Mitsui & Co. Invests In Translation Startup, PIJIN / Nikkei

Mitsui & Co. partners with PIJIN to launch a service allowing foreign visitors to get tourist information with their own language using a smartphone. When reading QR code on billboards or magazines, explanations in own language are automatically displayed. It will be available on over 10 languages including English and Chinese. It aims to sell the service to retailers and tourist facilities with increasing tourists.

Mitsui also takes more than a dozen percent of shares of the startup with about 30 million yen. ...
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Nikkei 8/13/2014 [jp]

memo

• Foreign tourists to Japan are increasing recently particularly from Asia. There are competitors' apps translating texts directly with machine translation, which seem easier than QR code. But still the accuracy of machine translation is not good enough. Similar services would be increasing heading for Tokyo Olympics in 2020. 
• https://www.qrtranslator.com/en