Northern Kurdish interpreters for asylum interviews, courts and hospitals across the US, matched to the speaker's country, plus certified translation of Turkish, Syrian and Iraqi records.
Prism Linguistics provides Kurmanji, or Northern Kurdish, interpreters for asylum interviews, court hearings, depositions and medical appointments anywhere in the United States, in person, by phone or by video, matched to the speaker's country, together with certified English translation of the Turkish, Syrian and Iraqi records that Kurmanji speakers carry.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
A separate Kurdish page on this site covers the wider language; this one is for Kurmanji in particular, the Northern Kurdish spoken across southeast Turkey, the northern strip of Syria, the Duhok governorate of Iraq and pockets of Iran and the Caucasus. If you reached us searching for a Kurdish interpreter and are unsure which variety you need, that page explains the split and you can come back. Our office is in New York and our Kurmanji linguists work wherever the asylum office, the courthouse or the clinic happens to sit. Nashville holds the largest Kurdish community in the country and a steady share of our Kurmanji work comes out of Tennessee, but the network reaches every state.
Booking a Kurmanji speaker as simply Kurdish is the request most likely to undo an assignment. Kurdish splits into Kurmanji and Sorani, and in a hearing the two are not interchangeable. Kurmanji has held onto grammatical gender and a set of noun cases that Sorani let go, so an interpreter raised on the Sorani of Sulaymaniyah will lose ground on the detail once the witness grew up in Turkey or Syria. We settle which country the person comes from and assign a Kurmanji interpreter from that side.
The distances inside Kurmanji are short, and that works in your favour. The Behdini of Duhok, the Kurmanji of Turkey and the Kurmanji of Syria sit close enough that one Kurmanji interpreter can usually cover a speaker from any of the three once the variety is named. What we will not do is send a Sorani linguist and hope the register carries. Give us the home region at intake and the match is decided before anyone is in the room.
A large part of our Kurmanji caseload is asylum, and the interview is where the interpreter counts for most. The officer weighs the account almost phrase by phrase, and a village in the mountains of southeast Turkey or a date on the Syrian frontier is exactly the sort of detail a hurried rendering smooths away. We brief every Kurmanji interpreter to give the officer the answer as it was spoken, place names and dates kept, and to add nothing of their own. A relative who tries to help by tidying a hesitation causes real harm at this stage, so we never seat one in the interpreter's chair.
No state runs a court certification exam in Kurmanji, or in any other Kurdish variety, so a court works from a registered or otherwise qualified Kurmanji interpreter rather than a certified one. Tell us the court and the case type and we confirm what that bench will accept before the date is set. We take instructions from courts, attorneys and law firms directly, and we put the limit plainly: Prism is a private agency and holds no court appointment or approved-vendor listing.
Naturalization and adjustment-of-status interviews are the routine USCIS work, and they run on plain rendering, the question and the answer carried across with nothing added and nothing dropped. The paperwork behind these cases seldom reads as Kurdish, which is its own problem and one we handle below. For the interview itself we field a Kurmanji interpreter matched to the applicant's country, by phone or video where an in-person linguist sits far off, and in person for the appointments that need a person in the room.
Here is the part that surprises applicants: a Kurmanji speaker's civil records are almost never in Kurmanji. Someone from Turkey files a Turkish civil registry extract (nüfus kayıt örneği) printed in Latin letters under a Turkicised name. Someone from Syria may have an Arabic registry extract, or nothing more than a UNHCR camp registration. Someone from Iraq brings the Arabic civil status card, the nationality certificate or the unified national card. Kurmanji itself is written in the Latin Hawar alphabet in Turkey and Syria and in an Arabic-based script in Iraq and Iran, so one man can be Mehmet on his Turkish record, Muhammad on an Iraqi one and Mihemed in a letter he wrote himself. We translate each document from the language it is genuinely in, carry the issuing office across as printed, spell every name to the passport and flag the variants so an officer does not read one person as three. The full document service sits 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 Kurmanji interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Kurmanji 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 Kurmanji assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.