Nubian Translation Services

Prism Language Solutions handles Nubian work for families from the Nile valley of southern Egypt and northern Sudan. The certified translation is almost always Arabic into English, since neither country registers anything in a Nubian language, and the Nubian element sits in the place names and in whatever the family has written by hand, each certified job delivered with a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy. Nubian interpreting is a separate booking, and the language has to be named before anyone is assigned.

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

Nubian is a family, not a language. Nobiin is spoken in southern Egypt and by the Mahas and Halfawi communities of northern Sudan. Kenzi in Egypt and Dongolawi in Sudan are one language under two names, with far fewer speakers, and a Nobiin speaker cannot simply follow it. Almost every Nubian adult also uses Arabic, which changes what a client actually needs from us more often than not.

• 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

Certified Nubian Translation Usually Means Arabic Records

An Egyptian Nubian file holds a computerized birth certificate and a national identity card issued in Arabic by the Civil Status Department of the Ministry of Interior. A Sudanese one, from families around Wadi Halfa or Dongola, holds a certificate from Sudan's Civil Registry, also Arabic, also under a Ministry of Interior. Nothing in either set is written in Nubian, so the job USCIS needs under 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3) is an Arabic translation with a translator who reads Nubian place names.

That distinction is not a technicality about billing. An Arabic translator with no Nubian background will transliterate a village name into something no relative recognizes, and on an asylum file the village is half the claim. See Arabic translation for the broader Egyptian and Sudanese document set, Sudanese Arabic for records from Khartoum and the north, and birth certificate translation for what to send.

Which Script a Handwritten Nubian Document Uses

Ask this before quoting, because Nubian has no settled written form and three answers are all in current use. Some writers use the Latin alphabet. Some use Arabic script. A revival movement writes in the Old Nubian alphabet, an uncial variant of Coptic with extra letters taken from Greek and Meroitic, used for manuscripts from the eighth century to 1485 and now carried by Unicode fonts built for the revitalization effort.

A letter, a poem or a community record can therefore arrive in any of the three, and a translator fluent in spoken Nobiin may not read the one in front of them. We look at the page first and assign accordingly. Where the writer has mixed Arabic script with Latin spellings on the same sheet, which happens often in letters between generations, the translation says so rather than smoothing it into one voice.

Drowned Villages and Place Names in a Nubian Translation

The Aswan High Dam flooded the old Nubian homeland and moved roughly 120,000 people. About 70,000 Egyptian Nubians were relocated to reclaimed land at Kom Ombo between October 1963 and June 1964. On the Sudanese side, some 50,000 people were moved from Wadi Halfa to Khashm el Girba, the New Halfa scheme, several hundred kilometers away, in a process running from 1964 into 1967.

One family's papers can therefore name a village that is under Lake Nasser and a resettlement village built for them afterwards, and both names are correct for different years. A translator who quietly reconciles them, or who renders the old name as a misspelling of the new one, breaks the chronology that an asylum account or a relationship claim depends on. We reproduce each place name as printed, note which is the pre-dam village and which the resettlement site, and leave the reading to the officer or the attorney.

Nobiin or Kenzi-Dongolawi for a Nubian Interpreter

Tell us where in the Nile valley the speaker's family comes from and the language question answers itself. Nobiin covers southern Egypt and the Mahas and Halfawi areas of northern Sudan. Kenzi sits north of that in Egypt and Dongolawi in Sudan. They are not dialects of a single tongue and one will not carry a hearing for a speaker of the other.

In-person Nubian linguists are thin on the ground anywhere in the United States, so most assignments run by video or phone, and that is generally a faster booking than it sounds. Where the case allows an Arabic interpreter, we say so. Where it does not, we find the Nubian one.

Nubian Interpreters in Asylum Interviews, Courts and Clinics

In an asylum interview the officer measures the words, the pauses and any contradiction together, so the interpreter's job is to carry the account and add nothing to it. That matters more than usual for a Nubian applicant describing displacement, a lost village or detention, where an Arabic rendering by a helpful relative tends to compress the story into something tidier and less credible. We do not seat relatives.

Nobiin and Dongolawi have no court certification exam in any state, so a judge qualifies the interpreter on the record; send us the court and the matter and we will tell you what that bench usually accepts. Prism works as a private agency taking assignments from courts and attorneys, not as a vendor any court has appointed. A hospital or clinic receiving federal financial assistance must provide the interpreter at no cost to the patient, which families rarely know. More on USCIS interview interpreting, court interpreting and medical interpreting.

What Nubian Translation and Interpreting Cost

Arabic civil records are quoted as Arabic, from around $24.95 a certified page as a US market guide, and a one- or two-page certificate is normally back within a business day. Handwritten Nubian material is quoted separately once we have seen the script, and it is slower work than a printed certificate. Interpreting runs by the hour, with a two-hour minimum on site and shorter minimums for video. You will find the ranges on the pricing page, and the written quote is the price.

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