Do you have plans in visiting Japan but afraid to communicate and interact with the locals because of the language barrier? It’s the right time to get rid of that fear. Japanese phone technology successfully created translation apps for your convenience.
There are a lot of translation tools that became available that can be used not only by foreigners visiting Japan but to all people who are interacting with other nationalities in their work and even in their daily activities. According to the article posted in Live Japan, the three best website-based translation tools are Excite Translator, Google Translate, and Bing Translate.
Aside from the website-based tools, there are also camera translation apps. Some of the best visual tools that use a camera app are Google Translate Camera mode and Microsoft Translator. All you have to do is open the application, take a snapshot of the sign and trace area of the text that you want to translate or you can also just choose the real-time mode wherein you have to align your camera to the text and then it will be automatically be translated.
One great example of the camera translation app is the “Payke”. It is a mobile shopping assistant for foreign visitors. Masaru Ikeda, an author in Bridge website wrote “Founded in Naha, Okinawa in November of 2014, Payke launched the mobile app a year later. Designed for foreign visitors shopping in Japan, it can display product information in 7 languages (English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese) by simply scanning the barcode of what they want to check. Foreign visitors to Japan make up more than 95% of the app’s users, and it has been downloaded approximately 700,000 times (as of August 2018). Summed up with third party services using Payke’s multilingual product database via API, the company’s platform is now being used by 3.4 million people in 132 countries (as of September 2018).”
Moreover, a voice recognition function that allows converting word into text has also become available nowadays as well as a speech synthesis function that converts the text back into audible speech and sends this sound signal to a speaker. These technologies are currently progressing globally.
Business owners who plans to market their businesses internationally often let digital experts to translate their Japanese website into English. This is one of the most common reasons why they need people or agencies like Shourai.It is an Information Technology consultancy who can fulfill their needs.
References:
https://livejapan.com/en/in-tokyo/in-pref-tokyo/in-tokyo_train_station/article-a0003251/
