Update 10th March 2020

 LanguageLine’s services – the services with which it supports you and the people that you in turn support every day, have been purposely designed with the very highest levels of business continuity built-in.

The service’s technological infrastructure is cloud-based, includes multiple redundancy/failover features and is not operationally dependent upon any single technological or physical point of operation.  The interpreters and call agents that underpin the service operate on a work-at-home model and are intentionally, geographically dispersed.  Our management and administration functions are already designed to operate equally efficiently within a home-based environment.

LanguageLine has established, robust and tested business continuity plans that are regularly reviewed and updated as a matter of course in the light of any threats identified, even if not yet current.  This includes scenarios relating to global and local weather extremes, terrorism and general security risk incidents.  It also includes regional epidemics or more widespread pandemics which may themselves result in a desire, a sensible preference or even government advice or instructions to minimise human movement.

Our industry-leading remote interpreting services – both telephone and video, in themselves, enable the uninterrupted delivery of interpreting support, including the maintenance of visual interpreter contact, even in situations of restricted human travel – when it makes absolute sense to restrict the number of people present at any given scenario.  Within our industry, this currently includes potential restrictions around the movement of interpreters and the subsequent impact upon the delivery of face-to-face interpreting services.

All of these measures are designed to mitigate the possible effects of a public health incident, such as COVID-19, and mean that professional interpreting can continue to be delivered without increasing the general risk of a situation.

At a local level also, we have taken various steps in light of the current incident to ensure that risk remains as low as possible and have the back-up and support of our parent and sister companies across the globe as part of that plan.

These steps include:

  • Enhanced sanitation procedures and sign-posting throughout our office and common areas
  • Enabling and testing increased work-from-home capabilities for management and administrative staff
  • Monitoring staff health and well-being, and issuing specific guidelines, support and instructions
  • Deploying communications proactively and on request to staff, our supply chain and customers
  • Readiness to use more global resource should local resource become challenged
  • Preparedness to assist any customers under specific threat to employ solutions which enhance and/or enable the utilisation of remote interpreting services and reduce the risk of further cross contamination

As a company, we have been closely monitoring and assessing risk in relation to the Coronavirus outbreak and, as yet, there has been no impact on our staff and business operations.  However, it remains our longstanding commitment to analyse, plan, review and test our resiliency and to further revise our plans as situations develop. 

Prompt, calm and efficient response to unplanned incidents is part of our DNA and our staff and suppliers fully support and are engaged in this approach.  We will continue, as ever, to go the extra mile in supporting customers who find themselves under pressure at this time.

LanguageLine Solutions