Deposition, hospital and USCIS interpreting across the US for the one person in the room who still thinks in Latvian, plus certified translation of Latvian records.
Prism Linguistics provides Latvian interpreters for depositions, court hearings, medical appointments and USCIS interviews anywhere in the United States, in person, by phone or by video, and certified English translation of Latvian birth, marriage and death certificates, Soviet-era bilingual records, passports and university diplomas for USCIS.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Latvian interpreting in the United States is a small, specific trade. The community is mostly English-speaking by the second generation, so a Latvian interpreter is booked for one person in one room: a parent visiting from Riga who has fallen ill, a witness in a case involving a Latvian company, a spouse at a green card interview. We take those bookings from our New York office and assign a Latvian linguist based near you for in-person work, or connect one by phone or video, usually the same day.
The post-war Latvian diaspora settled around Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Boston, New York and Los Angeles, and Latvian churches and community centers in those cities still anchor the population; post-1991 arrivals are scattered across the same metros and the West Coast. Roughly 86,000 Americans claim Latvian ancestry, and only a fraction speak the language daily.
Latvian or Russian? Check before you book. Around a third of Latvia's population speaks Russian at home, and a person born in Daugavpils or Riga may hold a Latvian passport and think entirely in Russian. Sending a Latvian interpreter to that person wastes the appointment. We ask at intake which language the person actually uses and assign accordingly.
Latvian is not among the languages tested by the National Center for State Courts and no state certifies court interpreters in it, so a court that needs one uses a registered or otherwise qualified Latvian interpreter, and it is exactly the kind of language a clerk cannot find on the day. Courts have come to us in those situations. The work is mostly civil: depositions with a Latvian party, family matters, the occasional criminal hearing. We work for courts, attorneys and law firms directly, and we are a private agency rather than a court-appointed vendor.
The typical patient is elderly, either a long-settled member of the diaspora whose English has thinned with age or a parent visiting an adult child. A provider that takes federal funding must supply a Latvian interpreter at no charge, and families often pay a stranger or press a grandchild into service instead. We send a Latvian medical interpreter in person for a diagnosis conversation, a surgical consent or a discharge plan, and by video for a follow-up.
Green card interviews for a Latvian spouse, naturalization interviews for older applicants who qualify for the English-test exemption, and the rare asylum matter make up the USCIS side. The officer expects a neutral interpreter who signs the interpreter declaration, not a family member, and a nervous seventy-year-old's grammar goes across exactly as spoken.
Most Latvian files hold a freshly reissued certificate rather than the original. Any Civil Registry Office in Latvia can reprint a birth or marriage record from the national register, so an event from the 1960s arrives on a current form with today's coat of arms, and the job is to translate that form as issued, not to reconstruct the Soviet original behind it. Where the original does survive it is bilingual, Russian on one side and Latvian on the other, and USCIS wants both halves rendered, since the Latvian side often spells the name differently.
Expect the passport name to differ from the birth name. Latvian law writes every personal name in Latvian form with a grammatical ending, so a foreign or historic surname changes in the passport and the original spelling may appear only on the remarks page. We translate the name as printed, quote the remarks entry and add a short note on the rule. Diplomas from the University of Latvia and Riga Technical University follow the same naming rule and come through for H-1B and I-140 filings. 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 Latvian interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Latvian 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 Latvian assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.