages has occurred for many years mainly at the local government level rather than the national, largely because the national government has been slow to acknowledge Japan’s increasing diversity given the enduring national belief in ethnolinguistic homogeneity. In recent years, however, this has begun to change: although the bulk of the translation activity for foreign residents still occurs at grassroots level through the agency of local government and private organizations, the national government has begun to view such residents as seikatsusha ‘people making their lives in Japan’ rather than as visitors passing through. This article examines the provision of translated multilingual information to newcomer foreign residents in Japanese communities by both local and national government in order to examine this change.
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Articles in the same Issue
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Building a field: translation policies and minority languages
- Translation policy and indigenous languages in Hispanic Latin America
- Official bilingualism meets de facto multilingualism: public service interpreting for the Chinese in Catalonia
- Translation as a sub-set of public and social policy and a consequence of multiculturalism: the provision of translation and interpreting services in Australia
- The dialect(ic)s of control and resistance: intralingual audiovisual translation in Chinese TV drama
- La nécessité des traductions. Translating legislation in a young parliamentary regime. The case of Belgium (1830–1895)
- Multilingual information for foreign residents in Japan: a survey of government initiatives
- Language, translation and interpreting policies in prisons: Protecting the rights of speakers of non-official languages
- Book Review
- Gabriel González Núñez: Translating in linguistically diverse societies. Translation policy in the United Kingdom
- Small Languages and Small Language Communities 84
- Transition as a focus within language maintenance research: Wellington Iraqi refugees as an example
