Understanding 役に立つ


<http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/k10011229751000/k10011229751000.html>

The sentence containing the 役に立つ in question: お年寄りや体に障害がある人の **介護などの役に立つ**
新しい機械の展示会が **東京ビッグサイト** で始まりました。

First, my attempt at translation: "On a Tokyo-big-website(???) the exhibition
of a new machine, which is useful for nursing the elderly and physically
impeded, has begun."

First, I don't really know what to make of this 東京ビッグサイト. It is not the focus
of this question, but unfortunately I couldn't make much sense of it (is this
really just a "websiteexhibition"???) and therefore its translation is really
botched...

So now, let's turn to the thing that really matters: 役に立つ. At first, when I
looked at 介護などの役に立つ I wondered about the の connecting the "verb" 役に立つ and the
nominal phrase. Then I thought about the fact that 役に立つ, although usually just
translated as some kind of special copula "being useful", is actually a phrase
consisting of the noun 役 and the verb 立つ. So, if I literally translated this
part in isolation 介護などの役に立つ the result would be => "it stands in service of
elderly care".

Does 役に立つ work that way? If it did, it would make perfect sense to me because
A it expresses the meaning „being of use“ and B it would perfectly suit the
usual function of の to make the preceding noun the attributing of the
following noun.




You'd really want to look at this form of parsing instead. I'm grabbing the
entirety of the noun phrase so that you can make sense of the parsing:

> 介護などの役に立つ新しい機械の展示会

介護 = nursing, caregiving, or, elderly care  
など = "or other", "et cetera"  
役に立つ = to be useful  
新しい = new  
機械 = machine  
展示会 = exhibition  

So here, we're talking about "the exhibition of new machines useful for care-
giving and other (related) uses," right?

I might translate the entirety of the sentence to say:

> お年寄りや体に障害がある人の介護などの役に立つ新しい機械の展示会が東京ビッグサイトで始まりました。  
>  The exhibition of new machines useful for care-giving etc. of the elderly
> and disabled individuals has begun at Tokyo Big Sight.

...and with a little leisure:

> The exhibition of new technology designed for aiding in elderly and
> handicapped care-giving has begun at the Tokyo Big Sight exhibition center.

