ICANN announces alliance for collaboration on Japanese translation

ICANN has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Japan Network Information Center (JPNIC) and Japan Registry Services Company (JPRS) to foster more collaboration on translation.

Under the agreement, ICANN, JPNIC and JPRS will coordinate and collaborate to address the linguistic needs of the Japanese community by identifying and translating ICANN materials into Japanese. This increased coordination calls for greater communication with regard to the translation efforts undertaken by each party, avoids duplication of resources, and ensures that relevant content is accessible to the local community.

“I am confident that this collaboration will be a good model that shows how ICANN and the local community can come together to help address the language needs of markets where English is not the main language medium. This is an important topic that we need to address as we move forward with ICANN’s globalisation efforts,” said Fadi Chehadé, ICANN President and Chief Executive Officer.

The MoU was formalised and signed at ICANN’s 53rd Public Meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina (see picture above). JPNIC representative Akinori Maemura (on behalf of JPNIC President, Shigeki Goto) and JPRS representative Hirofumi Hotta (on behalf of JPRS President Koki Higashida) were present at the signing ceremony together with Fadi Chehadé and other staff members of ICANN, JPNIC and JPRS.

“Since ICANN was incorporated, JPNIC has been closely keeping track of ICANN's activities and disseminating ICANN information to the Japanese community. The recently-established Asia Pacific Hub has helped to bring us to a new stage of collaboration, and I am delighted to enter into this MoU, which concretises one of our on-going cooperations," said Shigeki Goto, President of JPNIC.

Kuek Yu-Chuang, Vice President and Managing Director for ICANN Asia Pacific said that the region’s diversity called for ICANN to work even more closely with their stakeholders to achieve common goals.

“Both JPNIC and JPRS are already doing a great job translating and sharing some ICANN materials, for example in their ICANN Readout sessions. With this MoU, we can better coordinate our resources to cover translation work more efficiently, so as to deliver ICANN materials to the Japanese community according to their needs,” he said.

“We also hope that this will pave the way for more communities to come forward to work with us. Together, we can help to overcome the language barrier and ensure that this is not an impediment to participation in ICANN and our policy development process,” he added.

Christina Rodriguez, Director of ICANN Language Services Department, agreed. “This is a timely development and ties in very well with the department’s recently refined approach in partnering with the community on ICANN’s translation work. Such collaboration helps us to better reach audiences beyond those using the official ICANN languages* and provides a new avenue for community partnership.”

*The six official UN languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish, plus Portuguese

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