Comments on: Emergency service provision in linguistically diverse societies

By: Ingrid Piller

Ingrid Piller — Sat, 15 Mar 2014 06:00:50 +0000

A local newspaper in North Carolina has an interesting article about the provision of emergency services in Spanish: "How authorities respond when someone doesn't speak English"

By: Li Jia

Li Jia — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 04:03:21 +0000

In my life, I could hardly imagine when and where I would make an emergency call to the police. Unfortunately, I did dial 110 (Chinese emergency telephone number), but surprisingly, the bilingual service was delivered much more quickly and effective than the story described by Raymond even though China is not an immigration country. What I want to point is that it is definitely necessary to provide multilingual emergency services when linguistic diversity is already a fact outside.

By: Paul Desailly

Paul Desailly — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 20:39:24 +0000

Appropriately, Ingrid, your very last word references justice.
In its pursuit midway through your text I’ve found a crucial question:
“So, a way to provide effective multilingual services would be to hire multilingual telephone operators who can handle calls in the dominant language and one or more other languages.”
For the southern USA where Spanish is so strong bilingual operators would greatly help as an immediate improvement.
For people without English or Spanish in the USA and especially in Australia and other anglo countries where dozens of languages hold equal (or greater) sway with Spanish as a second language perhaps as a starting point our society should consider consulting on the principle of a universal auxiliary language