Prism Language Solutions translates Lithuanian into English for USCIS petitions, courts, credential evaluators and attorneys, and English into Lithuanian for US organizations that need it. The regular items are civil status register extracts, Soviet-era and 1990s certificates, university diplomas, police clearances and judgments, all delivered with a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy. The single most useful thing we add to a Lithuanian file is a note explaining the surnames.
Last reviewed September 12, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Language Solutions
Around 36,000 people spoke Lithuanian at home in the United States on American Community Survey estimates for 2017 to 2021, and they cluster hard, with Illinois holding the largest community by a wide margin and smaller concentrations around Cleveland, New York, Boston and Philadelphia. It is a small language here, and it produces a steady, technical stream of document work.
Start with the thing that trips up every file. Lithuanian surnames carry grammatical endings that differ by sex and, in the traditional forms, by marital status. Petrauskas, Petrauskiene and Petrauskaite are a husband, his wife and their daughter, one family name in three shapes. An American form has flattened all three to Petrauskas at some point in the last thirty years, and now the certificates and the petition do not agree.- 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
Lithuanian Surname Endings on a Certified Translation
The traditional endings do real grammatical work: -iene marks a married woman, -aite, -yte and -ute an unmarried daughter, and the masculine forms end in -as, -is or -us. Since a 2003 resolution of the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language a woman may instead take a short form ending in -e, which carries no marital information at all, so a modern Lithuanian passport may show a surname that looks unrelated to her mother's.
Our practice is fixed and worth stating. We spell the applicant exactly as the travel document does, reproduce every relative's surname with its ending as printed on the record it came from, and attach a short translator's note explaining the grammar. That note is three sentences and it stops an officer reading four surnames as four unrelated people. We do not standardize a family's names to look consistent. Doing that would conceal the very information a Lithuanian record is carrying.
Civil Status Register Extracts and Certified Lithuanian Translation for USCIS
Two people from one family can hand you two entirely different documents for the same kind of event, and both are genuine. Lithuania stopped issuing civil status certificates at the beginning of 2017, so anything ordered since then is an extract from the civil status register, issued by a municipal Civil Registry Office on a form set by the Minister of Justice. An older sibling's paperwork is a Soviet-era booklet or a 1990s certificate printed in Lithuanian and Russian, naming a registry office that has since been renamed.
A translator's job here is to call each document what it actually is and keep the issuing body as the page prints it, rather than quietly modernizing an office name that no longer exists. Under 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3) the English version has to be complete, which includes the seals, the reference numbers and the Russian half of an older bilingual form; for that half see Russian translation. Lithuania has been in the Apostille Convention since 1997, so an apostille is available where a foreign authority asks for one, though USCIS does not. Format details at certified translation.
Original-Spelling Surnames in a Lithuanian Document Since 2022
A change worth knowing about if your file spans the last few years. The Law on the Spelling of the Name and Surname in Documents was passed by the Seimas on 18 January 2022 and took effect on 1 May that year, allowing certain Lithuanian citizens to have a name written with Latin characters that the Lithuanian alphabet does not contain, specifically q, w and x and digraphs such as cz and sz, though without foreign diacritics. The Constitutional Court upheld the provision in July 2023.
In practice that means a Polish-Lithuanian or foreign-origin surname may now appear in its original spelling on a new passport while the person's birth record from the 1980s still carries the Lithuanianized version. Both documents are correct. Each is translated as printed, identified for what it is, and accompanied by a note on the statutory change, so nobody has to reconstruct the reason from scratch.
Lithuanian Diploma, Transcript and Police Clearance Translation
Diplomas from Vilnius University, Kaunas University of Technology and the other state institutions arrive for H-1B and I-140 petitions and for credential evaluation, usually with a diploma supplement that lists the courses, the credits and the grading scale. Send the supplement. Grades and course titles are translated as printed and the scale explained in a note, because converting a Lithuanian mark into an American grade is the evaluator's decision and not the translator's.
Police clearance certificates from the Information Technology and Communications Department come through for immigration and for licensing, and they are short. See diploma translation and police clearance translation.
Lithuanian Interpreters for Depositions, Hospitals and Green Card Interviews
The person who needs a Lithuanian interpreter is rarely the person who called. It is a parent brought over after retirement, a spouse who arrived last year, or a witness whose working English carries a meeting but not a cross-examination. Lithuanian has no state certification exam anywhere in the country, so courts seat a qualified interpreter, sometimes after a short voir dire, and that is a conversation to have with the clerk in advance rather than on the morning.
Do not accept Russian as a substitute unless the speaker asks for it. A booking desk that cannot find Lithuanian will sometimes offer Russian on the reasoning that anyone schooled before 1990 learned it. They did, and many will not testify in it; the answers come out clipped and the transcript reads that way. See court interpreting and USCIS interview interpreting.Lithuanian Translation Cost and Turnaround
Pricing follows the usual European pattern: short certified documents from around $24.95 per page as a US market guide, running text from roughly $0.10 per source word. A register extract or a one-page certificate that arrives legible is usually delivered within a business day; a diploma with its supplement, or a judgment running to many pages, takes two to five. Handwritten Soviet-era entries take longer and we say so when we quote. Guide ranges are published at pricing.
Ready to start? Send the document or the booking details through the quote form, call +1 (833) 282 8883, or email info@prismlinguistics.com. You get a fixed written price within 60 minutes during business hours.
Questions we get asked
Why do my parents and I have three different surnames on our Lithuanian documents?
My sister's Lithuanian certificate looks nothing like mine. Is one of them wrong?
My new Lithuanian passport spells my surname with a W, but my birth record does not. Why?
Is there a certified Lithuanian court interpreter in the United States?
Sources for this page
- 8 CFR § 103.2(b)(3): USCIS requires a full English translation certified as complete and accurate
- Ministry of Justice of Lithuania: rules on the spelling of personal names; the 2022 law permitting q, w, x and digraphs in identity documents
- Library of Congress: Lithuania's Constitutional Court ruled in July 2023 that non-Lithuanian Latin characters in documents are constitutional
- Lithuanian feminine surnames: traditional endings mark marital status, and a 2003 resolution of the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language allows a neutral form ending in -e
- HCCH status table, Apostille Convention: Lithuania acceded 5 November 1996, in force 19 July 1997