To provide an effective service across language and culture, more is required than the provision of suitably qualified interpreters and translators. Public service personnel must also be trained and qualified to communicate fully through linguists, to adapt and deliver their service to meet the needs of clients from different backgrounds and to create the management structures which will facilitate and support appropriate responses. This paper summarises an account of work done by the author, in a personal capacity in partnership with West Midlands Probation Service. This service, which has a large multilingual constituency, established local courses for public service interpreters and diverse pockets of expertise in working across language and culture. The work entailed an interdisciplinary collaboration to identify the skills and structures needed and how they might be formally brought into the service’s central framework of training and management.