Court, hospital and benefits-hearing interpreting in Diné bizaad across the Four Corners states and by phone or video nationwide, with written Navajo translation.
Prism Linguistics provides Navajo interpreters for state and federal court hearings, Indian Health Service and hospital appointments, benefits hearings and attorney meetings in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and anywhere else in the United States, in person, by phone or by video, and translates court notices and medical documents into written Navajo.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Navajo is the most spoken Native American language in the United States and one of only three, with Spanish and Haitian Creole, to carry a federal court interpreter certification. Nearly every Navajo speaker is a US citizen, so the work looks nothing like our other languages: no asylum interviews, no birth certificates to translate, and instead a steady run of court hearings, Indian Health Service consults and benefits appeals where an elder needs Diné bizaad. Prism's office is in New York; our Navajo interpreters live in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, where the work is, and phone or video reaches anywhere.
Around 81,000 Arizonans speak Navajo at home, which makes it the state's third language after English and Spanish, and it sits among the fifteen most spoken languages in New Mexico and Utah. The Navajo Nation covers parts of all three states, an area larger than West Virginia, and the courts, hospitals and agencies that serve it sit in Flagstaff, Gallup, Farmington, Phoenix, Albuquerque and Salt Lake City. New Mexico's courts count Navajo among their five most requested languages.
The difference is age, not geography. Navajo varies little from Tuba City to Shiprock; it varies enormously between a seventy-year-old and a thirty-year-old. Elders speak a formal Navajo built on kinship terms, in sentences English has no shortcut for, while younger speakers switch between Navajo and English mid-sentence. The elder's answer takes longer. It should. Cutting it short to keep pace with the judge is a change of testimony.
Federal courts in Arizona and New Mexico hear a steady stream of cases arising on the Nation, because serious crimes on tribal land fall under federal jurisdiction, and a Navajo-speaking witness or defendant there is entitled to a certified interpreter under the Court Interpreters Act. State courts in Arizona and New Mexico keep their own Navajo credentials, and the University of Arizona's Navajo Interpreter Training Institute has trained many of the interpreters they rely on. Tell us the court and the case type and we say which credential it expects and whether we can supply it for your date. The Navajo Nation's own district courts and Peacemaking Program work in Navajo with their own people; we cover the state and federal courtrooms around them. Prism is a private agency, not a court-appointed vendor.
Indian Health Service hospitals and the tribally run facilities that have taken over some of them serve a population in which diabetes, kidney disease and cancer care produce long, technical conversations, and Navajo has no single word for most of the terms in them. A Navajo medical interpreter explains a biopsy or dialysis in a phrase, checks the patient has understood, and then renders the reply. Any IHS facility or hospital taking federal money owes a Navajo speaker an interpreter at no cost. The off-reservation hospitals in Phoenix, Albuquerque, Flagstaff and Salt Lake City, where elders are transferred for specialist care, are where a family most often finds nobody on staff who speaks Navajo and calls us.
Distances on the Nation make in-person interpreting a day's work; a hearing in Flagstaff or Gallup can be three hours from the interpreter's home. Phone and video Navajo interpreting handles the routine cases, a benefits review, a pharmacy consult, an attorney's call with a client. Two cautions from experience. Broadband and cell coverage on the reservation are patchy, so we test the connection before a video appointment rather than during it. And an elder speaks more freely to a person in the room, so for a capacity assessment, a custody matter or a long deposition we still send someone.
The paperwork in a Navajo speaker's life is written in English: the birth certificate, the Certificate of Indian Blood, the court summons, the consent form. So Navajo translation runs backwards from every other language on this site. A court or a federally funded provider with a Title VI language-access plan may need a notice of rights, a discharge instruction or a patient survey rendered into written Navajo, and we produce it in the standard orthography with its tone marks and nasal hooks intact. Then we tell the client the part nobody wants to hear: most fluent Navajo speakers do not read it. A written Navajo translation earns its keep when it is paired with a recorded or in-person reading, and we supply both. Sight translation, an interpreter reading an English document aloud in Navajo at the bedside or the counsel table, is the more common request and is booked as interpreting. For a record that must be certified in English, the certified translation service applies.
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 Navajo interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Navajo 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 Navajo assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.