Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: das@cs.ucla.edu (David Smallberg) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: AT&T Operator Handling of International DA Message-ID: <1898@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 6 Dec 89 02:55:10 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Reply-To: David Smallberg Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department Lines: 27 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 9, Issue 557, message 1 of 11 In article klg@dukeac.UUCP (Kim Greer) writes: >>>speaks. Do any operators speak a second language? No! > Operators are not language junkies; they are >(educationally) ordinary people for the most part. >Which ones would you like them to speak: English, French, Spanish, >German, Dutch, Portuguese, Chinese (lots of dialects), Japanese, >Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, Urdu, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Farsi, >Russian (lots of variants), Italian, Turkish, Gaelic, Tamil, [lots of >Papua-New Guinea variants], Greek, Arabic, Swahili, ... ? Maybe it's just the U.S. that's backward, then. A Japanese acquaintance of mine was an operator for KDD (Japan's international phone company), and she spoke Japanese and English well, plus enough Mandarin, Korean, and French to handle most telephone requests. She said most other KDD operators could handle phone transactions in four or five major languages. The last time I used an international operator in the U.S., I asked her as an aside what languages she spoke other than English. She said none. As Yakov Smirnov would say, "What a country!" David Smallberg, das@cs.ucla.edu, ...!{uunet,ucbvax,rutgers}!cs.ucla.edu!das