Asylum, USCIS and hospital interpreting for Esan speakers nationwide, matched to the Ekpoma, Irrua, Uromi or Ubiaja variety, plus certified translation of Nigerian records.
Prism Linguistics provides Ishan (Esan) interpreters for asylum and USCIS interviews, court hearings, depositions and medical appointments anywhere in the United States, in person, by phone or by video, matched to the speaker's Esan town, together with certified English translation of the Nigerian records that come with an Edo State file.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Ishan, also written Esan, comes from a cluster of local government areas in Edo State, in Nigeria's south, and the people who ask for an Ishan interpreter are most often an elderly parent, a rural relative called to give evidence, or an asylum applicant who has to be understood word for word. Anyone of working age tends to hold their own in English. Our only office is in New York and the interpreters work across the country, so for a hearing or a clinic we place someone near you, and for an interview at short notice we connect by phone or video.
An Edo interpreter is not an Ishan interpreter, and the swap is the mistake we most often correct. Ishan and Edo, sometimes called Bini, are both Edoid languages of the same state, but they are separate tongues, and a witness answering in Ishan should not be run through an Edo speaker who catches the gist and loses the rest. We assign an Ishan interpreter and check the town, because the language varies from Ekpoma to Irrua to Uromi to Ubiaja to Igueben.
That town-level detail is not fussiness. In an asylum interview or a cross-examination, the difference between a matched interpreter and a near neighbour shows up in exactly the moments that decide the case, when a speaker reaches for the word they learned at home.
No state runs a court certification exam in Ishan, so a court works from a qualified Ishan interpreter, and this is one of the rare languages that courts approach us for precisely because nobody else can field it. We take the assignment from the court, the attorneys and the law firms directly. To be clear about our standing, we are a private agency, and not a court-appointed vendor. Tell us the court, the case type and the speaker's Esan town and we confirm what the bench will accept and who we can send before you commit to a date.
Any hospital or clinic that takes federal funding must provide an Ishan interpreter at no cost to the patient, and families rarely know they can insist on it. The typical patient is an older relative giving a medical history or sitting through a consent conversation, where an approximate rendering is worse than useless. Video works for a specialist review or a follow-up. For a mental health assessment, or when an elderly patient is uneasy with a screen, we send someone in person wherever an Ishan interpreter can be placed.
Asylum is where much of the Ishan work sits, and it is unforgiving of a loose rendering. The officer weighs the applicant's own words, the hesitations and the small contradictions along with them, and an interpreter who tidies an answer or supplies a missing detail changes the account on the record. We brief every Ishan interpreter to render what is said and only that, we match the Esan variety to the speaker, and we do not put a relative or a friend in the interpreter's seat, however fluent they are.
The documents themselves are Nigerian and mostly in English, so the real question in an Edo State file is which birth record the applicant holds. Someone born from 1992 usually has a National Population Commission certificate; someone born between 1979 and 1992 often needs an NPC attestation together with a declaration of age from a High Court; someone born earlier may carry a local government or hospital record alongside an NPC attestation. The Ishan sits in the names and the sworn statements. Esan names carry tone marks, and an attestation, affidavit or traditional marriage record can spell a name differently from the passport, so we match the passport, note the variant, and translate any Ishan-language text in full with a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy. 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 Ishan interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Ishan 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 Ishan assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.