Special Notice to Non-English Speaking Consumers and Families
Some of the families and individuals the Department of Developmental Services (DDS) serves speak little or no English. To address the needs of these families DDS has contracted with Language Line Services to provide over the phone interpretation for our consumers and their families to bridge the communication gap.
Consumers and families with little or no English speaking skills may call DDS to connect with a staff member, and quickly be connected to a two-way conversation with an interpreter. Please contact the DDS staff member you work with to learn more about this service.
As the leader in over the phone interpretation, Language Line supplies its customers with over 170 languages and dialects from Arabic to Vietnamese. This service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. In over-the-phone interpretation, Language Line Services interpreters listen to the non- English speaking consumers and their families, analyze the message, and accurately convey its original meaning to staff and vice versa.
Language Line has a history of high customer satisfaction. Alice Ridgeway, Program Manager for the Birth to Three System Quality Assurance Division uses Language Line Services for all of her interpretation needs. She is quite happy with the service and states, “There is nothing like the relief of getting a message on your voicemail in Portuguese and knowing, "I can handle this." I just called Language Line, got the interpreter ready, flashed over to the voicemail system, flashed the interpreter back in to the call and played her the message! It was great. Now even I can play multi-lingual phone tag”.
