(FORTUNE Magazine) – Doing business in a multilingual society can be dicey if your customers don't speak English well enough to communicate over the phone. To break the language barrier, Westin Hotels & Resorts, Dollar Rent A Car, Philadelphia Gas Works, and other companies have turned to Language Line Services, an army of telephone translators mobilized by AT&T. The interpreters stand ready round the clock in more than 160 languages, from Spanish and Sioux to Swahili. Anyone can dial them by calling 800-628-8486. The cost: $3.50 a minute, plus any long-distance charges. Customers can set up a conference call or pass the phone back and forth with the foreign speaker. About 60 full-time staffers (AT&T won't tell the exact number) handle the most commonly requested languages: French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Vietnamese. For more obscure tongues such as Tagalog (spoken in the Philippines), Kurdish, and Yiddish, AT&T uses part-time interpreters, said to number at least 1,000, who work out of their homes and are paid for time on the line.

Some languages bring less than one inquiry a year. Prince Yaw Nimako, 42, a native of Ghana, interprets Twi and Fanti, which are spoken in Ghana and Ivory Coast. After eight months of waiting in his East Lansing, Michigan, home, Nimako has yet to hear the phone ring. A Ph.D. student who is writing a thesis on telecommunications in education, he says, ''I keep hoping that people from Ghana will call.'' Language Line is said to be growing faster than AT&T anticipated, and has no major competitors. Says Gregory Sawers, a telecommunications analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.: ''The whole point of operating a business with a high fixed-cost structure like AT&T's is to create demand, and this will generate a certain amount of demand. I think it's a great idea.'' - A.J.M.