About Workplace Languages

How Workplace Languages Started

Ed Rosheim is the founder and President of Workplace Languages, a corporate language training company and international translation agency. Ed started his love for language in college when taking his first Spanish class as a sophomore. Although getting a relatively late start as far as learning a language goes, it shaped his philosophy regarding second language acquisition.

Feeling the need to “catch up,” Ed spent 6 months in Spain and a year later, 3 months in the Canary Islands. He received an MA in Spanish in 1991. A job as a bilingual social worker and various community college teaching experiences in Iowa helped Ed continue to learn the language, teach, and connect with the Latino culture.

It was a move to Minnesota in 1998 and a job at a Twin Cities community college where he saw a need for a different type of service and way of doing things. A number of Fortune 500 companies based in Minnesota would send employees to this particular college looking for Spanish that would help them “get their point across” to staff and clients. Ed saw that students were being loaded down with grammar and weren’t getting lessons tailored to their needs and weren’t industry, company, or job-specific.

Where Workplace Languages Is Today

Workplace Languages started as strictly a language training company with Ed doing all of the teaching. From teaching English to housekeepers at a local casino to Spanish at local manufacturing plants, Ed was developing a teaching methodology that fit a niche with companies. From there, through word of mouth, companies in a number of states wanted this type of “give them what they need” approach to help employees communicate effectively in the workplace.

Workplace Languages soon became more than a training company but rather a full-service language provider offering business language solutions for all industries in all languages. Services such as translations, voiceovers and over-the-phone interpretation were added as well as on-site and online corporate language training and bilingual training products customized to each company’s needs.