Say sombody who speaks some rare language lands in a country and Customs or whoever wants to interview them, but they have no one who speaks their language- what do they do?
If they think it necessary, they often have interpreters on call for languages not commonly used.
Since I speak two very obscure languages (less than 5,000 people in the world speak either of them) I am listed with the custom service (among other governmental agencies and institutions) should they run into just such a problem.
I have been called once. I was put on speaker phone, and it turned out it was not the language. They thanked me and hung up. About a month later I got a check for $24.
Sometimes, they taser him to death.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2007/11/14/bc-taservideo.html
The emergency services, Customs & Excise and the NHS in the UK use Language Line (www.languageline.co.uk), they have translators available for 170 languages. You phone up and then provide down-the-phone translations.
Cool- what languages?
Woleaian and Ulithian from islands of the Western Pacific (some would argue they are dialects of the same language, but so few people speak them it’s not a very big argument).