French document translation for Togolese and Beninese families, and Mina (Gen) interpreting by phone or video for USCIS, asylum and hospital appointments across the US.
Prism Linguistics translates the French civil records that Mina speakers, who call the language Gen, carry from Togo and Benin into certified English, and supplies Mina interpreters by phone or video for USCIS interviews, asylum interviews, court hearings and medical appointments across the United States.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Mina, which its own speakers call Gen, is a coastal language of south-east Togo and southern Benin with something like 600,000 native speakers, and almost none of its paperwork is written in it. Togo and Benin keep their registers in French, so a Mina case is usually a French translation job with a Mina interpreter attached. Our office is in New York and, for a community this size, the interpreter works by phone or video far more often than in the room. We ask one thing early: is the person really from the Gen-speaking coast, because that decides whether Mina or Ewe is the language to send.
Ask for Mina by name, not Ewe. Mina sits in the Gbe group alongside Ewe and Fon, close relatives that are not interchangeable. Send an Ewe interpreter to a speaker from the Maritime Region of Togo and the vocabulary starts to drift, quietly, in exactly the places a hearing cares about. When the person comes from the coastal south-east, we book Gen and mark it that way on the assignment sheet.
A working-age applicant from Lomé has almost certainly grown up with French too, and for many appointments French is the practical choice. The people who actually need Mina are older relatives, market traders whose working life ran in the language, and anyone giving evidence about a childhood in a Gen-speaking town. For those accounts we reach for a Mina speaker rather than lean on French.
No state runs a certification exam in Mina, so a court that needs an interpreter uses a qualified one, and a language this rare is why the request reaches an agency at all. We place a Mina interpreter, most often by phone or video for a hearing set ahead of time, and we take instruction from courts, attorneys and law firms directly. Prism is a private agency, not a court-appointed vendor.
Asylum work, though not large in Mina, is where precision matters most. The officer weighs the applicant's own words, so an interpreter who slides into French where the account was lived in Gen, or tidies a broken answer, hands over a different story. We assign a Mina speaker matched to the Togolese or Beninese coast, brief them to render only what is said, and keep relatives out of the interpreter's chair.
A hospital that receives federal funds must provide a Mina interpreter at no cost, and few Togolese or Beninese families know to ask. Video carries a consultation or a consent conversation well enough. For an older patient, or a mental health assessment where a French approximation would mislead, we try to reach an interpreter who can attend, and we are candid at intake about how likely that is.
A Mina family's documents are French. The record that reaches USCIS is a French acte de naissance from a centre d'état civil or a mairie, a marriage or divorce record, a school certificate, a police clearance. So the translation runs French to English, and the job is knowing what each paper actually is rather than what it looks like.
The one that trips people is the jugement supplétif. Togo requires a birth to be declared within 45 days, and anyone registered later holds a judgment from the tribunal de première instance that stands in for the birth certificate. Call it a birth certificate in the translation and you misdescribe it; we translate the judgment as a judgment and add a note so the officer sees why an adult holds a recent judgment for a birth decades earlier. Names carry a French spelling on the passport, and we follow the passport. 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 Mina interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Mina 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 Mina assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.