For the lack of an interpreter, a life was lost

A translated transcript of the Dziekanski video.

I'm glad the G&M did this, because I'm too squeamish to watch a person die. I wish we had more context though. I'm not familiar with Vancouver airport and I haven't been on an international flight in years. Was he just in the wrong room and not leaving that room going looking for his mother? Or was someone preventing him from leaving that room? If someone was preventing him, why couldn't they find an interpreter? Wasn't he in there for 10 hours? It would make more sense if we knew the layout.

While I know the real issue is that the police tased him at least three times, but I keep thinking how this might never have happened if there had just been someone there who had enough Polish to understand him and enough English to navigate the airport. Which I can do, either alone or with the help of my cellphone.

I've never been in the situation of witnessing someone acting erratically in another of my languages, but I might rethink my reaction in the future. I've always been told by people who know better than I do that if someone is acting threateningly because of distress or a mental health problem, they're still a threat to me and I should protect myself accordingly. But now I think I should take the Starfleet approach and answer any distress signals I can decode, at least until someone better able to help them gets there. I've always been willing to intervene to protect a person from another person, but I never thought before about protecting people from themselves before the police come. I'm not the kind of person who trusts the police unconditionally, but I always assumed they'd be able to handle the situation of a person in distress in another language. It looks like I can't assume that any more, which means it's my job now.

Edit: So far, I've been thinking about this in terms of the difficulty of getting an interpreter in the context of everyday life, about how I'd handle the problem in ordinary public space. But, as a letter in today's Toronto Star from one Omer Lifshitz of Toronto (whose name I am deliberately making Googleable because he deserves credit for seeing something I missed) pointed out, Robert Dziekanski had just gotten off a plane from Poland! They knew where he came from, and there must have been members of the flight crew who spoke Polish since he managed the flight okay. It should have taken far fewer than 10 hours for someone to notice that he had been in the arrivals area for a long time, look at his passport and/or boarding pass, identify his language needs, and find someone who speaks Polish. Before I disagreed with people who said this is the airline's responsibility, but now that I think about it they had people, right there getting off the same plane as Pan Dziekanski, who could have explained things to him in Polish.