自治体の多言語相談体制と政府の「外国人施策」

抄録

Promoting “consultation systems for foreign nationals” is one of the key initiatives in the Japanese government’s effort to create “a better environment for foreign nationals”. This paper examines how local governments have operated multilingual consultation services in light of recent developments in the central government’s “measures on foreign nationals”. It draws on the cases of the cities of Isesaki and Ota, focusing on their hiring of foreign residents with proficiency in relevant languages and the scope of their tasks, as well as the use of remote interpreting and speech machine translation systems. Some variance is found between the central government’s approach and the practices of the two cities, especially in how language issues are addressed. With the central government’s greater emphasis on foreign residents’ ability to understand Japanese and the use of AI-based translation, this paper argues for continued human involvement and clearer guidelines in providing multilingual consultation services.@