The importance of e-governance in Japan has grown parallel with the need for municipalities to provide multilingual services and translation for newcomer immigrants. Few studies have examined the content of official translated online materials in the context of immigrants’ actual experiences using such materials. The present study seeks to discover how international residents of Setagaya Ward in Tokyo access and navigate the foreign language information on the ward’s official website, in particular looking at issues of comprehension of both human and machine-translated content. Results of a survey of self-selected respondents (n＝52) indicate that such content is viewed as important and useful by international residents, though difficulties in locating and comprehending needed information were common. Implications of these results for official translation policy are considered in the context of notions of domestic internationalization and multicultural coexistence
