Tourists from Japan and South Korea can now read street signs and hear street broadcasts in their own languages when visiting Jioufen (九份) in Taipei County, the Tourism Bureau said yesterday.
Jioufen is a small town set among beautiful hills in northern Taiwan with many Japanese-style houses. Famous for its hand-made taro balls, the town became a tourist attraction after Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) used it as a location for his film City of Sadness.
The measure is part of the Tourism Bureau’s plan to create an environment friendly to both Japanese and South Korean tourists. Previously the town only had tourist information in Chinese and English. The change will make Jioufen the first town in the nation to have tourist information available in four different languages.
The bureau is also using Jioufen as a model to encourage others to follow suit.
To ensure the accuracy of the translation, the bureau recruited the faculty at the Chinese Culture University to do the translation.
The bureau released regulations in February promising to subsidize hotels, travel service providers and business owners near tourist attractions to a maximum of NT$300,000 as an incentive to help them produce pamphlets, films, signboards and street broadcasts in foreign languages.
A report released by the Ministry of Transportations and Communications (MOTC) earlier this month showed that approximately 1.53 million overseas tourists came to Taiwan between January and June of this year.
About 550,000 were from Japan, and 302,000 came from Hong Kong and Macau.
The report also showed only 150,000 came from South Korea during this period, but the number of visitors has already increased 32.7 percent compared to the same period last year.
The bureau also spent heavily on tourism marketing in these two countries. Not only has it invited popular boy bands such as F4 and Fahrenheit to help promote travel in Taiwan, it has spent millions buying ad time on television networks in the two countries.
Tourism Bureau Director General Janice Lai (賴瑟珍) said a majority of overseas tourists come from countries near Taiwan.
While tourists from Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia can read Chinese and English in general, tourists from Japan and South Korea may need translation when traveling in Taiwan, she said.
“We are trying to create a friendly and homey environment for our guests,” she said.
Rou Young-seop (盧永燮), a South Korean businessman working in Taiwan, said he was aware of the change when he visited Jioufen, but he still saw some grammatical mistakes.
Nevertheless, Rou said that the translation is better than nothing.
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