Culture Guides, Inc. is a for-profit company with a humanitarian mission. Our task is to facilitate genuine communication and foster mutual understanding on a small and diverse planet. As interpreters, translators, consultants and educators, we act as bridges across languages and cultures. Our holistic perspective and team approach bring cultural meaning and context to light, which in turn allow one person to discover the intended meaning of another. We seek to remove linguistic and cultural barriers wherever they exist and whenever people are ready for those barriers to come down. Each time we help people understand one another, we all come another step closer to world peace.

Our History

Culture Guides began in February 1996 as a sole proprietorship called Missouri Interpreters and by May 1996 became incorporated as Culture Guides, Inc. Jacqueline T. Ambrow, M.A., founded the company while she finished graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. At that time, the Mid-Missouri area saw a growing influx of immigrants but did not have organized services for linguistic interpreting or document translation. Ms. Ambrow established a unique company based upon principles from linguistic and cultural anthropology.

Applied anthropologists such as Ms. Ambrow use a holistic perspective and integrate skills and knowledge from a wide variety of disciplines to solve problems in the real world. A team approach and case management are typical methods of applied anthropologists and feature prominently in Culture Guides’ services. Culture Guides utilizes this unique holistic approach to solve problems related to barriers of language and culture.

Since 1996, Culture Guides has grown from a home-based business serving a few clients in Columbia, Missouri to a corporation serving clients all over Missouri and surrounding states in more than 40 languages. Our online technologies for requesting and scheduling interpreters, project management, and electronic billing now provide the foundation for extending services virtually to anyone in the world with an internet connection. We actively recruit qualified interpreters and translators wherever our clients need them. If you need help with overcoming a barrier of language or culture, please contact us. We will be glad to become your Culture Guides.

Culture Guides, Inc. is Missouri-based and woman-owned corporation, certified by the State of Missouri’s OA/OEO as a Woman-owned Business Enterprise (WBE), certification #W01055. For more information about our services and customers, please go to our customers page.

For information about our Privacy Practices, please click here.