Saraiki from Multan and Bahawalpur, matched by name rather than sent as a Punjabi speaker, for USCIS, hospital and court work across the United States.
Prism Linguistics arranges Siraiki interpreters for USCIS interviews, medical appointments and court hearings across the United States, in person, by phone or by video, for speakers from southern Punjab, and provides certified English translation of the Urdu and English civil records those families hold.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Siraiki, also written Saraiki, is the language of southern Punjab, spoken around Multan and Bahawalpur by a community that Pakistan's 2023 census counted at close to 29 million people. Most who reach us are family members: a parent visiting on a family visa, an elderly relative at a clinic, an applicant sitting for a USCIS interview. Our office is in New York and our Siraiki linguists work across the country, so we send someone near the appointment for in-person work and connect by phone or video when that is faster, which for a language this thinly staffed in the US it often is.
The mistake that shows up again and again is booking Punjabi for a Siraiki speaker. The two share a great deal of vocabulary and are partly intelligible, so for a short clinic visit a Punjabi interpreter may get by. Put the same speaker under questioning at an asylum interview or a cross-examination, talking fast about a village near Multan, and the Punjabi interpreter starts to fill gaps with guesses.
If a Siraiki interpreter is not to hand, Urdu is the safer stand-in, not Punjabi. Most working-age Siraiki speakers also carry Urdu, the language of their schooling, so an Urdu interpreter covers more ground than a Punjabi one. It is the elderly parent, or anyone who left school early, who may speak Siraiki alone, and that is the person we assign an interpreter for.
Naturalization and adjustment interviews are the everyday work, and the asylum interview is where the care matters most. A Siraiki applicant describing events in southern Punjab needs an interpreter who follows the idiom and does not quietly translate it into Punjabi or round it into Urdu. We brief every interpreter to render each answer as it is given and to add nothing, and we never seat a bilingual relative in that chair. Tell us the country and the home district at intake and we assign a linguist matched to the speech of that area rather than a general Pakistani-languages linguist.
A visiting Siraiki-speaking parent is the classic hospital case, and the easy error is to hand the appointment to an adult child or to a Punjabi-speaking staff member. Any hospital or clinic that takes federal funding has to provide a Siraiki interpreter at no cost to the patient, and most families are never told this. Video works for a consultation or a specialist review. For a mental-health assessment, a discharge conversation, or an older patient who does better with someone in the room, we arrange an interpreter in person where one is within reach.
In-person Siraiki interpreters are scarce in the United States, so a great deal of the work runs remotely, and that is usually the honest answer rather than a fallback. A USCIS interview, a lawyer's consultation, a routine clinic visit: phone and video reach a qualified interpreter the same day when no local one is available. No state runs a certification exam in Siraiki, so a court works from a qualified interpreter, most often over video, and we tell the bench and the attorneys exactly what that interpreter holds. Prism takes this from courts and firms directly, and we are a private agency, not a vendor appointed by any court.
Pakistan does not issue civil records in Siraiki, so a Siraiki family's paperwork is Urdu and English paperwork. The birth record is a Union Council entry or a NADRA Child Registration Certificate printed in Urdu and English; the marriage record is a nikah nama in Urdu; older documents and affidavits tend to be Urdu only. Our translators render the Urdu in full and reconcile it against the English side of a NADRA form, which disagree on dates and fathers' names more often than you would expect. The Siraiki angle is the spelling. The language uses an extended Shahmukhi alphabet with letters for implosive sounds that Urdu has no signs for, so a Siraiki name is already flattened into Urdu spelling before it is romanised again for the passport. We spell to match the passport, note the variant on the original, and deliver 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 Siraiki interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Siraiki 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 Siraiki assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.