Sindhi Translation Services

Sindhi is one of the few rare languages on this site that genuinely appears on official paper, so a Sindhi job at Prism Language Solutions starts with two questions rather than one: which script the document uses, and whether it is in Sindhi at all. Perso-Arabic from Pakistan and Devanagari from India are read by different translators. The rest of the file is usually Urdu or English. We sort that out before quoting, translate each document in full, and deliver a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy on every certified item.

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

Most requests for Sindhi arrive because somebody could not fill them elsewhere. A judge with a witness from Sukkur. An attorney whose client's mother has spoken nothing else in eighty years. A hospital with an elderly Indian Sindhi patient whose English stops at the reception desk. Community estimates put Sindhis in the United States above 50,000, while only around 7,000 people reported Sindhi as their household language in Census data, and the gap is generational rather than a counting error: the Karachi-raised engineer will never call us, and his father will.

• 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

Sindhi Document Script: Perso-Arabic or Devanagari

A translator fluent in one Sindhi script is not automatically able to read the other, so this is the first thing we establish from a scan. Pakistani Sindhi uses an extended Perso-Arabic alphabet, considerably larger than the Urdu one, built to carry the implosive consonants the language has. Indian Sindhi is written in Devanagari at least as often, and both forms are in official use there.

Send a photograph of the first page and we will tell you which it is and who we would assign, at no charge and before any quote. Handwriting matters here too. An affidavit written in the interior of Sindh in a cursive hand is slower work than a printed school certificate, and we say so in the quote rather than discovering it halfway through.

Sindhi as an Official Language of Record in Sindh

This is what separates Sindhi from nearly every other language in this part of the site. The Sind (Teaching, Promotion and Use of Sindhi Language) Act, 1972 made Sindhi an official language of the province, and it has a literary and administrative tradition behind it that goes back much further. There are Sindhi newspapers, Sindhi school textbooks and provincial material printed in Sindhi.

Certified Sindhi Translation Alongside the Urdu in the Same File

In practice most Pakistani Sindhi files are mixed, and the mix is predictable. The NADRA birth certificate, the CNIC, the nikah nama and the domicile certificate issued by the Deputy Commissioner are in Urdu or English; the Sindhi sits in the affidavit or the school record filed beside them. 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3) asks for a certified English translation of each foreign-language document, whichever language it is in.

We handle the whole set as one order for a reason that has nothing to do with convenience. Names, dates and place names have to come out identically across every page, and running the Sindhi through one translator and the Urdu through another is how a file ends up contradicting itself. See Urdu translation for the other half of a typical file, and USCIS translation for the document set per form.

Sindhi Surnames and the -ani Ending on a Certified Translation

Sindhi surnames are frequently formed with the clan ending -ani, and tribal names are used as surnames in their own right. Romanized by three different clerks over forty years, one such name produces three spellings, and a US officer comparing a NADRA card, a passport and a school record has no way of knowing they belong to one person unless somebody says so.

Every translation we issue spells the name as the controlling passport does, reproduces the source spelling exactly, and carries a note explaining how the variants relate. The same applies to place names in the interior, where a village may appear under a colonial-era spelling on an old record and a current one on a new print.

Sindhi Interpreters for Courts, Clinics and Depositions

Interpreting is a separate assignment from translation and it starts with a different question: which side of the border did the speaker grow up on? Sindhi spoken in Sindh draws on Urdu and Arabic vocabulary; Sindhi kept in Indian families after Partition leans on Hindi. The two sides understand each other with effort, which is fine over tea and not fine in a medical history.

Courts come to us for Sindhi because no state runs a certification exam in it and a clerk's roster holds nobody. The judge qualifies the interpreter on the record instead, so we put in writing what the person we are offering has done and how they will appear. Hospitals that take federal funding owe a Sindhi-speaking patient an interpreter at no cost, and in practice the patient is handed Urdu or Hindi and a relative fills the gaps. For depositions and psychiatric assessments we press for someone in the room. See court interpreting and medical interpreting. Prism takes this work directly from courts and firms, as a private agency holding no appointment from any of them.

What Sindhi Translation and Interpreting Costs

Short certified certificates start from about $24.95 per page as a US market guide, running text is priced by the source word, and interpreting typically falls between $45 and $95 an hour with a two-hour minimum on site. Handwritten Sindhi, in either script, is quoted above printed text because it is read at a different speed. A mixed Urdu and Sindhi file is quoted line by line so you can see what the Sindhi portion actually costs. The pricing page sets out the guide ranges, and a written quote follows within the hour in business hours.

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