Court, deposition, hospital and USCIS interpreting across the US for Romanian and Moldovan speakers, plus certified translation of civil records in Latin or Cyrillic script.
Prism Linguistics provides Romanian interpreters for court hearings, depositions, medical appointments and USCIS interviews anywhere in the United States, in person, by phone or by video, and certified English translation of Romanian and Moldovan civil records, diplomas and police clearances.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Romanian reaches our booking sheet from two countries and, quite often, in a third language. Romania and Moldova share the language, a Moldovan caller may be more at home in Russian, and a Roma family from either country may need Romani instead, so the first minutes of intake go on settling which interpreter to send. Prism's one office is in New York; the interpreters are wherever the courtroom, the clinic or the USCIS field office happens to be, assigned by proximity for in-person work and connected by phone or video the same day.
Roughly 425,000 Americans claim Romanian ancestry, and the community clusters rather than spreads: Queens and northern New Jersey, the Chicago suburbs, Los Angeles and Orange County, Detroit and Cleveland, Phoenix, and a fast-growing Romanian and Moldovan population around Sacramento and Portland. The people who need a Romanian interpreter are seldom the engineers and nurses who emigrated. They are the parents brought over on family petitions, the grandmother at the cardiology appointment, and the witness who is fluent in English until the questions turn hostile.
Say the country at booking, not just the language. A Moldovan educated before 1991 may be more precise in Russian than in Romanian, and an interpreter who does not know that will hear testimony given in the speaker's second-best language. The reverse trap is Romani: it is not a dialect of Romanian, and a Roma elder assigned a Romanian interpreter will nod along and follow a fraction. Ten seconds on the phone sorts this out, and we ask every time.
Romanian has no oral certification exam through the National Center for State Courts consortium, so no state issues a certified Romanian court interpreter credential the way it does for Spanish or Russian. Courts accept a registered or otherwise qualified interpreter, and each state defines qualified its own way. Tell us the court and the case type and we confirm what the clerk will accept before the date is fixed. Depositions are the bulk of our Romanian legal work, often personal injury and trucking cases where a Romanian-speaking driver is the deponent, and an interpreter who has sat through one before keeps the record clean. Prism is a private agency, not a court-appointed vendor; courts and attorneys book us directly.
Any hospital or clinic that takes Medicare or Medicaid must offer a Romanian interpreter at no charge, and most Romanian families do not know it, so an adult child takes a day off work to interpret instead. That child rounds off the prognosis, skips the question about alcohol, and translates the consent form as sign here. A Romanian medical interpreter renders the oncologist's exact words and the patient's exact reply. Video works for a follow-up. For a diagnosis, a psychiatric evaluation or hospice planning we put someone in the room.
Naturalization interviews, adjustment of status and the occasional asylum claim out of Moldova make up the Romanian USCIS work. The rule for the interpreter is the same in each: render, do not repair. An officer asking about a gap in the marriage timeline is listening for hesitation as much as content, and an interpreter who smooths a halting answer into a fluent one has altered the evidence. We brief every Romanian interpreter on that before the appointment, and we do not accept a family member as a stand-in.
The Romanian documents in a US filing come from two systems. A Romanian certificat de naștere or certificat de căsătorie is a standard national form from the local civil status office, and newer versions carry the CNP, the personal numeric code, which must appear in the translation digit for digit. Moldovan applicants are less uniform: a current certificate from the Agenția Servicii Publice, a multilingual extract, or a Soviet-era ZAGS certificate printed in Russian and Moldovan Cyrillic. USCIS takes whichever document you hold provided the translation is complete, so a Cyrillic original is rendered in full, both languages where the form is bilingual, along with every stamp and marginal note.
The comma-below letters are where names go wrong. Romanian ș and ț were printed with a cedilla by older software and stripped entirely by American databases, which is how one family ends up with three spellings of a surname across a diploma, a birth certificate and a green card. We spell to the passport and note the variants. Degree certificates and the foaia matricolă, the cazier judiciar police clearance and divorce judgments follow the same rule. 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 Romanian interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Romanian 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 Romanian assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.