West Frisian itself, not the Dutch a speaker also knows: interpreters for court and hospital work nationwide, plus certified translation of Dutch civil records.
Prism Linguistics provides Frisian interpreters for court hearings, depositions, medical appointments and USCIS interviews anywhere in the United States, mostly by phone or video, for speakers who want their first language rather than Dutch, together with certified English translation of the Dutch civil records, diplomas and deeds a family from Fryslân holds.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Most people who search for a Frisian interpreter need a Dutch one, and we say so at intake. Every speaker of West Frisian is fluent in Dutch, and the paperwork a family from Fryslân holds is written in Dutch. What this page offers is the narrower thing: an interpreter who speaks Frisian itself, for the person who wants their first language in a courtroom or at a bedside, and a translator who knows what to do with Frisian names inside a Dutch record. New York is our one office; the interpreter comes to you in person where one is nearby and by phone or video otherwise.
Around 450,000 people speak West Frisian, almost all of them in the province of Fryslân in the northern Netherlands, where it holds official status beside Dutch. In the United States the speakers number a few thousand at most: recent emigrants, their visiting parents, and heritage communities that trace to Dutch and Frisian settlement in Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin and northern New Jersey. Frisian is not a dialect of Dutch. It sits closer to English in origin, and a Dutch interpreter who has never heard it will catch fragments and guess the rest.
Preference or need? We ask, and we act on either. A widow in her eighties giving a deposition in a probate matter, or describing a fall to a doctor, may have the Dutch to manage and still not want it. Under stress people return to the language of their childhood, and for someone from a village near Snits or Dokkum that language is Frisian. A request like that is legitimate. We fill it with a native Frisian speaker, nearly always by phone or video, because in-person Frisian interpreters in the United States are very few.
No state has a certification exam in Frisian and none is likely to, so a court accepts a qualified interpreter on the judge's authority; we confirm with the clerk what the court needs before the hearing. Frisian is exactly the kind of language a court turns to a private agency for, when its own roster has nobody and the party is entitled to testify in their own tongue. The interpreter also has to handle the switching: a Frisian witness will drop Dutch words and whole Dutch sentences into testimony, and an interpreter who only has one of the two languages misses it. We serve courts and attorneys as a private agency rather than a court-appointed vendor.
The medical call comes from a hospital with an older patient on a Dutch passport whose family explains, apologetically, that their mother has gone back to Frisian. Federally funded providers are obliged to supply an interpreter at no cost, and a Frisian interpreter over video meets that obligation far better than a Dutch-speaking nurse who catches half. For a consent conversation, a capacity assessment or a palliative discussion, precision in the first language matters more than anywhere else, and a screen at the bedside is a sound second best to a person in the room.
Phone and video are the default for Frisian, not the fallback. They let us put a native speaker, wherever in the country they live, into a courtroom in Iowa or a clinic in Michigan at short notice. For USCIS, the honest advice is that a Frisian applicant seldom needs an interpreter and, if they do, a Dutch interpreter is the practical choice; when the applicant asks for Frisian we provide it and brief the interpreter to render every answer as spoken, nothing added and nothing smoothed.
There is almost never a Frisian document to translate. Civil records for someone born in Ljouwert are issued by the municipality on the same Dutch forms used in Amsterdam, and the multilingual international extract that any Dutch municipality can print is accepted by USCIS as it stands. The full copy, the afschrift, with its marginal notes on marriage and divorce, does need a certified English translation, as does a divorce decree, a diploma, a police record or a notarial deed. A genuine Frisian-language document turns up now and then, a letter, a school record, a personal statement, and it goes to a Frisian translator rather than a Dutch one. What the translator has to get right in either case is the Frisian layer: place names that read Ljouwert on one paper and Leeuwarden on the next, given names carrying â and û, and a surname that must match the passport letter for letter. Every spelling stays as printed, variants are noted, and the translation carries a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy. See certified translation and, for Dutch records generally, our Dutch page.
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 Frisian interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Frisian 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 Frisian assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.