Court, hospital and immigration interpreting across the US, staffed for Cyrillic exhibits and the credential a court expects, plus certified translation in either script.
Prism Linguistics provides Serbian interpreters for court hearings, depositions, medical appointments and immigration interviews anywhere in the United States, in person, by phone or by video, together with certified English translation of Serbian civil records, diplomas and police clearances written in Cyrillic or Latin script.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Serbian has been spoken in American steel and packing towns for well over a century, which is why the map of Serbian interpreting looks like the map of old industry: Chicago first and by a distance, then Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee and the mill towns of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana, with newer communities in Phoenix, Los Angeles, New York and Miami from the 1990s and 2000s. Our office is in New York and our Serbian interpreters are assigned near the job for in-person work, with phone and video covering the rest of the country.
Chicago is the Serbian capital of the United States by any count, with New York and Phoenix next, and the Census folds Serbian in with Bosnian and Croatian as Serbo-Croatian, so the language looks smaller on paper than it is on the ground. The people who need a Serbian interpreter today are mainly the parents of the post-Yugoslav arrivals: fluent enough for a factory floor, not for a cross-examination, a cardiology consultation or a naturalization interview.
Serbia, Bosnia or Croatia? It changes the vocabulary. Serbs from Banja Luka, from Knin and from Belgrade speak the same language with different everyday words, and an interpreter guessing at a regional term under oath is a problem we avoid by asking one question at intake. The second question is script. Serbian is written in Cyrillic and Latin interchangeably, and an interpreter asked to sight-translate a Cyrillic exhibit on the stand needs to read it at speed, which not every BCS-certified interpreter can. We ask that too.
The National Center for State Courts oral exam covers Serbian under the combined Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian label, and Washington is among the states certifying under it, so most courts accept a BCS-certified interpreter for a Serbian witness. Where a state has no BCS certification the court appoints a qualified interpreter. Tell us the court, the case type and whether Cyrillic exhibits will be read on the record, and we match the credential and the script skill. We take work from courts, attorneys and law firms as a private agency, not a court-appointed vendor.
Any provider that takes federal funding must offer a Serbian interpreter at no cost, and the typical patient is an older parent in Chicago, Cleveland or Milwaukee whose adult child has been doing the job unofficially. That works until the appointment is a cancer staging conversation, a psychiatric evaluation or a discussion of a living will, and then the child either softens the news or breaks down. We cover routine consultations by video and send a Serbian medical interpreter in person for the hard conversations.
Naturalization interviews for elders exempt from the English test, and adjustment interviews after a family petition, make up the Serbian USCIS work. The interpreter renders the officer's questions and the applicant's answers exactly, without prompting or improving, because the officer is testing the application against the answers. Where the file includes Cyrillic documents the officer may ask about, the interpreter should be able to read them. We assign a Serbian interpreter near the field office who does.
The extract from the register of births, the izvod iz matične knjige rođenih, arrives in Cyrillic or Latin depending on the office that printed it, in a domestic or an international multilingual form, and with an apostille from a court if the applicant thought to get one. USCIS wants all of it translated: the printed grid, the stamps, the handwritten annotations in the margin. The same goes for marriage extracts, divorce decrees, university diplomas and transcripts, and police clearance certificates. A translator who works only in Latin script slows down on a Cyrillic extract and skips the annotations; ours read both.
Then there is history. Serbs born in Bosnia or Croatia before 1991 hold extracts headed with a Yugoslav republic that no longer exists, and 1980s documents say SFRJ. We reproduce the issuing authority as printed and explain it in a translator's note. American clerks drop the diacritics, so Đorđević turns into Djordjevic on a driver's license; we follow the passport spelling and note the variant. Every translation carries a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy. 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 Serbian interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Serbian 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 Serbian assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.