The Evolution of Spanish in the United States

Over the past several decades, as the number of Spanish-speakers in the United States has risen sharply, the language itself has come to change and evolve. While it may not come as a surprise to most people, driving through places like Miami, Southern California, and many parts of New York City, Texas, Arizona, and New […]


Bridging the Gap: Medical Interpreter Course

Our medical interpreter training program, Bridging the Gap, is one of the leading programs of its kind in the U.S. today. Through our fully licensed program, we prepare bilingual individuals to work as professional medical interpreters in both hospital and clinical settings. Course environments are active, and students learn through participatory training techniques, including role-playing, […]


“Simplified” vs. “Traditional” Chinese Translation

Chinese has undoubtedly become one of the most popular languages for translation and localization over the past two decades owing to the dramatic growth of the Chinese economy, including the now more than 800 million Internet users in China with more disposable income to spend, and an e-commerce market expected to grow to $1.8 trillion […]


Language Confidential

In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing language industry landscape, the two key considerations for both language service providers (LSPs) and their clients are price and quality control. These two factors form the basis for LSPs to market and sell their services, as well as how clients choose between the enormous variety of LSPs in the marketplace. […]


Quality Standards in the Language Industry

The survival of a language services provider (LSP) rests, quite simply, in its ability to provide quality translation, interpretation, and localization services to its clients. However, given that language is a human function prone to error, misinterpretation, and a high degree of nuance, establishing a standard framework to help ensure quality services and quantify benchmarks […]


Affordable Language Services Helps Clients Bridge The Language Divide

This Article was featured in The Cincinnati Business Courier. In some ways Blue Ash-based Affordable Language Services is unrecognizable from the shoestring operation CEO Lynn Elfers founded in her home 19 years ago, but in other ways the company, now one of the 30 largest language service providers in North America, remains unchanged. Elfers’ inspiration […]


Illusions of Translation Quality

Many of you have wondered how you can know if a translation is any good. It’s a common question. After all, if you spoke both languages involved, in many cases you wouldn’t even need the translation. We’ve touched on this topic ourselves, and thought you might enjoy reading Ten Common Myths About Translation Quality That Might […]


Essential Skills of a Medical Interpreter

It’s pretty obvious why every medical interpreter needs to be skilled; communicating correct symptoms to a doctor is imperative for appropriate treatment, and understanding a prescription is vital for the health of a patient. Without medical interpreters, health care would be much less effective and possibly dangerous. A medical interpreter differs from a medical translator […]


Google Translate Still Too Risky for Health Care

There has been some recent debate (perhaps controversy!) about the alleged dubious quality of the Spanish version of the Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) website, healthcare.gov (see CNN and Washington Post). Some are arguing that in creating the Spanish version of the site, authors must have employed a service such as Google Translate to have ended up […]


The Dangers of Automated Translation

There is no doubt that tech firms have made great strides in automated language translation in the last decade. Advances in processing power, algorithms, and voice recognition are now providing almost seamless communication between humans and machine, yet human-to-human communication using a machine interface is still fraught with difficulties and dangers.   Website Disclaimers  To […]