|
Foreigners might feel more at home in this city because they can get translators anytime to help them communicate with police.
The Public Security Bureau (PSB) selected the first batch of 33 English-speaking volunteers on Tuesday to respond to emergency calls from foreigners. The translators will be on call round the clock.
When a foreigner dials 110 to report a crime or seek urgent help, a Chinese staff will answer the call. But once he or she realizes that a foreigner is on the other side, the call will be diverted to an English-speaking volunteer.
The volunteer will then report the matter to the closest police station or post.
"The English service is very important," Angeliki Lyviaki said yesterday. Lyviaki is a Greek translator who has been living in the city for seven months.
Lyviaki has never called 110, nor have any of her friends in Shanghai.
But she has asked her Chinese friends to call police when she came across an emergency in the past.
"Now that the service is available, more foreigners will try to call themselves," she said.
PSB spokeswoman Fang Jie said more English-speaking policemen would be recruited to help foreigners, for they can take turns to answer the calls.
The 110 service will have translators in seven other foreign languages: Japanese, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Arabic and Korean.
Shanghai, the busiest metropolis in the country, is home to about 130,000 foreigners. To ensure that every foreigner has access to police help in emergency, the PSB started the English service way back in May 2003.
Though the arrangement was informal, the bureau has answered 1,647 calls to date.
Fang said almost all the calls were for help; some foreigners were looking their lost cats or asked for road directions. But the main purpose of the new service is to tackle crime.
"Shanghai is a such a safe city that we don't have the need to call 110," Australian George Patton said. Still, foreigners need to be informed that 110 has an English-speaking service, said Patton, who has been living in the city for two years.
"The bureau has done a very good thing But it needs to be advertised so that the entire foreign community knows about it," he said. |
