A multilingual website offering earthquake and tsunami information was launched on March 17 in Japan.

The site at http://equinfojp.net was designed in ten languages – Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Thai.

The site, established by the Tohoku Area Pacific Offshore Earthquake multi-language support centre, which was set up by the NPO (Non-Profit Organisation) based in Otsu, Shiga prefecture in western Japan aims to provide updated multilingual information on the earthquake and tsunami as well as gather information about foreign residents in the disaster area.

At present, the centre uses some 15 volunteers to post all sorts of information – from everyday tips to ways to respond to nuclear disasters.

Apart from the site, the centre also established hot lines in the four languages of English, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish and plans to expand the number of languages./.