Increasing Inbound Demand in Naha City

Direct flights from Naha airport to both capitals in Asia and regional big cities such as Xian in China and Taegu in Korea is increasing. Recently, due to direct flights from Bangkok and the call of cruise ships from Europe and USA, the number of foreigners in Okinawa has been increasing every year. As for them, Institute of Naha City Tourist Association is the first tourist office in Okinawa. In recent years, we focus on the promotion of tourism in Naha city and its surroundings, conducting various activities such as the management and occupation of the homepage “Naha Navi”, large-scale event projects, various tourist acceptance seminars. As the Okinawa attracts the attention around the world, the need for multilingualization becomes high.

Inconvenience we felt on Machine Translation

Until last year we translated our homepage “Naha Navi” using Google Translator, but since the translation result of the machine cannot be manually advised, there were often some issues of mistranslation. We considered whether these issues could be solved if reconstruct our homepage.”, said by Takaori Higa, who is in charge of Chinese translation work.

Translation Accuracy & Work Efficiency is Significant

When searching for a service that matches “Be able to modify the translation result” and “Machine learns modified sentences and automatically reflects on the next translation result”, Mr. Higa found YarakuZen that has the function of phrase registration. He said that since the mistranslation on the homepage could be a complaint from tourists, he also emphasized translation accuracy.

“We have the employees who master English, Chinese and Korean. Therefore, we did not outsource the translation, but it is hard to handle a huge amount of translation manually for each person. Then I got interested in YarakuZen that can customize the translation result by people as well as machine translation. You can register a bilingual sentence as a phrase and the phrase automatically reflects on the translation result. We realized that it was a convenient tool as it was not necessary to re-translate the translated texts once, so we decided to introduce YarakuZen. “

Mr. Higa himself is bilingual, so he acknowledges the difficulty of translating tremendous works. In this kind of situation, he utilizes the YarakuZen as a support tool for the translation work.

35 Languages Support

“In addition to the fact that Yaraku Zen has improved the efficiency of Chinese translation work by 30%, it is also conducive to the correspondence to 35 languages. The number of tourists in Okinawa continues to increase every year and we never know languages they use, so the more languages we support, the more tourists we can handle with. We want foreign visitors to feel more welcome by creating and setting up POP etc. in their mother language.”