ABSTRACT
Rapid advances in translation technologies, such as machine translation (MT), have promoted the multilingualisation of digital text. End users themselves can take advantage of online MT services to obtain information communicated in languages that they cannot understand. In most small municipalities, resources are so scarce that they cannot even provide English translations. Under such circumstances, municipalities typically rely on MT tools, or else the residents themselves rely on MT, such as Google Translate, to grasp the meaning of texts. In such circumstances, having recourse to free, online and thus readily available MT may seem an attractive option. However, while the quality of MT output is reasonable for many language pairs in many practical situations, MT systems does not always produce satisfactory results. From the perspective of MT technologies, MT systems dealing with Japanese as source language or target language are state-of-the-art level. This chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
