Translate Documents near Boston, Massachusetts

Who needs a translator in Boston

About 15.5% of Boston residents aged five and over, 98,073 people, speak English less than very well. That is a substantial community, and in practice it is where almost all of our Boston work originates.

The largest group is Spanish, with 98,220 speakers. It is not the whole picture: 9 separate language groups in Boston have a limited-English population in the thousands.

Languages spoken at home in Boston, and how many speakers report limited English

Language group	Speakers	Limited English
Spanish	98,220	46,042
Other Indo-European languages	28,706	8,998
Chinese (incl. Mandarin, Cantonese)	26,505	15,060
French, Haitian, or Cajun	26,232	11,794
Other and unspecified languages	10,288	2,519
Vietnamese	9,450	6,606
Other Asian and Pacific Island languages	6,299	1,750
Russian, Polish, or other Slavic languages	6,059	2,774
Arabic	4,254	1,283
Korean	3,040	787
German or other West Germanic languages	2,879	243
Tagalog (incl. Filipino)	994	217

Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2023 5-Year Estimates, table C16001. "Limited English" is the Census category for speaking English less than very well. Several rows are combined groups rather than single languages, so the totals cover a family of languages. We translate the individual languages inside each group.

Getting a document certified from Boston

There is no walk-in office here and none is needed. You upload the file, we return a PDF you can print, and the certification carries the same weight whether the translator sat in Massachusetts or in New York. Our office at 55 Broadway in New York handles paper in person if you prefer that.

What a certified translation has to contain, what USCIS accepts, and what it costs are the same everywhere, so they are covered once on the pages that own them rather than repeated here:

• How certified translation works, including the wording USCIS requires
• Birth certificates, the most common document in an immigration file
• Marriage certificates and divorce decrees
• Diplomas and transcripts for credential evaluation
• Apostilles, a separate step that is often mistaken for certification

The USCIS office in Boston

Application Support Center - Boston, MA is at USCIS Application Support Center, 7F Everett Street, Revere, MA 02151.

An Application Support Center handles biometrics, not interviews. Translations are filed with your paperwork either way. Address from USCIS; check your own appointment notice before travelling.

Apostilles for Massachusetts documents

For documents issued in Massachusetts, the competent authority is Deputy Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for Public Records. Not us: an apostille authenticates the original document, while certification covers the translation. How the two fit together.

Authority per the Hague Conference registry, which is not the Secretary of State in every state.

Languages most asked for in Boston: Spanish, other Indo-European languages, Chinese. We cover more than 100 languages in total, listed on the languages page.