May Newsletter

May is known as a time for new growth and it’s been a busy month at Affordable Language Services. Because of the increasing requests for our interpreting services, we have been adding to our interpreting team, including staff interpreters, recruiters and scheduling. As you can imagine, everyone here has been busy keeping our customers happy […]


Middle School Students Help Solve Our Business Challenge

On Friday, Affordable Language Services kicked off a case study at the Academy for Multilingual Immersion Studies. Over the course of ten weeks, the students in Ms. McNatt’s junior high class will help us solve an important problem: how many interpreters do we need, and what languages should they speak, for the Cincinnati of the future? […]


Learn a Language in 2014 – Part 2

By this point in the year, many new year’s resolutions are beginning to falter. Don’t let your goal to learn a language be one of them. Now that you’ve started attacking the problem in every way possible, using the extra time you didn’t realize you had, it’s time to make these efforts more effective. As Barry […]


Learn a Language in 2014 – Part 1

It’s time to make your resolutions for the new year. While I may not be able to give you any advice about losing weight or kicking that bad habit, I can help when it comes to the most in-demand job skill: fluency in a foreign language. There are so many different ways to learn a language […]


Scottish Finger Signing

In keeping with the sign language theme this week, we thought we’d share something that’s not American Sign Language, but a different kind of signing. It took a while for standard sign language to reach Scotland and the Deaf had to communicate with one another and the hearing community long before that. (The earliest records […]


Indian American Chamber of Commerce meeting

Last Wednesday Lynn Elfers, owner of Affordable Language Services, spoke at the Indian American Chamber of Commerce (IACC) meeting for the Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky chapter. Her topic was the importance of accurate translation in business, and how to set yourself (or your company) up for a successful translation. If you’re purchasing a translation, […]


Avoiding Miscommunication in a Multilingual Workplace

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. Avoiding Miscommunication in a Multilingual Workplace


How are you?

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. He was planning a trip to Kenya and wanted to speak the native language before he left. We set him up with Timothy, a native speaker of […]


Why Learn a Foreign Language?

Lots of reasons. Hunch.com recently asked its users, “in how many languages could you call a restaurant and make a reservation?” If you’re thinking “just one,” you’re in the majority. Only 40% of 129,626 users felt comfortable saying they could perform the task in 2 or more languages. So why learn another language when machine […]


Colors Across Cultures

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– […]