Asylum, immigration court and medical interpreting for Tshiluba speakers from the Kasai, with certified translation of French Congolese records and Tshiluba statements.
Prism Linguistics assigns Tshiluba interpreters for asylum interviews, immigration court, benefits hearings and medical appointments across the United States, and provides certified English translation of the French certificates and the Tshiluba statements that a Kasai family carries into a filing. Also written Ciluba, it is a language of the Congo's Kasai region. Our office is in New York and the interpreter is placed near the case, in person, by phone or by video.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Tshiluba, also spelled Ciluba, is one of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's four national languages and the everyday speech of the Kasai region, but the paperwork of the state is written in French. That split runs through every Congolese case we handle. The certificate a family shows is French; the account behind it, the part that decides an asylum claim, is told in Tshiluba. We work from New York and place a linguist near the interview or the hearing.
Congo has become one of the largest sources of new arrivals. In fiscal year 2024 Congolese nationals were the biggest single group of refugees admitted to the country, close to twenty thousand people, and many of them speak Tshiluba first. They land in the resettlement cities rather than on the coasts: Columbus, Phoenix, the Dakotas, upstate New York, Idaho. That is where the demand sits, and where we concentrate the network.
Ask the province before you assign. Tshiluba has an eastern form among the Luba of Kasai-Oriental and a western form among the Lulua of Kasai-Occidental, parted mostly by tone and word choice, so one interpreter can generally handle either, though we still check. The sharper question is whether the person needs Tshiluba at all. Plenty of Kasai adults carry French or Lingala as well, and sending a French interpreter to a village grandmother is a failure dressed up as a match.
The asylum interview is where a Tshiluba interpreter earns the fee. An officer weighs the applicant's exact words, the pauses and the small contradictions, and an interpreter who tidies an answer or fills a silence hands over a different story than the one that was told. We brief every Tshiluba interpreter to render and nothing else, and we never seat a bilingual relative in that chair. For a survivor recounting violence in the Kasai, the interpreter's steadiness is part of whether the account holds together.
Removal proceedings and bond hearings are the other steady stream. No state offers a certification exam in Tshiluba, so an immigration judge relies on a qualified interpreter, and this is exactly the rare language a court cannot source on its own and comes to us for. We take assignments from attorneys and courts directly and place the interpreter with the case, in person where the docket sits near a linguist and by video where it does not. We are a private agency and no court keeps us on an approved list. Tell us the court and the hearing type and we confirm what will be accepted before the date.
In a clinic the wrong assumption is that a Congolese patient must speak French. A Kasai patient may follow only Tshiluba, and a hospital that takes federal funding has to provide that interpreter at no cost, a right most families never hear about. Video works for a consultation, a consent conversation or a specialist review. For a mental health assessment, an obstetric visit, or an elderly patient far from any French, we send a person into the room where the network allows.
Two languages sit in one Congolese file, and they take two different translators. The acte de naissance from a commune's bureau de l'état civil is French, and where a birth was declared late the jugement supplétif from a peace court is French too, so those go to our French desk. The Tshiluba work is the human layer: affidavits, a church letter, a relative's sworn account of events no register recorded. Names are the trap here. The same child can appear under a Tshiluba name at home, a French baptismal name on the certificate, and yet another spelling on a refugee travel document, so we set the spelling to the travel document and flag every variant. 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 Tshiluba interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Tshiluba 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 Tshiluba assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.