This post is a bit less about Shinto and a bit more about what I do for Jinja Honchō and more generally for the Shinto community. As readers probably know, most of what I do is the preparation of English material to introduce Shinto to a foreign audience. (I occasionally work as an interpreter for people at Jinja Honchō, but that is minor in terms of time spent — although it pays well.)
Since the beginning, I have been emphasising that simply translating the Japanese material for a Japanese audience into English is not enough. A foreign audience does not have the cultural background necessary to understand a lot of what is said. Sometimes, this discussion has resulted in jinja rewriting their Japanese material as well, because they have realised that contemporary Japanese would also not understand a lot of the references. Even then, the English version needs further revision. In many cases, when working for Jinja Honchō, there is no Japanese version to start with, although one of my colleagues normally prepares a Japanese translation of the English for the benefit of priests who cannot read English. That approach only works, however, when I can discuss things throughout the process, and so it is not normally possible for jinja.
Recently, this policy has, I think, become even more important. Machine translation, even between Japanese and English, is really quite good now. If you want an English (or other language) translation of a jinja’s webpage, you can get one. However, if you just translate the Japanese, there will still be a lot you do not understand, as discussed above.
That is where a proper English version is important. It avoids assuming Japanese cultural knowledge, and is adapted to a foreign audience. For example, at a jinja I worked with recently, the Japanese page about shichigosan was mainly about how to book it for your child. The English page is about the ceremony and its significance, because very few people who want the English version will live in the area around the jinja and want to have a shichigosan performed — and those who do need access to someone who speaks Japanese to talk to the priests in any case.
At this point, the existence of machine translation becomes a real boon. If you have accessible English pages, then the machine translation of those pages into French is very likely to be accessible to French speakers as well. There is a good chance that it will also work for Chinese speakers, or Quechua speakers, because most of the time I am not assuming that someone is from a Western background — just that they are not from a Japanese background. That isn’t going to be perfect, but the lack of overlap between Western culture and Shinto culture means that it is likely to be pretty good. I generally cannot rely on Western assumptions, so I have to explain from the basics, which means that cultures with more similarities to Shinto should be able to spot those similarities from my explanations.
Of course, this may be over-optimistic. Western cultural assumptions may be more pervasive than I think. Even in that case, the English translation should work for the West in general, which is still a fairly broad reach.
In other words, I think jinja and other Shinto organisations do need a proper foreign language translation of their material. However, most of them only need one language — they can rely on machine translation for the rest. The biggest cultural jump is to “not Japanese”, and once that is done, the content should work for almost everyone. This is a substantial benefit of the development of machine translation, because there is no way that most jinja, even the relatively wealthy ones, could afford to translate their websites into multiple languages.