Actual calls from one Saturday night with one Language Line Services interpreter.

Have you ever wondered what professional interpreters experience during a typical 8-hour shift? The variety of callers, situations and emotions they encounter?

We've asked one of our senior interpreters (who we'll call "Amelia" to protect her identity) to give us a peek at the callers she "met" during a recent Saturday night shift.

• A woman about to give birth on the emergency room floor. An officer trying to get a resistant driver to take a breathalyzer test. A man calling 911 for the phone number of a taxi company.
• A woman wanting to know if she qualified for low income assistance for her phone service. A woman in a doctor's office asking if her infection might mean the loss of her unborn child.
• A man in a hospital asking if they could give his hysterical wife something to calm her nerves. A nurse needing translation for questions on a routine hospital admissions form. A caller in a store wanting to know why her credit card purchase had not been approved.
• A man wanting to make a long-distance call to Japan to speak with his future bride's family. A woman reporting someone breaking into her car outside her apartment window just when she was calling 911.
• A 911 operator returning a call to a man who had hung up during the previous conversation. A narcotics officer giving instructions to an undercover agent about buying cocaine from a suspect. A man calling the phone company to ask the procedure for calling Mexico from Nevada on his cellular phone
• A man called by police and told that they had recovered his stolen car. A man wanting phone service connected to his new apartment. A woman calling to complain about her high electric bill. An airline customer service agent telling a passenger the departure time and gate of her flight.
• A woman calling 911 to report that three youths had burglarized her bedroom while she sat in the living room. An ambulance crew needing help to deliver a baby.

Thank you, Amelia, for sharing a part of your professional life with us.

If you have an interesting story about when you called one of our interpreters, share it with your fellow readers by writing to newsletter@languageline.com.

The Language LineŽ LanguageTrak provided the following data for the month of May

LanguageTrak delivers timely alerts on emerging language trends in your market areas... before your competitors learn of them.

This data reflects the languages most requested by emergency services, government agencies, health care facilities and businesses during the month of May 2008.

Quick Facts

• Only three states had more requests for Burmese in May than Indiana - New York, Texas and Colorado
• Kentucky had the third most requests for Armenian and Tagalog
• Somali was Kansas' and Kentucky's sixth most requested language in May
• Kansas' ninth most requested language was Laotian, from Laos in southeast Asia

Top Ten Foreign Languages Spoken In Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky

Indiana

1. Spanish
2. Burmese
3. Mandarin
4. Vietnamese
5. Arabic
6. Russian
7. Korean
8. French
9. Cantonese
10. Haitian-Creole

Kansas

1. Spanish
2. Russian
3. Mandarin
4. Vietnamese
5. Polish
6. Somali
7. Arabic
8. French
9. Laotian
10. Korean

Kentucky

1. Spanish
2. Russian
3. Cantonese
4. Vietnamese
5. Mandarin
6. Somali
7. Arabic
8. Korean
9. Tagalog
10. Swahili

For a list of May's top language requests for your home state, visit www.languageline.com/page/topten.

To learn more about Language LineŽ LanguageTrak click here or drop us a note at languagetrak@languageline.com .

If you're a Language Line Services Customer, first off --- Thank You!

And, secondly, have you visited our new website?

In particular, have you seen our revamped "Manage Your Account" page?

With a prominent link at the top right of all 200+ pages of our site, the "Manage Your Account" page is a one-stop center for you to request billing assistance, order more training, support materials, and our dual handset telephones, or any number of tasks.

Take a moment and visit our "Manage Your Account" page.

And, while you're at it, let us know how else we can make being our client even easier for you by writing to us at Newsletter@LanguageLine.com.

Thank you again for your business!

The topic of "language" is a popular one.

Many of our favorite and most memorable wordsmiths had something witty or wise to say about language.

In the early years of publishing "In Other Words" we included such famous and not so famous quotes in each issue.

Here are a few that our newsletter readers especially liked, and the authors attributed to them.

Enjoy... and thanks again for reading this issue of "In Other Words".

• "To have another language is to possess a second soul." - Charlemagne, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire

• "Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work." - Carl Sandburg, poet and author

• "A different language is a different vision of life." - Federico Fellini, Italian filmmaker

• "Language is the roadmap of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going." - Rita Mae Brown, author and social activist

• "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart." - Nelson Mandela, Nobel Peace Prize winner

• "Accent is the soul of a language; it gives the feeling and truth to it." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• "Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very young age, I discovered that some words got me in trouble and others got me out." - Katherine Dunn, American writer

• "Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms." - Penelope Lively, novelist and children's writer

• "Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain." - Lily Tomlin, U.S. humorist, writer and actress

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