日本における自治体ウェブサイトの多言語化の現況と課題

抄録

This article examines the current situation and issues of the multilingualisation of Japanese local government websites based on the results of a comprehensive survey. To devise ways to improve the multilingual services of local governments, it is first crucial to gain an accurate and broad understanding of how and to what extent multilingual information is currently provided. The following items in all municipal websites of 47 prefectures and 1,741 basic municipalities in Japan were manually investigated:（i）languages supported by human translation or authoring,（ii）languages supported by machine translation（MT）, and（iii） types of adopted MT systems. The most significant findings include that（1）66.5% of basic municipalities rely only on MT and that（2）Southeast Asian languages such as Indonesian are particularly not supported from the viewpoint of the expected resident population of the speakers. A detailed examination of information types covered by English versions of 40 websites further revealed general tendencies regarding information provision.