Kabyle, Tarifit, Tashelhit and Central Atlas Tamazight interpreting for asylum, court and medical settings across the US, by video, phone or in person.
Prism Linguistics provides Berber (Amazigh) interpreters for asylum interviews, immigration court hearings, depositions and medical appointments anywhere in the United States, assigned by variety (Kabyle, Chaouia, Tarifit, Tashelhit or Central Atlas Tamazight), together with certified English translation of the Arabic and French civil records that Moroccan and Algerian applicants hold.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Nobody speaks Berber. People speak Kabyle, or Tarifit, or Tashelhit, and the word on the booking form is only the start of the conversation. Our office is in New York and our Amazigh interpreters are scattered across the country, so an in-person job goes to a linguist based near you and a phone or video job can usually be set up the same day. Before any of that happens we ask two things: which country, and which region. The answers decide who we send.
The Berber languages run along North Africa from the Rif coast of Morocco to the mountains east of Algiers, and the varieties at either end are not mutually usable in a courtroom. Algeria gives us Kabyle speakers above all, with Chaouia from the Aures; Morocco gives us Tarifit from the north, Tashelhit from the Souss in the south, and Central Atlas Tamazight in between. An interpreter is native in one of these. Send a Kabyle interpreter to a Tashelhit witness and the hearing runs in a language neither party fully shares.
Arabic or French might do. Ask before you assume. Many Amazigh speakers grew up bilingual in Moroccan or Algerian Arabic, often with French from school. For a routine consultation that can be enough, and we will say so. It stops being enough when detail matters: a credible-fear interview, cross-examination, an elderly parent who left the village speaking only Tamazight. Then we assign for the variety, not the country.
Asylum work is the bulk of what we do in the Berber languages. An applicant recounting what happened to them in a Kabyle village will tell it best in Kabyle, and an officer weighing credibility needs the exact wording, hesitations included, not a smoothed version relayed through Arabic. We brief every interpreter to render what is said and nothing more. If the attorney wants a preparation session first, the same interpreter can cover both, so place names and terminology stay consistent across the file.
No US state offers a court certification exam in Kabyle, Tarifit, Tashelhit or any other Amazigh language, so a judge who needs one works with a qualified interpreter rather than a certified one, very often by video. This is the kind of language that brings courts to us: a rare one that the usual roster cannot cover. Tell us the court, the case type and where the speaker's family is from, and we confirm the interpreter's variety before the date. We are a private agency, not a court-appointed vendor, and we say so plainly.
A hospital that takes federal funding has to provide an interpreter at no cost to the patient, and for a Tamazight-speaking grandmother that obligation is not met by handing her an Arabic-speaking relative. Consent conversations and discharge instructions are where the gap shows. Video reaches a clinic anywhere in the country within hours; for a long inpatient stay we send someone in person where a suitable interpreter is within reach.
Ask for a certified Berber translation and what lands on our desk is nearly always an Arabic or French document. Morocco made Amazigh official in 2011 and Algeria followed in 2016, yet neither country's civil registry writes in it: a Moroccan birth record comes in French, Arabic or both, and an Algerian one is issued in Arabic by the commune, with a French extract on request. The Amazigh part of the job is the names. A Tamazight name spelled in Arabic script gets romanized one way on the birth act and another on the passport, and USCIS notices. We keep the issuing authority as printed, translate every stamp and margin, and spell to the passport with the variants noted.
Where Berber text does turn up, in a school record or a letter, it can be in Tifinagh (official in Morocco since 2003), in Latin letters (the norm for Tamazight teaching in Algeria) or in Arabic script on older material. Our translators read all three. The full document service, with a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy, 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 Berber interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Berber 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 a Berber assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.