Asylum and SIV interviews, courts and clinics across the US, with Dari, Farsi or Pashto settled first, plus certified translation of tazkiras and Afghan records.
Prism Linguistics provides Dari interpreters for asylum interviews, Special Immigrant Visa appointments, court hearings and medical appointments anywhere in the United States, in person, by phone or by video, and certified English translation of Afghan tazkiras and other Dari documents.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Dari interpreting in the United States is mostly immigration work, and much of it is recent. Families who fled after 2021 are still filing asylum and Special Immigrant Visa cases, and the paperwork and the interviews both run through Dari. Before we assign we ask a question that decides the whole job: Dari, Farsi or Pashto? Our office is in New York, and our Dari interpreters, all Afghan, work nationwide, in person where we can and by phone or video almost anywhere the same day.
Afghan immigrants cluster hard. In 2018-22 about 39 percent lived in California, 14 percent in Virginia and 10 percent in Texas, and the tens of thousands evacuated in 2021 landed mostly in those same three states. Fremont's Little Kabul, the northern Virginia suburbs and the Sacramento and San Diego areas carry the largest communities. Dari interpreting demand tracks that resettlement, which is why an assignment is as likely in Fremont or Alexandria as in a courthouse downtown.
Dari is Afghan Persian, and it is not the same as Iranian Farsi. The two are close in formal speech, and a Farsi speaker and a Dari speaker can follow each other in a meeting. Everyday vocabulary and accent pull apart, though, and an Iranian interpreter can lose an Afghan word at the exact moment an asylum officer is probing for detail. Pashto is a separate language, not a dialect. Many Afghans speak both Dari and Pashto, so we ask which the speaker prefers and where in Afghanistan they are from, then assign an Afghan Dari interpreter.
California lists Dari as a registered court language rather than a certified one, and no state runs a certification exam in Dari, so courts work with a registered or otherwise qualified interpreter. Much of the court work is tied to immigration and to families still finding their feet, from protective orders to guardianship. Tell us the court, the case type and whether the speaker wants Dari or Pashto, and we confirm what the judge will accept before you book. We are a private agency and not a court-appointed vendor.
A hospital that receives federal funding must provide a Dari interpreter to a patient who needs one at no charge, which comes up constantly for the older parents and grandparents of evacuee families, many of whom arrived with untreated conditions. We use video for a routine consult and send a person for labor, a mental health assessment or a serious diagnosis. Trauma care is a recurring need in this population, and a screen is not always the right setting for it.
Asylum interviews and Special Immigrant Visa appointments are the heart of Dari USCIS work, and neutrality is not optional in them. An interpreter who softens a frightening account, or explains what they think the officer is after, undercuts the credibility finding the applicant is relying on. We brief every Dari interpreter to render the words exactly and add nothing, and we never seat a relative or a fellow applicant in that chair.
Almost every Afghan file opens with a tazkira. The paper version is written in Dari and Pashto, records a person by given name, father's name and grandfather's name rather than a surname, and is often handwritten, stamped and added to over years. The e-Tazkira card that the National Statistics and Information Authority began issuing in 2018 carries the same fields in print, with English on the reverse. USCIS wants every word rendered, stamps and seals included, and an SIV or asylum officer will lay the tazkira against the passport, the I-94 and the employment letters behind the petition. A translator who invents a surname to fill a blank, or quietly regularizes a father's name, creates the mismatch the applicant then has to explain away.
Beyond the tazkira, a Dari file usually holds marriage documents, school and university records, and the letters, night letters and threat evidence an asylum claim is built on. Afghan names romanize inconsistently, so one person can appear spelled three ways across three papers. We match the passport, note each spelling against the original, and deliver a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy. The full service is at certified document 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 Dari interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Dari 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 Dari assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.