School Newsletter Translation Support for Multicultural Families: Focused on the Cases of Korea and Japan

Abstract

This paper concerns the status of translation support for children attending elementary school in Korea who experience difficulties as members of multicultural married immigrant families and compares that support against the example of Japan where multicultural policies are far more advanced than in Korea. Both Korea and Japan provide support for multicultural families, but in the case of Japan, the amount of information provided is small according to the format of the examples. In the case of Korea, there is no unified system, the disadvantage of which is that support is extended sporadically by local governments and departments of the central government. To provide an alternative, first, we must build an integrated system like that of Japan but make the contents of the examples meaningful, and second, we must develop practically usable programs and applications. In the second case, the multilingual translation provision services jointly developed by the Korean Language Processing Laboratory of the University of Ulsan and Busan University of Foreign Studies could be utilized. In order to validate the practicality of the language translation services, 10 married women were surveyed on their level of understanding by having them translate sentences from a school newsletter through the language translation services and Google Translate, thereby proving that the language translation services performed better than Google Translate. In addition, by comparing the high frequency vocabularies that appeared in the school newsletter and those entered or required by the survey participants, the need was uncovered for additional translations and corrections for 15% of the top 100 high frequency vocabularies in the school newsletter.