The Ministry of Transportation and Communications is rolling out multilingual signage across the nation’s transport hubs in three phases to make travel more tourist-friendly, with signs featuring Mandarin, English, Japanese and Korean.
Updates have already been made around Taipei Main Station, including the railway, high-speed rail and airport metro line, with plans to gradually expand the program nationwide, it said.
The ministry said that the second phase, to be completed by the end of this year, would cover 27 locations, including eight Taiwan Railways stations such as Nangang Station, 12 high-speed rail stations, airports and ports such as Kaohsiung and Taichung airports, Kaohsiung Port Travel Center and Gushan Ferry Terminal.
Photo: Wu Liang-yi, Taipei Times
The third phase would allow individual agencies to submit locations themselves, it said, adding that so far, Taiwan Railway Corp has proposed seven sites and the Civil Aeronautics Administration has proposed two.
For the MRT, taking Taipei Metro as an example, it said, stations with higher tourist traffic, such as Zhongshan and Taipei City Hall, already feature multilingual signage and train announcements made in multiple languages, including Japanese.
On the Kaohsiung MRT, popular transfer stations such as Formosa Boulevard and Kaohsiung Station have Japanese announcements, while other stations continue to use Chinese and English signage, it said.
The number of tourists from Japan and South Korea visiting Taiwan has risen over the past few years. Last year, Japanese visitors ranged from about 80,000 to more than 170,000 per month, while South Korean visitors averaged 40,000 to 120,000 per month, occasionally even surpassing the number of Japanese tourists in a single month.
The ministry’s Department of Public Transportation and Supervision Director-General Hu Ti-chi (胡迪琦) said yesterday that Taiwan’s top sources of tourists include Japan, the US and South Korea.
English is already an international language, but with the growing number of South Korean visitors — one of Taiwan’s main sources of international tourists — Korean has been added to multilingual signage at these transport hubs, he said.
The transport operators are responsible for updating station signs, while the ministry would monitor and supervise the process, he said.
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