Norwegian Translation Services

Prism Language Solutions translates Norwegian documents into English for USCIS, courts, credential evaluators and companies, and English into Norwegian where a Norwegian reader or authority needs it. The certified side covers population register certificates, church and court records, the vitnemål for a degree evaluation and the politiattest police certificate. A useful share of our Norwegian advice is telling clients which of their papers they can already get in English for free.

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

Norway sits oddly on a list of translation languages. More than a million Americans claim Norwegian ancestry, concentrated in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin and the Pacific Northwest, and hardly any of them speak it. The people generating actual Norwegian work are a few thousand Norwegian nationals in shipping, energy and seafood, their attorneys, and the families of elderly emigrants. It is a small, specific demand, and almost all of it is document work rather than interpreting.

• 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

Norwegian Certificates You May Not Need Translated

Skatteetaten, the Norwegian Tax Administration, runs the National Population Register and issues the everyday personal certificates from it. The bostedsattest, the certificate of registered residence, is available in a multilingual version covering English among other languages, so ordering it in that form removes the translation step entirely. Ask for the multilingual version by name; the default Norwegian one will arrive otherwise.

A birth certificate, fødselsattest, is narrower than people expect. Skatteetaten issues it for people born in Norway after 31 December 1982, and for people born in Norway and registered as resident between 2 December 1946 and 31 December 1982. Outside those windows the record that exists is a church or parish register entry or an older registry extract, and that does need translating. Send what you have and we will say which category it falls in before quoting.

Certified Norwegian Translation for USCIS and Consular Files

Where a Norwegian-language document goes into a US filing, 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3) governs it: the complete document in English, with a signed statement of the translator’s competence. The certificate and the delivery format are described on the certified translation page. Norwegian files are usually small and clean, so the work turns on getting the institutions right rather than on volume.

The recurring trap is the Norwegian institution with no American twin. A separation or divorce granted administratively by the Statsforvalter is not a court decree and should not be translated as one. A tingrett is a district court and a lagmannsrett a court of appeal, and calling either of them something more familiar misdescribes the record. We render the body by its function and leave the Norwegian name visible in the translation.

• Birth and baptismal records, including older church register entries
• Marriage certificates, separation and divorce licences from the Statsforvalter, and court custody rulings
• Politiattest police certificates for immigrant visa and licensing files
• Vitnemål and transcripts for WES and other credential evaluations
• Pension, tax and employment records supporting an affidavit of support

Bokmal, Nynorsk and Norwegian Letters in a Document Translation

Norway has two written standards and no spoken standard at all. The Language Act that took effect on 1 January 2022 gives Bokmål and Nynorsk equal standing in public bodies, and around twelve percent of schoolchildren are taught in Nynorsk, with the western counties accounting for most of that. A municipality in Sogn writes to its residents in Nynorsk; Oslo writes in Bokmål. Both are Norwegian, both are official, and a document in Nynorsk is not a dialect curiosity.

The three extra letters are a practical nuisance rather than a linguistic one. Names containing æ, ø and å get flattened into ae, o and a by American systems, so one person appears as Sørensen on the certificate and Sorensen on the green card. We keep the original spelling on the translation, match the applicant to the passport, and note the flattened variant instead of silently choosing one.

Norwegian Legal, Maritime and Commercial Document Translation

The commercial half of our Norwegian work comes from shipping, offshore energy and seafood, and it arrives through law firms in Houston, New York and Seattle. Charterparties, class and survey reports, incident and inspection records, employment contracts under Norwegian law, and company filings from Brønnøysund all turn up in discovery and in arbitration bundles. Technical Norwegian in these fields is dense and specific, and the translator has to know the industry as well as the language.

Our practice on legal material is to leave ambiguity where the drafter left it. A clause that is loose in Norwegian stays loose in English, because deciding what it means is for the tribunal. See legal translation and business translation, and where a deposition needs someone in the room, a court interpreter is booked through the same desk.

Norwegian Apostille, Turnaround and Translation Cost

Norway has been inside the Apostille Convention for a long time, with the Convention in force there since 29 July 1983, and the Statsforvalter is the authority that issues the apostille. This catches people out in the other direction: clients sometimes assume Norway is a recent joiner and that older documents cannot be apostilled. Get the apostille attached before the file comes to us, since the stamp is a page like any other and is translated with the record. See apostille translation.

Norwegian is priced above the common European languages because the pool of US-based legal and technical translators in it is small. A short certificate runs from around $24.95 a page as a US market guide and is normally delivered within a business day; contracts and technical reports are priced by the source word from about $0.10 and take two to five business days depending on length. Handwritten church records take longer and are quoted individually. Ranges sit on the pricing page. If your file also contains Danish or Swedish pages, say so and we will quote each at its own language.

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