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This is a common problem in healthcare settings. There are lots of options which cost a bit of dosh and I don't know how the library functions financially but some are cheaper than others.
There are international symbols (or sometimes photographs of things) which are easier to interpret than some obscure Albanian dialect terms and you can even make up fairly cheap flash cards yourself, when there might be assumed to be a limited range of things people come into libraries for. It's never going to be exact communication but it can bring about a much clearer understanding of what someone wants and explanation of what you can do for them.
You local council might well have a set up like ours where they supply posters with the same introductory /explanatory statements in a huge range of languages and once the foreign language speaker points to the one they understand (assuming that amount of literacy) you contact the interpreting service which fits. It can take time to get the correct interpreter though and if all someone wants is to have a simple question answered, both parties might get frustrated with the wait.
Some agencies will offer down-the-phone and reasonably instant translation but, again, they cost and you have to look at what's cost effective.
There are often pockets of people from particular ethnic groups in one locality or another, for obvious reasons, and some basic phrase books in those languages shouldn't be too great an expense.
If your library is affiliated to a larger, national, service, you might find they've already got other tools on the go which you can access more easily than struggling to reinvent the wheel in Cantonese yourself.
Another thing which comes in handy with us is that we can muster a fair number of people within our own team who can communicate, if not always fluently, in a variety of languages and I can remember an old Ukrainian guy who would talk in Ukrainian to the Polish guy in the next bed and the Pole would then speak translate to a bilingual nurse, who'd tell us what was up.
I once managed to communicate with a Russian chap, non English speaker who'd fallen down a cargo hold on a fishing boat and broken his back, by first translating into German which he then could understand a fair bit of. I can still remember how to say "I am going to put a tube up into your bladder" twenty years later.
&, apparently, vorrei fregare la natica means I am going to rub your buttocks in Italian. Probably not a phrase you could easily work into conversation over the library counter.
Good luck. It's a fine thing that you're trying to provide a service to these visitors when you might just take the Basil Fawlty route, as many do. & smiling translates well into any language. |
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