The Mie Prefectural Government has been operating Japan's first 24-hour multilingual telephone interpretation service for public counseling centers dealing with child care issues since last year, allowing for more inquiries to be handled more efficiently.
The service allows for response times that are 20 times faster than when using dispatched interpreters, greatly reducing the centers' labor needs. As a result, the number of cases handled by such centers almost doubled to 147 last fiscal year from 77 in fiscal 2015.
The service, provided by Tokyo-based interpreting company Bricks Corp. and introduced in November 2018, allows interpreters to listen to calls in real-time.