Certified translation of Latin diplomas, baptismal and marriage registers and old European church records, delivered by email anywhere in the US; no interpreting, because nobody speaks Latin.
Prism Linguistics provides certified English translation of Latin documents for USCIS filings, credential evaluators, licensing boards, courts and genealogists across the United States: university diplomas conferred in Latin, Catholic parish registers of baptism, marriage and burial, and historical church and civil records from Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Ireland and Italy. Latin has no interpreters, and we do not offer one.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Latin is the one language on this site for which the honest answer to the interpreter question is no. Nobody testifies in Latin, no clinic takes a history in it and no USCIS officer conducts an interview in it, so a request for a Latin interpreter is always something else in disguise: a document that needs a translator, or a client from Latin America who needs Spanish, Portuguese or a Mayan language. Latin translation, on the other hand, is steady work. It is handled from our New York office and delivered by email to clients in every state, because a diploma or a register page does not care where the translator sits.
Every enquiry we receive for a Latin interpreter falls into one of three groups, and none of them ends with an interpreter. The first is a graduate whose diploma is printed in Latin and who has been told by a licensing board or a credential evaluator that it must be translated. The second is a family holding a Catholic parish register entry or a century-old church record in Latin that a US agency or a foreign consulate wants in English. The third is someone who typed Latin when they meant Spanish. We send the first two to a Latin translator and the third to the right interpreter, and we explain the difference on the phone rather than take a booking that cannot be filled.
A handful of American universities still confer degrees in Latin; Yale prints every diploma that way and answers hundreds of translation requests a year, and Princeton does the same. Outside the university nobody can read the document, so a state licensing board, a foreign employer or an evaluator such as WES asks for a literal English translation with a signed statement of accuracy. Literal is the operative word. The Latin names the degree, the faculty and the date in a fixed formula, and a translator who paraphrases it into a modern English diploma has altered the document. We render the Latin line by line, keep the Latinized name of the institution beside its English one, and check first whether the university supplies its own translation, which is often free.
Roman Catholic parishes kept their registers in Latin across much of Europe into the late nineteenth century, and in Poland, Galicia, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia and Ireland the Latin entry is often the only record of a birth or marriage that survives. Those pages now arrive in estate matters, family petitions and citizenship applications, written in a priest's hand with ligatures, abbreviations and marginal notes that a general translator cannot read. Palaeography is the skill, not vocabulary. Our Latin translators read the hand, expand the abbreviations, translate the margin, where a legitimation or a later marriage usually sits, and identify the parish and diocese as written.
Applicants for Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Croatian and Irish citizenship by descent routinely hit a Latin record at the top of the chain: a baptism from a northern Italian parish before the state began civil registration in 1866, or a Galician marriage entry the Polish archives hold in Latin. The consulate wants the name chain unbroken, and Latin breaks it. Registers decline names, so Joannes, Joannis and Joanni are one man, and they Latinize them, so that same Joannes may be Jan, Giovanni or Sean depending on the parish. We give the vernacular form the family actually used, note the Latin, and convert the dating conventions, which in older registers may count from a feast day rather than a calendar date.
USCIS meets Latin through the baptismal certificate. When a civil birth record does not exist or cannot be obtained, USCIS accepts a baptismal record as secondary evidence of birth, provided the applicant explains why the civil record is unavailable, and a great many older baptismal certificates from Catholic parishes are in Latin. The same goes for a church marriage certificate offered in support of a spousal petition, and now and then for a canonical document from a diocesan tribunal. The translation has to be complete: the Latin entry, the priest's signature, the parish seal, and every marginal annotation, because the annotation is where a later marriage or a corrected date lives. We deliver it with a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy, name the parish and diocese exactly as they appear, and match the applicant's name to the passport spelling with the Latin form noted. The full document 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 Latin interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Latin 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 Latin assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.