In case you haven't discovered it already, the BBC has created a handsome site for learning conversational phrases in several different languages. The usual suspects, French, German, Italian and Spanish are covered in a series of well-developed course materials of the caliber that used to only be available inside pricey software. Clicking on the "Other" button next to the FIGS buttons yields a variety of informational pieces and mp3 files on various languages from around the world.

Danay Escanaverino at adotas.com has written an excellent article about targeting the Hispanic culture. At McElroy, we often get requests to have a website translated into Spanish where the marketing person is unfamiliar with the different types of cultures that abound in the U.S. We also realize that it isn't enough to simply translate your website into Spanish, or that a Spanish translation is always necessarily going to be seen by your target Hispanic niche.

"The first thing you need to do is figure out which type of Hispanic you are selling to. Geographically speaking, you can split them into 5 major groups, US Hispanic, South American, Central American, European and Caribbean. If you chose US Hispanics, you need to figure out which language they speak, such as Spanish speaking, English speaking or bilingual. "