Corsican Translation Services

Prism Language Solutions translates Corsican into English for US courts, probate files and immigration matters. The demand is genuinely small, and we would rather say so than sell you a service you do not need: civil records from Corsica are issued in French by the mairie, so most of what arrives in a Corsican file is a French translation job. What is really in Corsican tends to be private writing, a will, a letter, a recording or a statement, and that goes to a Corsican translator.

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

This page is shorter than the others on this site, deliberately. There is not much honest content to put on it. Corsican is a living language with somewhere around 100,000 active speakers on the island, on the 2020 sociolinguistic survey commissioned by the Corsican authorities, which found 39 per cent of adult residents to be active speakers. Every one of them also speaks French, and the French state does not issue documents in Corsican.

• 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

Civil Records from Corsica Are French, Not Corsican Documents

Corsica is two French departments, and its town halls run the same état civil as any commune in mainland France. The birth record, the marriage record and the death record are French, printed on French forms. Corsican has no official status in the Republic: article 2 of the French Constitution makes French the language of the Republic, and the regional languages sit outside it.

What that means for your file is practical. Ask for the copie intégrale of the act rather than an extract, because the full copy carries the marginal entries where a later marriage, divorce or death was recorded against the birth, and those margins are what a US adjudicator reads. Then send it for French translation, not Corsican. The French page covers the document set and the recurring problems: see French translation.

What in a Corsican File Genuinely Needs a Corsican Translator

A real Corsican translation job looks like private writing rather than officialdom, and it is usually the heart of the matter rather than a formality.

These are slower and more expensive per page than French work, and that is honest pricing rather than a premium for rarity: fewer people can do it, handwriting is hard, and a recording has to be listened to several times before a word of it is written down.

• A will, a codicil or a family agreement written in Corsican, for a US probate or an estate with island property
• Letters and notebooks offered as evidence of a relationship or a hardship claim
• Recordings and voice messages, transcribed in Corsican and translated alongside
• A statement or declaration a witness chose to give in Corsican
• Parish, school and local association records with Corsican entries

Certified work carries the signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy described on the certified translation page, and where a USCIS filing is involved the rule is 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3): every foreign-language page translated in full.

The French Apostille on a Corsican Document File

If a receiving body has asked for an apostille, the French procedure changed recently and older guidance is now wrong. Since 1 May 2025 the apostille is issued by the notarial profession through fifteen regional and interdepartmental councils of notaries, not by the public prosecutor at a court of appeal, and since 1 September 2025 the same bodies handle legalisation for countries outside the Apostille Convention. France has been a party to the Convention since 24 January 1965.

Get the apostille attached before the document reaches us. It is a page of text like any other and we translate it with the record, so a document apostilled afterwards means handling the file twice. More at apostille translation.

Corsican Names and Place Names on a Certified Translation

The island writes many of its own names differently from the French administration, and both forms are legitimate. Portivechju and Porto-Vecchio are the same town; Aiacciu and Ajaccio are the same city. Surnames drift between an Italianate spelling on an old parish register and a French one on a modern identity document, and Corsican family names often look Italian because the island’s written tradition ran through Tuscan for centuries.

Our practice is to reproduce whatever form each document uses, run the applicant’s own name through the English text in the passport spelling, and set out the alternatives in a translator’s note. A translation that quietly standardizes the spellings hides the very thing a reader needs to see.

Corsican Interpreters and the Italian Mistake

Interpreting requests in Corsican are rare and nearly always narrow: a recording that a French interpreter will not swear to, an elderly speaker who is exact in Corsican and approximate in French, or testimony where the choice of language is itself in issue. Most of the time a French interpreter serves the speaker better, sooner and for less, and we will say so before you book.

Questions we get asked