‘Garbage Let’s Take Away’: Producing Understandable and Translatable Government Documents: A Case Study from Japan

Abstract

Government departments increasingly communicate information to citizens digitally via web sites, and, in many societies, the linguistic diversity of these citizens is also growing. In Japan, a largely monolingual society, municipal governments now routinely address the necessity of providing practical and legal information to residents with limited Japanese by machine-translating their public service web sites into selected languages. Cost constraints often mean the translation is left un-edited and, as a result, may be unclear, misleading or even incomprehensible. While machine translation from Japanese is particularly challenging because of its structural uniqueness, the state of the art in the field generally is such that poor output is a universal problem. The solution we propose draws on recent advances in controlled authoring, document structuring and machine translation evaluation. It is realised as a prototype tool that enables non-professional writers to create documents where individual sentences and overall flow are both clear. The tool is designed to enhance machine-translatability into English without compromising the readability of the Japanese original. The originality of the tool is to provide an interactive sentence checker that is context-sensitive to the individual functional elements of a document template specialised for the public administration domain. Where natural Japanese sentences give bad translation results, we pre-process them internally into a form which yields acceptable machine translation output. Evaluation of the tool will target three concerns: its usability by non-professional authors; the acceptability of the Japanese document; and the comprehensibility of the English translation. We suggest that such an authoring framework could facilitate government communication with citizens in many societies beyond Japan.