Italian Translation Services

Prism Language Solutions translates Italian documents into English and English documents into Italian for use in the United States and at Italian consulates. Two streams of work dominate: civil records issued by an Italian comune that a US body needs in English, and American birth, marriage and death certificates that have to go into Italian for a citizenship by descent application. Both are delivered complete, with a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy.

Last reviewed September 11, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Language Solutions

Italian is the one language on this site where most of our volume runs into the language rather than out of it. The reason is citizenship by descent. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have an Italian-born ancestor, and the file a consulate wants is built almost entirely from US paperwork that has to be produced in Italian. That is a different job from translating an Italian certificate for USCIS, with a different standard of finish and a much less forgiving reader at the far end.

• 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

Italian Comune Records: Certificato and Estratto Translation

Italian civil records come from the Ufficio di Stato Civile of the comune where the event was registered, signed by the Ufficiale dello Stato Civile. There are two forms and they are not interchangeable. The certificato di nascita gives the date and place of birth and little else. The estratto dell'atto di nascita gives more: the time of birth, the parents' names, and civil status annotations such as a marriage or a divorce recorded against the entry.

That distinction decides cases. If what you are proving is parentage or a marital history, the estratto is the document, and a certificato will simply be silent on the point. We translate whichever arrives, including the annotations and the comune's stamp, and we say in the delivery note when the form you sent does not appear to carry the information the recipient asked for.

Certified Italian Translation for USCIS and US Agencies

Out of Italian, the work is the familiar immigration and administrative set: civil records for a family petition, a divorce judgment, a police certificate, an Italian degree for a licensing board, an estate document where property in Italy is involved. Italian records are legible and well structured, which makes this quick work, and the usual delay is a scan that cuts off the comune's stamp at the edge of the page.

Certificate wording and delivery are on the certified translation page; form-by-form requirements are on the USCIS translation page.

• Birth, marriage and death records from any comune
• Divorce judgments and annulments
• Casellario giudiziale criminal record certificates
• Passports, identity cards and driver’s licenses
• Notarial deeds, wills and property records

English to Italian Translation for Citizenship by Descent

A jure sanguinis file is a chain: the Italian ancestor's record, then a birth, marriage or death certificate for every person linking that ancestor to the applicant, plus naturalization evidence for the ancestor. Consulates ask for the foreign documents with an official Italian translation attached, and they do not translate anything for you. The Consulate General in Chicago says so in as many words.

The rules changed in 2025. Law 74 of 23 May 2025, converting Decree-Law 36 of 28 March 2025, narrowed automatic transmission of citizenship to people born abroad who hold another citizenship, with exceptions that turn on the ancestor's own citizenship and on residence in Italy, and with applications lodged before 27 March 2025 treated under the earlier rules. We are translators and not citizenship advisers, so take the eligibility question to the consulate or an Italian attorney. What we can tell you is that files under the new rules are examined more closely, and a translation that hides a name discrepancy rather than showing it is now a liability.

Italian Apostille and Consular Document Translation

For a US document going to an Italian authority, the apostille comes from the Secretary of State of the state that issued the record, and a federal document is apostilled by the US Department of State. Order it before the translation, because the apostille is itself a document and it has to appear in Italian alongside the certificate it is attached to. Applicants who translate first almost always pay twice.

One more sequencing point that catches people: an apostille attaches to a specific certified copy. If you later obtain a fresh copy of the same birth certificate, the old apostille does not travel with it. See apostille translation and notarized translation.

Italian Diploma and Academic Transcript Translation

Italian qualifications are translated under their own names. A laurea triennale is the three-year first degree and a laurea magistrale the two-year second cycle, while older single-cycle degrees awarded before the Bologna reforms carry the plain title laurea and are not the same thing as either. Marks run out of thirty for individual examinations and out of one hundred and ten for the final degree, with lode as the distinction, and none of that means anything to an American reader without a note. We supply the note and leave the equivalence to the evaluator. See diploma translation and academic transcript translation.

Italian Legal and Business Document Translation

Attorneys send us contracts, judgments, company records from the chamber of commerce, and probate material where a decedent held property in Italy. Italian legal drafting is long-sentenced and highly formulaic, and the temptation to tidy it into brisk American English is a mistake: the structure carries meaning, and a court comparing the two texts wants to see them correspond. We keep the register and the sentence architecture, and we leave a Latin term as a Latin term.

Commercial and litigation work is described on the legal translation and business translation pages.

Italian Translation Cost and Turnaround

Italian is a deep-pool language in the US and prices near the bottom: certified pages from around $24.95 as a market guide, running text from about $0.10 per source word. Citizenship files are quoted as a set rather than document by document, because a dozen short certificates translated together cost less than a dozen separate orders and arrive as one package. A single certificate goes out within 24 hours. A full descent file is usually two to five business days depending on how many generations it covers. Ranges are on the pricing page.

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