‘Every day, every minute, with every call’

It’s unusual to see screens marked “arrivals” and “departures” anywhere other an airport, but CanTalk Canada Inc. has them set up in its Winnipeg office.

The company specializes in language interpretation and translation services by phone. The arrivals screen lists customers that CanTalk staff are working to connect with interpreters, while the departures screen indicates calls interpreters are already working on.

Last Tuesday, around lunchtime, CanTalk’s interpreters helped customers by speaking Mandarin, Spanish and Portuguese. Some translated conversations that involved Arabic, Ukrainian and Punjabi, while others spoke in languages native to Afghanistan, China and Eritrea.

The nature of the calls varies. At any given moment, a CanTalk interpreter could be helping a utility company employee explain a bill to a customer who’s most comfortable speaking Polish, conveying medical information from a nurse to a patient who speaks Farsi or helping a parent who speaks Tagalog understand their child’s English-speaking teacher.

CanTalk has come a long way since Maureen Mitchells started it 30 years ago, but the mission has remained the same: to make language support immediate, affordable, high quality and easy to use.

“Providing language services makes a difference in people’s lives,” Mitchells says. “It can transform businesses, it can create loyalties. It could bring people closer together in communities they never thought possible. It can reduce prejudices. It can open up opportunities.”

CanTalk’s interpreters offer immediate help to customers in more than 200 languages and dialects — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

For the 50 most common languages CanTalk encounters, the company’s facilitators can connect customers to an interpreter in 30 to 60 seconds, Mitchells says. For languages that are less common, it can take longer — but not much longer.

“That’s what the clients expect,” she says. “They have to keep their operation or process going as quickly as possible.”

Mitchells has made a career out of communications. Prior to starting CanTalk, she was a television journalist with CBC and CTV, and a reporter at the Winnipeg Tribune. She then entered the world of corporate communications and marketing — including stints with the Canadian International Grains Institute and the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange (now known as ICE Futures Canada).

While driving home at Christmas in 1994, Mitchells heard a radio program about a company in California that provided emergency language services between English-speaking health-care professionals and their Hispanic patients.

“It hit me like a bolt of lightning,” Mitchells recalls. “This is a service that could be used with Canada’s rich linguistic diversity and pluralism, and the whole span of the makeup of who we were as a country.”

Corporate clients, government agencies, emergency service providers, non-profits — Mitchells envisioned all of them receiving rapid language services and technical support tailored to their needs.

Mitchells believed it was an opportune time to start something like CanTalk. The internet was emerging, long distance rates were dropping and people were increasingly reaching out to other parts of the world thanks to globalization — yet language could be a barrier.

She started the business in 1995. For the first few years, it was a small operation — two chairs and four rotary phones in a 600-square-foot warehouse.

Today, CanTalk’s second-floor office in the Exchange District takes up more than 13 times that amount of space. The company employs from 70 to 150 Manitobans depending on the time of year, and relies on a network of more than 2,000 interpreters — 89 per cent of whom live in Canada, Mitchells says.

In the last year, CanTalk’s interpreters spent more than 5.3 million minutes helping customers.

Live language facilitators act as concierge support by gathering callers’ details, connecting conversations and ensuring a smooth experience.

Protecting client data is a top priority, Mitchells says. The company’s network is fortified with next-generation firewalls, 24-7 monitoring and a dedicated security operations centre to detect and prevent threats in real time.

Mitchells believes companies that insist on doing business using English only unnecessarily limit their potential.

Further, despite the availability of online translation services and artificial intelligence, hiring a company such as CanTalk is still worthwhile.

“Google Translate isn’t going to be sitting on the phone call with you while you’re trying to do a very delicate negotiation,” she says.

“AI is not going to be there picking out all the nuances and all the subtleties of humour and pace and tone, and all those signals that are unspoken but yet are incredibly meaningful.”

Three decades in, what Mitchells finds most fulfilling about her work is that the company helps people.

“We make a difference in people’s lives every day, every minute, with every call.”

Allowing people to use the language they’re most comfortable speaking gives them confidence, she adds.

“(It) helps them reach their objectives to become productive and buy the new home, get the licence, have their child looked after by a doctor, and talk to the teacher and understand what the teacher’s trying to do.”

Companies pay a fee to use CanTalk; annual revenue is around $10 million. Mitchells says she doesn’t run the company to make a huge profit.

“I learned long ago that money can define you as successful but it doesn’t make you successful from within,” she says. “What makes you successful is this continued connection with the people you work with … and the people you serve.”

CanTalk has experienced its share of challenges and will no doubt face more in the years to come, but for Mitchells, adversity is always an opportunity for creative thinking.

“You think you’re in a dark tunnel and there’s no illumination (but) then you see a little flicker — just a little flicker,” she says. “If you hang on to that belief — that every dark tunnel can be lit — that becomes your enduring success.

“So I suppose after 30 years I keep seeing flickers, because there’s always going to be light within the tunnel,” Mitchells adds. “I just keep finding new tunnels and I see new flickers, and I get excited all over again.”

aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca