If somebody is in a foreign country, where they don’t speak the language and they call the emergency number, how do they communicate their emergency? Is there a special phone line for different languages?
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I don’t know about other countries but in the UK the emergency phone line (999) process has a mechanism to deal with non English speakers.
Basically the calls with non-English speakers get dealt with through an interpretation service that allows for a three-way call between the person with the emergency; the emergency services and the interpreter (who acts as the go between).
I’d imagine the process works much the same way in many other countries or at the very least multi-lingual staff are sought out for the role of call-handler.
Anecdotally in my younger days i had a role in a call-centre for an insurance company and we had a database of staff who could indicate their language proficiency and willingness to field calls, then if calls came in and needed an interpreter to help deal with the call we would look up the language in the DB and have a list of staff to contact to deal with the call (basically an in-business version of the slightly more fancy interpretation service i mentioned 999 uses)
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