Sicilian Translation Services

Prism Language Solutions serves Sicilian-descended families, their attorneys and the researchers working for them, and the work splits in two. The certificates a comune in Palermo, Catania or Agrigento issues are Italian and are translated and certified as Italian. The Sicilian proper sits in the private material: letters home, wills, recorded conversation and the spellings a village clerk set down two centuries ago. The two are priced separately.

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

Sicilian is its own Romance language rather than a corruption of Italian, and it has a longer literary record than Italian does. The poets at Frederick II's court in Palermo in the thirteenth century, the Sicilian School, wrote the first body of courtly verse in an Italian vernacular and are credited with inventing the sonnet. None of that made it a language of administration: Sicily's registers, courts and schools have always run in Italian or, earlier, in Latin.

• 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

Sicilian Family Records and the Language They Are Written In

Sort the file by date before ordering anything. Certificates requested from a comune today are modern Italian, clean and quick. Acts from the nineteenth-century registry are Italian too, but handwritten to a fixed formula, in an official hand that takes practice to read. Anything earlier than the registry is a parish register in ecclesiastical Latin. The pages that are actually in Sicilian are almost always private: correspondence, a household note, a dialect entry in a family bible.

Getting that split right is most of the value we add before a word is translated. See Italian translation for the bulk of the certificates, and send scans rather than descriptions, because what a family calls a birth certificate is frequently an extract of something else.

Sicilian Civil Registry Acts and Parish Record Translation

Sicily keeps a different calendar from the Italian mainland, and researchers who do not know that lose weeks. Civil registration on the Naples mainland began in 1809, but in Sicily the registers start in 1820, and the series known as the stato civile della Restaurazione runs to 1865, held for Palermo and its province at the Archivio di Stato di Palermo with the ten-year indexes. After unification the Italian state registry takes over. A Sicilian line therefore hits the end of civil records a decade earlier than a Campanian one, and continues, if at all, in the parish books.

Certified Sicilian Document Translation for Citizenship and Probate

For a US filing the rule is 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3), a complete English version with a signed certification, and the certified translation page sets out what the certificate covers. For an Italian dual citizenship claim the direction is often the reverse: American birth, marriage and death certificates translated into Italian for a consulate or a comune, which is a different job with different formatting expectations.

Anyone starting a jure sanguinis file now should check eligibility before buying translations. The 2025 reform, Decree-Law 36 converted into Law 74, limits recognition to applicants with an Italian-born parent or grandparent and closed the great-grandparent route for new applications. A probate or property matter is unaffected by that and runs on its own evidence. Ask the consulate or an Italian attorney first; we will hold a quote while you do.

• Birth acts from the comune, as an estratto or the fuller copia integrale
• Marriage acts with their processetti, and death acts for each generation
• US certificates translated into Italian for a consulate or a Sicilian comune
• Notarial deeds and property records for an inheritance in Sicily

Sicilian Surnames, Nicknames and Place Names in Translation

Sicilian naming produces predictable collisions. The first son was traditionally named for the paternal grandfather and the first daughter for the paternal grandmother, so a single village in 1880 holds half a dozen men with identical first and last names, separated in the register only by their fathers’ names and their ages. A translator who quietly picks the likeliest match has made a research decision that belongs to the researcher.

Then there is the everyday name. Turiddu stands for Salvatore, Nunzio for Annunziato, Ciccio for Francesco, and a letter may use only the household form. Foundling surnames are another Sicilian fixture, assigned to abandoned infants by the registrar. We translate what the document says, flag the variant forms, give the modern spelling of a comune that has been renamed, and leave the identification to you.

Spoken Sicilian: Interpreters and Recorded Statement Translation

Requests for a Sicilian interpreter are few and nearly always involve an older person. Anyone schooled in Italy in the last several decades gives evidence or sees a doctor in Italian without difficulty, so an Italian interpreter is the right booking and we will say so. The exception is real: an elderly speaker in a guardianship hearing, a capacity assessment or a hospital admission may drop back into the language of the village, and an interpreter trained on northern Italian loses the specifics of a symptom or a memory.

Recorded material is the other place a Sicilian linguist is genuinely required. Old family tapes, a recorded call in a probate dispute, a statement taken from a relative in Sicily. We transcribe in the language spoken, translate alongside, time-stamp it and mark what is unclear rather than inventing a reading. See transcription.

Sicilian Translation Prices, Apostille and Turnaround

Modern certificates are ordinary Italian work, quoted from around $24.95 a page as a US market guide and usually back inside a business day. Nineteenth-century handwritten acts are quoted individually, because the time goes on reading the hand rather than on word count, and a batch of twenty register images is not twenty times the price of one. Ranges are on the pricing page.

Italy has issued apostilles since the Convention came into force there on 11 February 1978, and the prefettura attaches them. Where a receiving body asks for one, get it before translation so the stamp is covered in the same pass. See apostille translation and notarized translation.

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