Asylum, court and hospital interpreting across the US for Eritrean and Tigrayan speakers, plus certified translation of records written in the Ge'ez script.
Prism Linguistics provides Tigrinya interpreters for asylum interviews, immigration court, hearings and medical appointments anywhere in the United States, in person, by phone or by video, assigned by whether the speaker is Eritrean or from Tigray, together with certified English translation of Eritrean and Ethiopian records.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Most of the people who need a Tigrinya interpreter are in the middle of an asylum case. They are Eritreans who left an open-ended national service, and since 2020 a growing number of Tigrayans from northern Ethiopia. Our office is in New York; our Tigrinya interpreters live in the cities where those two communities have settled, and for phone or video we can usually connect the same day. The first thing we settle on any booking is which country the speaker comes from.
The Eritrean diaspora clusters around Washington DC and northern Virginia, the East Bay, Seattle, Denver, the Twin Cities, Las Vegas and Columbus, with Tigrayan families from Ethiopia often in the same neighborhoods and the same churches. That closeness is a trap for a booking desk. Eritrean Tigrinya and Tigray Tigrinya are one language on paper and audibly different in the room, and an asylum applicant may not want to tell their story through someone they hear as the other side of a war. We ask, we assign on the answer, and we do not treat the two as interchangeable.
Three languages get confused on the form. Amharic is Ethiopia's working language and a separate language from Tigrinya; a Tigrinya speaker may follow some of it and still be lost in a hearing. Tigre, spoken in Eritrea's western and coastal lowlands, is different again despite the near-identical name, and a request that says Tigre when it means Tigrinya, or the reverse, sends the wrong person. Give us the speaker's home town and we sort out which of the three you need.
Most of our Tigrinya work is the credible fear screening, the asylum office interview and the master and individual hearings in immigration court. An Eritrean claim usually rests on national service, detention, religion or the border crossing, and the account often comes out in fragments and out of order. The interpreter's job is to carry it across exactly like that. A rendering that tidies the sequence or supplies a missing word hands the adjudicator a rehearsed-sounding story the applicant never told. We brief every Tigrinya interpreter for that setting and never send a relative in their place.
No state certifies court interpreters in Tigrinya and there is no federal exam for it, so a judge works from registered or otherwise qualified interpreters, and outside a handful of cities the court's own roster is empty. That is when the clerk calls a private agency. We supply Tigrinya interpreters to state and immigration courts and to attorneys for depositions, in person or by video. Name the court and the case type and we tell you honestly what that bench will accept. We are a private agency, not a court-appointed vendor.
A hospital that takes federal funding has to provide a Tigrinya interpreter free of charge, and the shortcut that fails is the phone line offering Amharic instead. The patients who need one are usually parents who arrived later through family reunification, not the adults who came first, and a diagnosis explained through a grandchild loses the parts the family finds hardest to say. Video handles a clinic visit or a prescription review. For a mental health assessment, which comes up often in this community, we send someone in person.
Tigrinya is written in the Ge'ez script, and the documents that reach us split by country. Eritrean records, when they exist, carry Gregorian dates and come from the municipality or the parish; Tigray records from Ethiopia carry Ethiopian calendar dates that sit seven to eight years behind, and a translation showing only one calendar creates a mismatch with the passport, so we show both. Many Eritrean asylees will not approach their own embassy, which means a lost or never-issued record is not going to be replaced, and the file leans on whatever the family carried out: a baptismal certificate, a school transcript, an old identity card, a church marriage record. We tell you when USCIS will want an affidavit explaining why the primary record does not exist. Names run given name, father, grandfather, with no surname and no fixed Latin spelling, so we spell to the passport and note the original. Every seal and margin is translated and the work is delivered with a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy; the full 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 Tigrinya interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Tigrinya 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 Tigrinya assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.