Asylum, court and medical interpreting for Jola (Diola) speakers from Casamance and the Gambia, matched to the Fonyi, Kasa or Bayot variety, plus certified French document translation.
Prism Linguistics provides Jola (Diola) interpreters for asylum and USCIS interviews, court hearings and medical appointments anywhere in the United States, in person where a match can be placed and otherwise by phone or by video, matched to the speaker's variety of Jola, together with certified English translation of the French and English civil records that Casamance and Gambian applicants hold.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Jola, written Diola in French, is spoken in the Casamance region of southern Senegal and the Foni area of the Gambia, and the community in the United States is small and largely bound up with asylum. It is not a language anyone registers a birth in, so the paperwork is French or English while the interpreting is where the language itself matters. Our office is in New York and the interpreters work nationwide, in person where we can place one and, for a scarce language like this, often by phone or video.
Jola is a continuum, and its main branches do not all understand one another. Jola-Fonyi, the variety around Bignona, is the largest and the one most interpreters offer, but Kasa, Bayot, Karon and the rest are Jola too, and a Fonyi interpreter placed with a Kasa or a Bayot speaker misses more than an asylum case can spare. So we ask which village the speaker comes from before anything is confirmed.
When we cannot match the exact variety, we say so rather than sending a near neighbour and hoping. This is the kind of rare language a court or an attorney comes to us for precisely because it is hard to source, and honesty about what we can and cannot cover is part of the service.
No state runs a court certification exam in Jola, so a court works from a qualified Jola interpreter, and because the language is scarce this is often work that reaches us after other providers have turned it down. We take the assignment from the court and the attorneys directly, and we are a private agency rather than a court-appointed vendor. Give us the case type and the speaker's village, and if the variety is one we can field we confirm the interpreter; if it is not, we tell you plainly instead of sending an approximate match into a hearing.
A hospital that takes federal funding must provide a Jola interpreter at no cost to the patient, though families seldom know the right is theirs to claim. The patient is usually an older relative or a recent arrival describing symptoms, where a rough rendering can send the clinician down the wrong path. Much of this we handle by video, given how few Jola interpreters there are. For a sensitive consultation we place someone in person when the variety and the location allow it, and we confirm the branch of Jola before the appointment.
Most Jola work is asylum, and asylum turns on the applicant's own account, told in their own words. An interpreter who fills a pause or rounds off a hesitation hands the officer something other than what was said, and with Jola there is the added risk of a variety mismatch quietly swallowing detail. We match the branch of Jola to the speaker, we brief the interpreter to render and not to explain, and we do not put a relative or a friend in the interpreter's seat.
For most Jola speakers, certified translation means working from French rather than from Jola, because Jola is spoken and the civil records are not. A Senegalese applicant brings an extrait du registre des actes de naissance from the local centre d'état civil, in French; where the birth was registered more than a year late, the entry rests on a court judgment, a jugement d'autorisation d'inscription de naissance, and a certified copy of that judgment belongs in the file with the extract. A Gambian applicant's birth certificate is in English and needs no translation. The Jola shows up in the names. A name spoken in Jola and written down by a French or English clerk will not always match the passport, so we translate the French record in full, note the variant spelling, and deliver 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 Jola interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Jola 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 Jola assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.