The multilingual emergency and security coordination centre service was launched in 1998, and is offered in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish with operators in the on duty 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In order to facilitate assistance to both native and foreign residents and visitors who are in an emergency situation, from last year the 1-1-2 Canary islands has been operating an external multilingual tele-translation system that allows the service to be extended to more than 40 languages.
According to data referring to the attention to calls in several foreign languages, calls in English continued to concentrate in 2017 as the highest percentage of activity, standing at 68.67% of the total. German followed, at 17.22%, Italian, 9.95%, and in French, 3.86%. In addition, there was a small percentage that corresponded to other languages including Dutch or Russian, which were served through the multilingual tele-translation system.
As for the general type of the incidents to which foreigners requested help, those related to the security sector represented the highest percentage, with 46.6% and were followed by health related incidents, at 26.7% and 10.9% asking for technical assistance, including fires and incidents related to maritime rescue.
The Canarian emergency centre includes this multilingual assistance in the management of alerts, prevention and guidelines for action in the face of a risk situation, aimed at tourists who visit the Islands and seeks a safe destination.
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