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Our Spring Whitepaper is here! We’ve pooled some ways you can avoid potentially costly miscommunications in your workplace. Click the link below and read up.

It’s a simple question, but can you ask and respond to it in Swahili? We recently had a man come to us for some help with this task.

Michael Felger is one of Affordable Language Services’ medical interpreters. He shares with us one example of a time when his expertise came in especially helpful.

Lots of reasons. Hunch.com recently asked its users, “in how many languages could you call a restaurant and make a reservation?”

Last weekend Affordable Language Services took part in one of our favorite events of the year, the Deaf Health Fair. We love working with the Deaf and hearing-impaired community! To make sure we could communicate effectively with the people in attendance, we contracted a nationally certified interpreter (who often does contract work for us) to help us out. Nick Miller spent the day at our booth interpreting for our staff. Here’s what he had to say about the event.

Ask an American to name off some colors and you’re likely to hear “Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple.” Perhaps substitute Indigo and Violet for Purple if the person really knows their rainbow, or add in White and Black as a sort of afterthought. Of course, this isn’t the rote response you’d get from everyone– there’s always going to be some human variation– but since color is culturally defined, there are bound to be similarities between people raised in the same culture.

Linguistic anthropologists have always looked at the connection between language and culture. Some cultures can express concepts in a single word that would take other languages a full paragraph to approximate the full meaning. Similarly, exact translation doesn’t necessarily capture the feeling behind the word, or the connotation it carries within the cultural context.

Ever since British colonies started springing up in the Americas, we’ve been borrowing and building off their language. Now, there are marked differences between American English and British English, so much so that Facebook even differentiates between American, British, and Australian English when asking users what languages they speak.

If you’re seeing a lot of green today, there’s probably good reason.

Interpreting Case Study: