Bulgarian Translation Services

Prism Language Solutions translates Bulgarian documents into English for USCIS, credential evaluators, courts and employers, and English material into Bulgarian where a US organization needs it read. The usual file is a municipal birth or marriage certificate, a diploma with its transcript, a criminal record certificate and an apostille sheet, each returned complete with a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy. Short certificates are normally ready inside 24 hours.

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

Bulgarian document work is rarely complicated in itself. A birth certificate from a municipal registrar runs to one page, a marriage certificate to one, and the vocabulary is settled. What makes the file go wrong is the alphabet: every name on a Bulgarian record is written in Cyrillic, and its Latin version depends on which decade the document was issued in.

• 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

Bulgarian Name Transliteration on a Certified Translation

Our rule here is fixed: the current travel document sets the spelling used through the English text, and every other Latin form in the bundle goes into a translator’s note beside the Cyrillic original. Mariya and Maria, Iliya and Ilia, Kostadinov and Kostadinoff all get written down. The adjudicator then has one page connecting the names rather than records that appear to belong to four people.

Bulgarian names also carry a patronymic in the middle position, formed from the father’s given name and inflected for sex, so Ivanov and Ivanova sit between the first name and the family name. US forms have no box for it and applicants routinely drop it. We keep it where the certificate puts it and say in the note what it is. If a petition shows a different arrangement, that is a question for the attorney.

Certified Bulgarian Translation of Municipal Civil Status Certificates

Bulgarian civil status records come from the municipality, the obshtina, not from a national registry. A birth certificate, an udostoverenie za razhdane, carries the municipal round seal, the registrar’s signature block and an act number with its date of entry. Duplicates are printed on demand, so a recent issue date on a 1970s birth is ordinary.

We translate the seal text, the act number, the registrar line and any handwritten amendment, not only the printed fields. Where a later event has been noted against the original entry, that annotation is the part a US officer wants and the part most often skipped. The mechanics of the certificate are on the certified translation page and the form-by-form list on the USCIS translation page.

• Birth certificate translation, seal and marginal annotations included
• Marriage certificates and divorce judgments from a rayonen or okrazhen sad
• Criminal record certificates for employment and immigration filings
• Death certificates and inheritance papers for a US estate

Which Bulgarian Authority Apostilles Which Document

Bulgaria has been a party to the Apostille Convention since 29 April 2001, and it is one of the few countries that splits the job four ways. The Ministry of Justice apostilles acts of the courts and notaries. The National Center for Information and Documentation apostilles education documents. The regional administrations apostille anything issued by a mayor or a municipal administration, a transfer that took effect on 1 January 2019 and still catches out people working from older guidance. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs takes the rest.

EU Multilingual Forms and Bulgarian Certificate Translation

Applicants arrive holding a multilingual standard form attached to their certificate and reasonably assume the translation problem is solved. Inside the European Union it often is. Regulation (EU) 2016/1191, applicable from 16 February 2019, lifted the apostille requirement between member states for birth, marriage, death and several other categories, and gave registrars an optional multilingual form so a receiving authority elsewhere in the EU needs no translator.

None of that reaches the United States. USCIS is not an EU authority and the underlying certificate is still a Bulgarian-language document under 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3). We translate it in full and render any Bulgarian entries on the form itself.

Bulgarian Diploma and Transcript Translation for Credential Evaluation

Bulgarian degrees reach us mainly on the way to a credential evaluator for an H-1B, an EB-2 or a state licensing board: the diploma za visshe obrazovanie with its supplement, or a secondary school diploma behind a nursing application. Marks run on a six-point scale where six is the best and three is the pass, the reverse of what an American reader assumes a low number means. We print the Bulgarian grade and explain the scale in a note rather than converting it, because converting it is the evaluator’s decision.

Institutional renaming is the other recurring problem. Universities were reorganized through the 1990s, so the name on a 1994 diploma may no longer exist. We render the institution as printed and note the current name where it is documented.

Bulgarian Interpreters for Hearings, Clinics and USCIS Interviews

Interpreting in Bulgarian is a smaller and different trade from the document work. There is almost no asylum caseload. What there is tends to be a commercial deposition, a custody hearing, a visiting parent who ends up in an emergency room, and the marriage-based adjustment interview where the applicant follows English until the officer asks the same question a second way.

Bulgarian raises no dialect problem worth the name, so the assignment turns on register. For a hearing or deposition see court interpreting, for an appointment medical interpreting, and for the interview USCIS interview interpreting. The national court exam is not offered in Bulgarian, so tell us the venue and we confirm what it accepts. Courts and attorneys retain us directly and we hold no court-appointed vendor status.

Bulgarian Translation Cost and Turnaround

A one-page municipal certificate is quoted from around $24.95 per page as a US market guide and usually goes back the next business day. Diplomas with a full supplement and multi-page judgments are priced per source word from roughly $0.10 and take two to four business days. Allow an extra day for handwriting: old registrar script in Cyrillic genuinely is the slow part. Figures are on the pricing page.

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