Many of Japan's local governments are concerned about a shortage of volunteer interpreters and translators to support foreign residents and tourists during times of disaster, having made limited progress in addressing the issue highlighted by natural disasters in recent years, a survey showed Sunday.
Disasters including massive floods triggered by typhoons last year have exposed a difficulty in having enough language professionals to assist non-Japanese speakers as the country promotes inbound tourism to boost the economy and draws more foreign workers to alleviate the labor shortage.
(Photo taken Feb. 28, 2020 shows Duong Hong Phong, a Vietnamese studying in Japan, showing an emergency mail he received when a major typhoon hit eastern Japan in October 2019.)
In the Kyodo News survey of all 47 prefectures, 70 percent of them said they are short of registered volunteer linguists to provide safety, relief services and other important information in different languages.
Of the 47 prefectural governments, 32 said they expect to see a shortage of Vietnamese interpreters and translators. Japan has seen a sharp rise in Vietnamese residents in recent years due to an increase in technical intern trainees from the Southeast Asian country.
The number of Vietnamese living in Japan stood at about 370,000 as of June 2019, rising over fourfold in five years largely due to more Japanese companies entering the fast-growing Vietnamese market and resulting in increased interest in Japan among young people.
Government-affiliated foundations, which work with prefectures to promote international relations at local levels, make volunteering arrangements with people who speak foreign languages. Around 8,000 foreign language volunteers are registered with the foundations across the country to offer their disaster relief services to prefectural governments.
In Chiba Prefecture east of Tokyo, for instance, 635 people have registered to offer English interpretation or translation and 116 for assistance in Chinese, but there are only seven Vietnamese-speaking and two Nepali-speaking volunteers.
Local governments are generally in need of more Tagalog and Indonesian interpreters and translators, the survey also showed.
Minoru Naito, associate professor of global studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies' graduate school, said prefectures need arrangements to mutually dispatch volunteers and provide interpretation though an online video system given the limited number of foreign language speakers available for disaster relief.
Local governments will be better prepared if training programs are provided for such volunteers so that they can help foreigners with legal, medical and public service matters, he said.