March 31, 2020 Announcement of Global Communication Plan 2025

The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) has formulated the Global Communication Plan 2025 in order to promote the further sophistication of multilingual translation technologies, such as the realization of concurrent interpretation by AI in 2025.

1. Overview

In 2014, MIC formulated the Global Communication Plan (^*1) with the objective of eliminating global language barriers, and initiatives were begun for research and development and social implementation of multilingual translation technologies of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) for 2020.
As a result of these efforts, NICT's multilingual translation technologies have seen improvements in translation accuracy and the widening of supported languages, have allowed various translation services to be applied and disseminated, and they have been used in a range of sectors, such as government administration, medical care, transportation and tourism.
Looking towards 2025, MIC expects rapid growth in multilingual translation technologies in order to strengthen business capabilities in handling discussions and negotiations in person at business and international conferences, to realize (^*2) an inclusive society with people from other countries against the background of the tourism strategy and policies to accept human resources from other countries being promoted by the entire government, and to improve Japan’s presence at the Expo 2025 (Osaka, Kansai).
For this reason, with consideration for the results of studies by the Global Communication Development Promotion Council (^*3) and the Department on Information and Communications Technology (^*4) under the Information and Communications Council, MIC formulated the Global Communication Plan 2025 which outlines policies on new missions, visions, objectives and actions that need to be tackled in cooperation between industry, academia and government, this is in order to promote research and development for the further sophistication of multilingual translation technologies, such as the realization of concurrent interpretation by AI in 2025, and its social implementation.

• (^*1)
  Global Communication Plan (April, 2014. MIC)
  https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_content/000285578.pdf
• (^*2)

  The number of visitors from abroad to Japan (annually) was approximately 31.88 million in 2019, and the number of foreign residents was approximately 2.93 million as of December 31, 2019. In recent years, both of them have been increasing. In particular, in regards to foreign residents, it is expected that there will be increased interaction with people from other countries throughout Japan, including rural areas, this is against the background of the revision of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act (enacted in April 2019) pertaining to establishing residency requirements in order to accept new human resources from abroad under Comprehensive Measures for Acceptance and Coexistence of Foreign Human Resources (December, 2018. Revised December, 2019).

• (^*3)
  Chairman: Osamu Sudo (Professor, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, University of Tokyo). The Global Communication Plan is a joint council to promote the All Japan system through industry-academia-government collaboration, it is mainly comprised of private companies, universities, and local governments. Studies for this plan were conducted by the Research and Development Subcommittee, the Practical Application Promotion Subcommittee, and the Next Global Communication Plan Study WG.
• (^*4)
  Chairman: Shojiro Nishio (President of Osaka University). Studies for this plan was conducted by the Department on Information and Communications Technology, the Information Technology Strategy Committee, and the Priority Field WG.

2. How to obtain further reference information

Reference information can be viewed, and copies handed out, at the Research and Development Office, Technology Policy Division, Global Strategy Bureau, MIC (9th floor of Central Government Building No. 2).