Minutes for meetings between a Japan office and overseas teams or partners
Kaigi AI · · Japanese version
Write the minutes in the language of the people who will read them: in Kaigi AI that is one setting, the output language chosen when the recording is uploaded, so a Japanese meeting can produce English minutes for an overseas office and an English meeting can produce Japanese minutes for the team in Japan.
A weekly call with the regional office, a negotiation with a supplier abroad, a report to headquarters: when one side of the meeting is in Japan and the other is not, the first question is which language the record should be in. Whenever the meeting language and the readers’ language differ, someone ends up translating.
This guide sorts the common combinations and lists what to check before minutes leave the company. It is written for Japan offices of overseas companies and for Japanese teams that work with partners abroad.
Decide by who reads the minutes
| The meeting | Setting, and what you get |
|---|---|
| Held in Japanese, read by an overseas office or partner | Output language: English. English minutes and a line-by-line English translation. |
| Held in English, read by the team in Japan | Output language left unset (Japanese). Japanese minutes and a line-by-line Japanese translation. |
| Held in Japanese, read only in Japan | Output language left unset (Japanese). Japanese minutes. |
In every case the transcript in the language that was spoken stays available. When a translated line feels off, the original is one click away.
The minutes are written in one language per upload, the one you chose. If both sides need their own language, share the minutes in one language and point the other side to the line-by-line translation on screen.
Before minutes go to a partner
- Agreed terms, figures and dates. Check amounts, quantities and delivery dates against the original rather than the translation alone. Anything contractual belongs in a separate formal document, not only in the minutes.
- Soft Japanese phrasing. 検討します ("we will look into it") and 前向きに進めます ("we will move forward positively") can read like commitments in English. Make sure nothing undecided ended up under decisions.
- Internal remarks. Check that nothing said among your own team before or after the call made it into the recording.
- Custom templates. If you use a custom template, its headings are translated into English as well. If that translation does not go through, only the headings stay as written in your template; the minutes underneath are still in English.
Then export to Word or PDF and send.
Across time zones
With an overseas office, someone always misses the call. English minutes let them catch up in their own morning. Before you send, check that decisions and owners with dates sit near the top: the reader who was not there needs those first.
Worth knowing in advance
- Meetings where each side speaks its own language. If the conversation switches to another language partway through a recording, the part after the switch can be missing from the transcript. We recommend keeping each meeting to one language. For a call where the Japan side speaks Japanese and the other side English, agree on one language for the meeting.
- Meeting-bot recordings. Meetings recorded by the meeting bot get Japanese minutes. For English minutes, upload the recording instead.
- The app is in Japanese. When you sign up from this page, the sign-up page, the upload page and the result page are in English. The rest of the app (menus, settings, the login page), the error messages the server returns, the emails and the legal pages are in Japanese.
- Where the data is kept. Minutes and transcripts are stored in the AWS Tokyo region. Transcription runs on OpenAI and the translation on Anthropic (both in the US). The minutes are written by Anthropic as well, except on the 国産AI plan, where Sakana AI (Japan) writes them. The security page (in Japanese) has the details, and you can point a partner to it if they ask.
- Recording consent. Tell the other side at the start that the meeting is recorded and the minutes are made with AI, and record only with their agreement.
Related guides
Frequently asked questions
- Can a meeting held in Japanese produce English minutes for an overseas office?
- Yes. When you upload the recording, choose English as the output language. Each Japanese utterance is translated into English and the minutes are written in English.
- Can a meeting held in English produce Japanese minutes?
- Yes. Upload it without choosing an output language: the minutes are written in Japanese, with a Japanese translation of each English utterance.
- Can one meeting produce minutes in both English and Japanese?
- The minutes are written in the one language chosen at upload. The transcript in the language that was spoken stays on the same screen, and the translation tab shows the original and the translation side by side.
- What if the Japan side speaks Japanese and the other side speaks English?
- If the conversation switches to another language partway through a recording, the part after the switch can be missing from the transcript. We recommend keeping each meeting to one language.
Try it with one of your own recordings
The free plan needs no credit card. Sign-up, upload and the result page are in English; the rest of the app, server error messages, emails and the legal pages are in Japanese. The labels for the Japanese screens are on the English overview.
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