Asylum, court and hospital interpreting across the US in Sureth, matched by church and village, plus certified translation of the Arabic, Persian and Syriac documents in an Assyrian file.
Prism Linguistics provides Assyrian interpreters, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic or Sureth matched to the speaker's church and village, for asylum interviews, immigration court, hearings, depositions and medical appointments anywhere in the United States, in person, by phone or by video, together with certified English translation of the Iraqi Arabic, Iranian Persian and Syriac-script church records that Assyrian families submit to USCIS.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Assyrian is the everyday name for Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, the Sureth spoken by Assyrian Christians from northern Iraq, north-western Iran, north-eastern Syria and south-eastern Turkey, and one of the rare languages courts call us for when an Arabic booking has failed. Our office is in New York; our Assyrian interpreters work nationwide, in person where one is based near you and by phone or video everywhere, usually connected the same day.
Chicago holds the largest Assyrian community in the country, Detroit's suburbs of Sterling Heights and Warren hold the Chaldean population, and Modesto, Turlock, San Diego and El Cajon, Phoenix and Los Angeles carry the West Coast. The 2020 Census counted roughly 119,000 people of Assyrian, Chaldean or Syriac ancestry. The people who need an Assyrian interpreter are asylum applicants, refugees adjusting status, and elderly parents in hospital.
Ask the church and the village before you book. Assyrian Neo-Aramaic forms a dialect chain from the Nineveh Plain to Urmia, and its own varieties understand each other well enough that the Iraqi koine and Urmian cover most speakers. Chaldean Neo-Aramaic, spoken by Catholic Assyrians from the Nineveh Plain, is close enough that a Chaldean and an Assyrian interpreter usually cover each other, and we tell you when we are relying on that. Turoyo, the Aramaic of Syriac Orthodox families from Tur Abdin, is a different language and gets its own interpreter.
Asylum claims by Assyrian Christians turn on what happened to a church, a shop, a brother, in Mosul in 2014 or in Baghdad in the years before, and the applicant tells it in Sureth with place names, church names and family relations that an Arabic interpreter will flatten. Our Assyrian interpreters render the account as told, hesitations and repetitions included, and never explain, tidy or summarize.
Assyrian is not on the National Center for State Courts exam list and no state, Michigan and Illinois included, certifies court interpreters in it, so a court relies on a qualified Assyrian interpreter it can examine on the record. Courts come to us for languages of this kind when the roster is empty. We work directly for courts, attorneys and law firms, and we are a private agency rather than a court-appointed vendor.
Hospitals in Chicago, Detroit and the Central Valley see Assyrian patients regularly and usually reach for an Arabic phone line, which works for a young Iraqi and fails for a grandmother from an Urmia village who has never spoken Arabic. A provider that takes federal funding must supply an Assyrian interpreter at no cost. We send an interpreter in person for diagnosis conversations, surgical consent, dialysis education and end-of-life discussions, and by video for follow-ups.
Almost nothing an Assyrian family submits to USCIS is written in Assyrian. Iraqi civil records are in Arabic: the Civil Status ID, the Iraqi Nationality Certificate and, since 2016, the unified National Card that replaces both, along with a birth certificate that on older handwritten forms records religion, which for an Assyrian applicant is often the substance of the claim. Iranian Assyrians hold the shenasnameh, a Persian identity booklet whose pages record birth, marriage and children and which USCIS requires translated cover to cover. Our translators handle the Arabic and Persian and keep every stamp and attestation.
The Assyrian-language documents are church documents. Baptism, marriage and membership certificates from the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East come in Syriac script, sometimes with an Arabic or English column, and we translate the Syriac rather than copying the column. Names then need reconciling: Yousip on the baptism certificate, Yusuf on the Iraqi ID, Joseph on the US record, each variant noted against the passport. The full service is at certified translation.
Tell us the date, the city and the setting, or send a clear scan of the document. We reply with a fixed price and, for interpreting, a named linguist. Call +1 (833) 282 8883, email info@prismlinguistics.com, or use the quote form and you will hear back within 60 minutes during business hours.
Our only office is in New York, and our Assyrian interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Assyrian work is concentrated; the full list of 288 cities is below it.
Prism Linguistics is rated 4.6 out of 5 across 67 client reviews for its interpreting and translation work in the United States. That is the company-wide figure; we do not publish a separate rating per language because there is no honest way to measure one. If an Assyrian assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.