The Swiss National Telephone Interpreting Service has conducted a well-received pilot project demonstrating its ability to provide practical and helpful emergency interventions that are not limited to those in hospitals.

The service provides telephone language interpreters who are fluent in Arabic, Serbian and Italian and who are prepared to interpret into and from Switzerland’s three official languages – German, French and Italian – immediately at a moment’s notice.

It’s the middle of the night at a hospital and a midwife is trying to coach an expectant mother who’s in labor. “We already see the baby’s head. Now you have to push,” she urges. But her words fall on deaf ears: the Arabic-speaking mother doesn’t understand her. An urgent call is placed to the service.

“In the Arab culture it’s not customary for the father to be present at the birth,” according to Inaia Noureddine, a Swiss of Lebanese descent, who for the past year has worked for the interpretation service as an Arabic-to-German and German-to-Arabic interpreter. She added that for the young mother in the delivery room, it’s emotionally important to hear her own language, even if only on the telephone.

There are other emergency situations in which interpreters are called on for assistance – psychiatric clinics also make regular use of the service to communicate with distraught persons and prevent possible suicide attempts.

“We translate for emergency rooms, all kinds of hospitals, general practitioners, pharmacies, private clinics, prisons, communities, and fire and police departments,” says Sanja Lukic, head of the National Telephone Interpretation Service.

While the service only provides interpretations into and from Switzerland’s three official languages, the staff can contact interpreters around the clock for up to 12 languages: Albanian, Arabic, Italian, Kurdish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian-Croat-Bosnian, Somali, Spanish, Tamil, Tigrinya (Eritrea), and Turkish.