17. The computer program product of claim 15 , the computer readable storage device further comprising program instructions to: determine, in response to the received customer communication, whether an agent having a required proficiency in the first language is available to service the customer communication; and place the customer communication in a queue in the case that none of the set of agents has an associated confidence factor greater than the predetermined threshold confidence factor.
15. A computer program product for assigning work in a customer support environment, the computer program product comprising a computer readable storage device, and program instructions stored on the computer readable storage device, to: receive a customer communication in a first language; detect a shortage of agents having the first language as a primary language; translate, in response to the shortage of agents, the customer communication into a second language; calculate a translation score based on a confidence in the translation, the confidence in the translation being based on a technical content of the customer communication; obtain a set of agents, each agent in the set of agents being a person that has a language proficiency in at least one of the first language or the second language and has a language proficiency score associated with the language proficiency, the language proficiency score being based on a measure of an ability of each agent to communicate in the first language or the second language and a technical skill set of each agent associated with a technical area of the customer communication, and each of the first language and second language being natural languages; calculate, for each agent, an associated confidence factor by combining the language proficiency score for the agent and the translation score; generate a threshold confidence factor curve comprising a first curve, having a first rate of decrease over a first wait time period of the customer communication, and a second curve, having a second rate of decrease over a second, subsequent wait time of the customer communication, the second rate of decrease being greater than the first rate of decrease and the threshold confidence factor curve being based on a priority of the customer communication; and assign, at a time, the customer communication to one of the set of agents to respond to the customer communication in a selected language based on the associated confidence factor being greater than the threshold confidence factor curve at the time.