An emergency call for an ambulance could easily result in an unnecessary tragedy if the caller doesn’t speak Japanese fluently.
It’s a possibility the city of Kyoto has faced many times, officials there said.
“In the past, we have experienced great difficulty pinpointing the location of foreign callers because of the language barrier,” said Miki Watanabe, a spokeswoman for the city’s fire department, whose command center operators receive emergency calls.
To counter this potentially life-threatening problem, on Oct. 1 the fire department introduced a multilingual translation system to handle emergency 119 calls for ambulances. |
