MegaFon, a leading Russian mobile operator, has made its phone interpreting service available nationwide. The service, which until now was accessible only from Moscow region, uses a three-way conference call format, enabling a person to speak with another person through an interpreter.
To use this service, a MegaFon customer must call a specific phone number (0595) to choose a language and specify a topic of conversation so that the operator can find a suitable interpreter. At present, the service supports English, German, Chinese, and Japanese. It can additionally accommodate interpretation to and from other languages if requested in advance.
This service is also available for international roaming calls.
To implement this interpretation service, MegaFon collaborated with ABBYY, a Moscow-based international provider of document conversion, data capture, and linguistic software and services.
MegaFon is not the first company to offer such a service. Several years ago, a similar one was launched by Tekhnologiya under the brand Sim Travel, but it is available only outside the Russian Federation.
Source: Telecom Daily, Megafon
