Afrikaans Translation Services

Afrikaans is the exception in this part of the world: documents really are written in it. Older South African certificates, identity books, title deeds, wills, antenuptial contracts, court papers and school reports carry Afrikaans headings, stamps and handwritten entries, and USCIS requires every non-English word rendered into English. Prism Language Solutions translates those pages in full and certifies them, and supplies Afrikaans interpreters for the speakers who can manage in English but should not have to.

Last reviewed September 12, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Language Solutions

Afrikaans was one of South Africa’s two official languages until 1994 and the language of the administration that produced most of the country’s older paperwork. It was also official in South West Africa, now Namibia, alongside German and English. That history is the whole of the translation business in this language: the deeper into a family archive you go, the more Afrikaans there is.

• Certified translations prepared to meet USCIS requirements
• Human linguists only, matched to the subject
• Fixed written quote within 60 minutes in business hours
• One office in New York, linguists in every state

Certified Afrikaans Translation for a USCIS Filing

Certification under 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3) is about the document, not the majority of the document. Any part of a page that is not in English needs a certified English translation, so a bilingual Home Affairs certificate from the 1970s or an identity book with Afrikaans field labels is a translation job even where the names and dates are legible to an English reader.

We translate the whole page: printed headings, rubber stamps, the endorsement on the reverse, the annotation in the margin. Fields already in English are shown as such so the officer can see nothing was passed over, and departmental names stay as printed, since Binnelandse Sake and Home Affairs are the same office. Every item carries a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy: see certified translation.

Afrikaans Entries on Older South African Certificates and ID Books

The certificates families hold rarely match the one they were told to get. Since 2013 the Department of Home Affairs has issued only the unabridged birth certificate, which is in English and names both parents. Anything older sits in a different world: the abridged form, the green bar-coded identity book, a marriage register entry, a vault copy of the original handwritten registration.

On those, Afrikaans and English share the form and the handwriting is decades old, so the work is transcription first and translation second. Read the entry, render the Afrikaans, print the names exactly as the registering clerk wrote them, and mark anything genuinely illegible rather than producing a tidy date the original does not support. Where the rest of the bundle is in an African language, Zulu and Xhosa cover that half.

Afrikaans Translation of Deeds, Wills and Antenuptial Contracts

Estate and property work is where Afrikaans translation gets technical, and it is a large part of what we do in this language. A will, a title deed, a bond, an executor’s appointment from the Master of the High Court, a liquidation and distribution account: any of these may be drawn in Afrikaans, in a legal vocabulary that does not survive casual translation.

Afrikaans School Reports and University Transcripts for US Evaluation

Credential evaluators and admissions offices see South African records constantly and still send them back for translation, because subject names, grading terms and the school’s own headings are in Afrikaans even when the certificate title is English. A matric statement, a technikon record, a rapport from a Free State dorpskool: all of it has to cross into English before an evaluator will score it.

We translate the document as laid out, keep symbols and percentages exactly as recorded, and note the awarding body as printed. Converting South African marks to a US scale is the evaluator’s job, not the translator’s, and a translation that does it anyway tends to be rejected. See academic transcript translation and diploma translation.

Why a Dutch Translator Is Not an Afrikaans Translator

Afrikaans grew out of the Dutch of the seventeenth-century Cape and the two remain close on the page, which is why the substitution is so tempting and so often made. A Dutch reader can get the gist of an Afrikaans newspaper. That is not the same as being able to certify a South African deed.

The grammar has diverged, the everyday vocabulary further, and the apparatus a document refers to is entirely South African: Home Affairs, the Master of the High Court, the magistrate’s court, the Deeds Office. Afrikaans also carries false friends that read perfectly well to a Dutch eye and mean something else. Our Afrikaans linguists grew up in the language; Dutch translation is a separate service, quoted separately.

Namibian Documents in Afrikaans, German and English

Namibia made English its sole official language at independence in 1990, under Article 3 of its constitution. Before that, under South African administration, Afrikaans, German and English all held official standing, so a Namibian family file crosses three languages depending on when each paper was issued.

In practice a 1985 birth record is likely to be Afrikaans, a modern one English, and anything from the German colonial period German and in a script an ordinary reader cannot follow. We sort a bundle by language before quoting, so you pay for Afrikaans where it is Afrikaans. German material is handled by German translation.

Afrikaans Interpreters for Depositions, Clinics and Resettlement Appointments

Almost every Afrikaans speaker who books an interpreter could hold the conversation in English and has decided, rightly, that this is not the conversation to do it in. A witness at a deposition wants the language she thinks in; an elderly patient loses her English between the waiting room and the diagnosis. A resettlement pathway for Afrikaners opened under Executive Order 14204 in 2025, with the first arrivals that May, putting the language on caseloads that had never carried it.

No state examines court interpreters in Afrikaans, so the bench decides what qualifications it accepts and we set that out before the date rather than on the morning. Regional accent matters more than people expect, so we ask whether the speaker is from the Cape, the Free State or the Northern Cape. See court interpreting and the pricing page.

Questions we get asked