Toyota to Strengthen its Global, Internal SNS-based Communications

 

Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC), aiming to encourage greater and more fluid communication between Japanese employees based in Japan and non-Japanese employees at overseas affiliates, will add a translation service to its global, internal social networking service (SNS) on July 10.

The new translation service, SNS Translation Center(1), will be added to Toyota Chatter(2), which was launched in January this year. The service will initially be run on a trial basis through to the end of July, before full-scale operations begin in August.

The SNS Translation Center will feature drastically improved accuracy over normal machine translations, due to added real-time translation assistance by operators. In addition, the center's vocabulary database includes a wealth of Toyota-specific terms and phrases to help improve accuracy.

Operators will be on hand to rectify the machine translation when necessary. Meanwhile, the translation software learns terms and phrases corrected by operators, ensuring that the machine translation becomes more accurate the more it is used. The service will be offered round-the-clock to Toyota employees registered on Toyota Chatter.

With sales and marketing personnel at the forefront, some 8,400 employees worldwide (including 3,200 in North America and 1,700 in Europe) have registered to use Toyota Chatter, increasing the need for seamless and speedy translation services.

TMC believes that the translation service will enhance communication among Toyota employees around the world, leading to quicker decision-making and information-sharing. It is envisioned that this enhanced communication will ultimately help to make products and services best suited to consumers.

Going forward, TMC plans to increase the number of languages serviced by the Center and to extend the service beyond the scope of SNS.

(1) Developed and operated by Toyota Media Service Corporation, a TMC IT subsidiary.

(2) An in-house global SNS platform designed to allow prompt information sharing among sales and marketing personnel that is based on a platform created by salesforce.com, inc., which entered into a strategic alliance with Toyota in May 2011.

Source: Market Watch