Maay Translation Services

Prism Language Solutions works in Maay Maay, the language of the Somali Bantu from the river valleys of southern Somalia, and the first thing we do on a Maay job is check that the booking is not really a Somali one. Most Maay work is spoken: asylum interviews, clinic visits, hearings. The certified side is unusual, because Somalia has no functioning civil registry, so what we translate is the affidavit, the UNHCR card and the camp school record a family holds instead of a birth certificate.

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

Roughly 13,000 Somali Bantu refugees were resettled in the United States between 2003 and 2007, placed across dozens of cities in dozens of states rather than concentrated in one metro, and moving since. Maay is the home language for most of that community. It is a Cushitic language of southern Somalia, spoken in the South West State, Banaadir and Jubaland and across the borders into Ethiopia and Kenya.

• 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

Maay and Standard Somali Are Not One Interpreter Booking

Maay and standard Somali, Af Maxaa, are written in the same Latin letters and look related on a page. In speech they are not reliably mutually intelligible, and the gap widens exactly where it matters: fast questioning, medical vocabulary, an account of something frightening. A Maay speaker given a standard Somali interpreter will often follow the social parts of a conversation and lose the clinical or legal sentence in the middle, which is worse than understanding nothing, because nobody in the room can see it happening.

There is a second layer to the labelling problem. Some Somali Bantu families speak Mushunguli, also called Zigula, a Bantu language carried from the Tanzanian coast generations ago and separate from both Maay and Somali. If an older speaker is struggling with a Maay interpreter as well as a Somali one, that is the next question to ask. Standard Somali work sits on a separate roster: see Somali translation and Somali interpreters.

Certified Maay Translation When Somalia Issues No Civil Records

Families are sent looking for a Somali birth certificate that does not exist, and the search can eat months. The Department of State reciprocity schedule for Somalia is blunt: there is no recognized competent civil authority issuing civil documents, the government ceased to exist in December 1990, and most records were destroyed in the war that followed. The few that survived sit with private individuals and are not retrievable.

So the schedule directs applicants to a sworn affidavit from at least two people, executed before a notary public or an attorney, giving where and when the birth took place and the full names of both parents. USCIS arrives at the same place by a different route: 8 CFR 103.2(b)(2) allows secondary evidence, and then affidavits, where a primary record cannot be obtained. That is the legal frame a Maay file is built on.

Affidavits and Camp Records in a Maay Document Translation

The paperwork a Maay-speaking family actually holds is a recognizable set, and most of it is not in Maay at all.

• Sworn affidavits from relatives and elders, sometimes drafted in English by a legal aid office, sometimes in Somali
• UNHCR registration papers and ration cards from Dadaab or Kakuma
• Camp school reports and clinic records, usually in English or Swahili
• Resettlement agency paperwork and travel documents issued at departure
• Letters and recordings from relatives still in Somalia or Kenya, where Maay itself usually appears

Each of those is translated for what it is, with the issuing body named as printed and any assigned date of birth described as assigned rather than recorded. Where the page turns out to be Swahili, we requote it as Swahili. Where it is already English, we say so and do not charge for it. See certified translation.

Maay Name Spellings Across a Certified Translation Set

Maay is written in the Latin alphabet, but competing spelling conventions have circulated since the 1980s and none of them governed how a clerk in a camp wrote a name down. One person can reach USCIS as three people: the spelling on the UNHCR card, the spelling on the school report, the spelling on the travel document. Somali naming compounds the problem, because the given name, the father's name and the grandfather's name shift position depending on which official filled in which box.

We translate each document with the spelling it carries, set the working spelling to the travel document, and list the variants in a note saying which paper each came from. Send the whole bundle at once, because the variants only make sense side by side. See immigration attorneys.

Maay Interpreters for Asylum, Medical and Court Appointments

Asylum work is the sharpest use of a Maay interpreter. An officer weighs the applicant's exact words alongside the pauses and the inconsistencies, so an interpreter who tidies a hesitant answer or softens a detail has altered the record. Our briefing is to render and nothing more, and never to fill a silence. A relative does not sit in that chair.

In hospitals and clinics the rule is simpler than most families know: a provider receiving federal financial assistance has to supply the interpreter at no cost to the patient, and the family may ask for Maay by name instead of accepting the Somali line the switchboard offers. No state examines court interpreters in Maay, although several certify standard Somali through the NCSC exam, so a judge qualifies a Maay interpreter on the record, typically over video because no city has a local bench of them. Prism takes the assignment as a private agency, never as a vendor a court has appointed. Bookings for a hearing, a clinic visit or an interview run through court interpreting, medical interpreting and USCIS interview interpreting.

Maay Translation and Interpreting Prices

A short certified affidavit or camp card is quoted from about $24.95 a page as a US market guide and is usually back within a business day. Longer statements are priced by the source word. Interpreting is quoted by the hour, with a two-hour minimum in person and shorter minimums by video, which is what most Maay bookings use. Recorded Maay audio is quoted on length. Figures sit on the pricing page.

Questions we get asked