Civil records, legal, medical, financial, technical and marketing — in 326 languages.
Last reviewed August 23, 2026 by the Prism Linguistics editorial team
Prism Linguistics translates documents in 326 languages for clients across the United States: legal contracts, medical records, business files, technical manuals and personal certificates. Every project is translated by a native human linguist and reviewed by a second editor. Certified translations are prepared to meet USCIS requirements. Quotes are free and usually back within 60 minutes during business hours.
Most document translation projects fail in the same handful of ways. A birth certificate translation that USCIS returns because the certification is missing. A contract that loses a liability clause in translation. A medical record where a dosage decimal moves a place. A technical manual where nobody translated the warning labels. The fix is the same in every case: a translator who knows the subject, and a second pair of eyes before delivery.
Translators are matched by subject, not just language pair. A commercial contract and a discharge summary fail in different ways, so they never go to the same person by default. These are the categories our US clients send most.
Birth, marriage, divorce and death certificates; passports, national ID cards, police clearance certificates. Certified translation prepared to meet USCIS requirements.
Contracts, NDAs, court orders, affidavits, powers of attorney, witness statements, discovery exhibits and foreign-jurisdiction filings.
Diplomas, transcripts, syllabi and professional licenses, prepared to credential evaluator standards (WES, ECE, IEE, Educational Perspectives).
Hospital records, lab reports, imaging, discharge summaries, prescriptions and patient-facing material under HIPAA-aware handling.
Audit reports, financial statements, tax returns, prospectuses, fund factsheets and regulatory filings in IFRS / US GAAP terminology.
Product manuals, engineering specifications, patents, IFUs, safety data sheets and standard operating procedures.
Websites, brochures, press releases, white papers, case studies and sales presentations with brand-voice consistency across languages.
Supporting documents for I-130, I-485, N-400, asylum and EOIR submissions, certified in the format USCIS officers expect.
Each category has its own failure points, regulators and turnaround expectations. The table below is a realistic guide; timelines assume a typical document size, and your quote confirms the exact date.
| Document type | Typical documents | Who usually requests it | Typical turnaround |
|---|---|---|---|
| Legal | Contracts, court orders, affidavits, discovery material, powers of attorney | Attorneys, law firms, in-house counsel, courts | 2–5 business days for most contracts |
| Medical | Hospital records, lab results, discharge summaries, consent forms | Hospitals, clinics, insurers, patients | 1–3 business days for typical records |
| Business & financial | Reports, statements, tax returns, tenders, HR policies | Companies, auditors, HR teams | Priced and scheduled per source word |
| Personal & civil | Birth and marriage certificates, diplomas, transcripts, IDs | Individuals filing with USCIS, universities, the DMV or SSA | Often 24–48 hours per document |
| Technical | Manuals, specifications, patents, safety data sheets | Manufacturers, engineering firms, importers | Depends on volume; teams available for large sets |
Interpreting and sector-specific work sits on its own pages: legal interpreting for depositions and court dates, healthcare interpreting for hospitals and clinics, and dedicated pages for financial translation and business translation clients who send recurring work.
A standard translation is a faithful, professionally reviewed translation of your document, delivered in your format. It is what most business, technical and marketing work needs, and nobody signs anything.
A certified translation adds a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy: a statement on company letterhead, with the date and signature, attesting that the translation is complete and accurate. US government agencies expect it. USCIS requires a certified English translation of every foreign-language supporting document, and courts, universities and state agencies such as the DMV usually ask for the same thing.
A quick rule of thumb:
Two related points, because clients ask weekly. We do not provide notary services ourselves, but we prepare the certified translation in the form a notary public needs if the receiving institution asks for notarization. And if your document is headed abroad, we deliver the translation ready for your apostille application through the Secretary of State.
Spanish generates more requests than any other language pair we handle in the US, in both directions. English to Spanish document translation covers employee handbooks for workforces in Texas and Florida, patient consent forms for clinics serving Spanish-speaking communities, school communications, and contracts with suppliers in Mexico and Latin America. Spanish to English runs the other way: civil certificates, diplomas and medical records supporting USCIS filings.
Regional variation matters more in Spanish than most buyers expect. A handbook written for a Mexican-heritage workforce in Houston reads differently from one aimed at a Cuban-heritage team in Miami, and neutral Latin American Spanish is usually the right call for national material. Our Spanish translation services page covers the pair in depth, with city-level pages for Spanish translation in New York and Spanish translation in Houston.
The same depth applies across the catalog: Mandarin translation services for trade and manufacturing documents, Arabic translation services for legal and immigration work, and 300-plus more on our languages page. Rare pairs take a little longer to schedule; we tell you that in the quote, not after you have committed.
Send your document in the format your team already uses. We translate in place and return the same format with layout preserved. Scans and phone photos are rebuilt by hand rather than run through text recognition, so stamps and tables stay where they belong.
A one or two page personal document is often ready within 24 to 48 hours. For longer material, a professional translator covers roughly 2,000 to 2,500 words a day, plus time for the second-editor review, so a 10,000-word agreement usually lands in about a week. Large document sets can be split across a team with a shared glossary to keep terminology consistent, which is how a 500-page bundle gets done without taking a quarter. Rush delivery on short standard documents is sometimes possible, subject to capacity; ask, and we will give you an honest answer rather than an optimistic one.
As a guide to the US market: certified document translation typically starts around $24.95 per page, and standard business translation is priced per source word, which is fairer than per page because pages vary so much. Four things move the number: word count, language pair (common pairs cost less than rare ones, simply because more qualified translators exist), how technical the text is, and the deadline. These are market ranges, not a price list; your quote confirms the exact figure, free, usually within 60 minutes during business hours.
Four steps, no account, no minimum order. Most projects start and finish by email.
Upload the file through the quote form or email it to info@prismlinguistics.com. Tell us the target language, the deadline and who will receive the translation, because a file bound for USCIS and a file bound for a supplier are prepared differently.
We reply within 60 minutes during business hours with a fixed price, a word or page count and a delivery date. If you need an NDA signed before you send anything sensitive, ask and we will sign it first.
A native-speaker translator matched to your subject does the work. A second bilingual editor then reviews the translation against the source, and a proofreader checks formatting, terminology and name spellings before anything leaves the building.
You receive the finished file in the same format you sent, layout preserved. Certified translations arrive as a signed PDF, with hard copies by USPS or FedEx on request, and free revisions if a US institution asks for a change.
People search for a translation office near them, then discover the office visit was never necessary. Document translation is digital end to end: you upload a file, approve a quote by email, and receive the finished translation the same way, from any state and any time zone. When an institution wants ink on paper, we mail signed hard copies by USPS or FedEx.
We are based at 100 Church Street in Manhattan and serve all 50 states, with steady work coming from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Miami, San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston and Atlanta. The one practical difference location makes is language demand: Spanish dominates in Texas, Haitian Creole shows up in Florida filings, Mandarin and Cantonese in the Bay Area. Our locations page lists the metro areas we cover in detail.
Most documents worth translating are sensitive before they are anything else: unsigned agreements, medical histories, tax filings, personnel records. Every linguist on our roster works under a non-disclosure agreement, files move over secure transfer rather than open email where clients prefer it, and access is restricted to the team actually working on your project. Documents are deleted from active systems 30 days after delivery.
Medical records get extra care. Our handling is HIPAA-aware: patient identifiers are not exposed beyond the working team, and we are used to the paperwork hospitals and health plans require of vendors under Section 1557 language-access obligations. Legal documents follow the same discipline for privilege. If your organization has its own NDA, send it over and we will sign it before you upload anything at all.
How we keep document translation defensible for USCIS officers, court clerks and auditors.
Translation, independent Editing by a second bilingual linguist, then Proofreading. Three sets of trained eyes on every certified project, with no exceptions for "easy" documents. Already have a translation? We also offer standalone proofreading of existing translated material.
Certified translations carry a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy on company letterhead with the translator's signature, our corporate seal and the date: the format USCIS officers, US federal and state courts and university registrars expect to see. Acceptance ultimately depends on the receiving institution.
Source layout preserved on every page. Existing client glossaries imported at kick-off; new term decisions documented and reused across future projects, so a policy update next year matches the handbook from this one.
Native speakers of the target language, professionally qualified and background-checked, certified where the setting requires it. When you vet any translation vendor, ask how they select linguists; ATA membership and court certification programs are the ecosystem benchmarks worth asking about.
The questions US clients ask before sending a document.
Common companions to a document translation project.
Signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy, prepared to meet USCIS requirements. Needed for most US official filings.
Marketing pages, product pages, in-app strings and transactional emails in engineering-friendly formats.
Brochures, catalogs, white papers and sales collateral in IDML / INDD with layout preserved.
Beyond literal translation: cultural adaptation, units, dates, currency, regulatory and tone-of-voice handling.
Sector specialists: legal, healthcare, financial, business, media and law enforcement.
Send it through and we'll return a written quote and turnaround, usually within 60 minutes during business hours.
Get a Free Quote Call +1 (833) 282 8883