Brigham Young University linguistic professor Bill Eggington is doing his best to add a group of BYU students to Utah's list of valuable natural resources.
The students — some 300 who speak 60 languages — volunteered to be part of Eggington's Olympic "language hotline."
Eggington said Friday the hotline has helped the 2002 Winter Games earn a "gold medal" for translation services.
"An undisputed gold medal," Eggington specified.
Considering such talk is coming from an Australian whose spent the last three Olympics studying language services for Sydney's Olympic Committee, the judgment is fairly trustworthy.
He says the translation and interpretation services available at Salt Lake's Games is far better then those supplied at the 2000 Summer Games. "That's painful for me to say," he said.
Eggington says the idea for a language hotline came to him years ago in a grocery store when a clerk asked over a speaker system if anyone in the store spoke Russian.
The hotline is only used for emergency situations, such as when an athlete gets injured. So far the system has handled 12 calls, most of them involving interpretation of French, Hungarian and German, Eggington says.
Though some of the students involved in the program live as far away as California, all of them carry cell phones.
An estimated 30 percent of men in Salt Lake City speak a language other than English. Most learned the foreign language while serving missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
E-mail: joliver@desnews.com
