Language Line Services Now Tweeting in Five Languages

Language Line Services, the global leader in telephone interpreting and language solutions, serves clients in government, healthcare, telecommunications, financial services, utilities, insurance and many other industries. The company quickly connects clients to their customers, patients and sales prospects in more than 170 spoken languages as well as American Sign Language (ASL) and Mexican Sign Language (LSM).

 

The company recently announced that it is now tweeting in five of the top non-English languages spoken in the United States -- Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish.

 

“We hope that by tweeting in multiple languages we highlight the need for more pervasive language access in this country and make information about our services more accessible to anyone who has difficulties communicating in English,” said Louis F. Provenzano, Jr., president and chief executive officer of Language Line Services, which fields millions of interpreter-request calls each year. “We are a country of hundreds of languages -- and cultures -- and growing, and we need to be able to communicate with one another in emergencies, for government services and for commerce.”

 

More than 24 million legal U.S. residents speak a language other than English at home, or have trouble communicating clearly without resorting to their native tongues. U.S. Census estimates predict that by the year 2050 more than half of the U.S. population will be made up of minorities -- many of whom will have limited English proficiency.

 

Twitter has become a haven for multilingual communication, with 200 million users generating 200 million-plus tweets per day -- more than half of them in another language. As of last year, 60% of registered Twitter accounts were outside the U.S. The site currently supports a number of languages, including Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Hindi, Tagalog and Malay.

 

Provenzano noted, “By communicating through social media in various languages we can strengthen our brand within multicultural communities, recruit potential interpreters and even attract new business. The power of ‘in-language’ social media should not be underestimated or overlooked.”

 

Language Line Services created the over-the-phone interpreting industry almost 30 years ago.