To International residents in Sapporo area:
Do your Japanese language skills stop you from going to see a doctor? Don’t worry! Help is at hand!
We specialize in helping the foreign community meet with doctors using English. Please spread the word! Let your friends and colleagues know about us. If you need our help or would like to join us, send us a message using the contact form below or e-mail us. We will get back to you as soon as possible.
What we do:
– Interpret for the foreign community at a doctor’s clinic or at a hospital.
– Organize in-house medical English seminars
– Interpret for the elderly or new mothers at their homes or at other health care institutions
– Organize seminars for volunteer medical interpreters (jointly hosted by the Sapporo International Communication Plaza Foundation)
– Organize workshops for the improvement of interpreting skills
What we do not accept:
– If a client assaults, uses abusive language towards, or otherwise harasses one of SEMI’s members or anyone else, that client will no longer be able to make use of SEMI’s services.
How can you help us get better prepared?
When you send a request for an interpreter by email, please describe the disease in detail, such as symptoms, medical history and your hospital name.
After we receive your request for an interpreter, we will check to see who is available for assignment. The assigned interpreter (or the contact person) will then send an email back to you. After we obtain the required information from you, we will then decide the location, date, and time to meet with our assigned interpreter.
We appreciate when you give us information regarding your medical condition, so that we can be better prepared.
We appreciate that urgent appointments may arise, however we ask that you send your request around a week (at the latest, at least a few days) in advance of your appointment. If you’ve sent a request and three days before your appointment you still haven’t heard from your assigned interpreter, please send us a reminder email.
All comments are welcome!
Your confidentiality is guaranteed.
E-mail: SEMIsapporo (at) gmail.com
Contact person: Megumi Terao
Volunteer opportunities at NPO SEMI Sapporo:
If you are a native English speaker living anywhere on earth and are willing to help us with proof-reading as a volunteer, your help would be greatly appreciated.
We need to translate various materials given to patients by hospitals or health centers. These handouts are, in most cases, written in Japanese only. To clarify, our main activity is medical interpreting. However, we occasionally need to translate documents in our role as interpreters, since most of the documents provided by hospitals, the Sapporo city webpage, and most hospital webpages are written in Japanese.
Request for client donations
As our interpreters’ services are free of charge, we ask all our clients to support our services through donations. Donations are used to cover the costs that our interpreters incur, such as transportation, so even a small amount goes a long way. Our clients’ generosity is what allows us to continue to provide free Japanese-English and English-Japanese translation and interpretation services.
If you are able to contribute, please feel free to do so in the way that is most convenient to you: by providing it directly to your interpreter on the day of service, by way of cash, or by way of bank transfer to SEMI Sapporo. We greatly appreciate all donations, and would like to thank you in advance for your understanding.
– Please give us your correct email address, or you will not receive our reply. If you haven’t received our reply in 1 to 3 days, please re-send your email. Also please understand that there are times when the volume of requests prevents our coordinators from immediately responding.
