Translate Documents near Brooklyn, New York

Who needs a translator in Brooklyn

Brooklyn is one of the more multilingual places we work in. Of 2,470,419 residents aged five and over, 546,054 report speaking English less than very well, which is 22.1% of the city. Demand for certified translation here is steady rather than occasional, and it runs across 12 separate language groups rather than one.

No single language dominates Brooklyn. The largest group, Spanish, accounts for only 33% of residents who speak a language other than English at home, and 12 groups have a limited-English population in the thousands. That mix is worth knowing before you assume which language a document will be in.

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

Language group	Speakers	Limited English
Spanish	358,954	161,214
Chinese (incl. Mandarin, Cantonese)	168,296	116,489
Russian, Polish, or other Slavic languages	152,723	98,165
German or other West Germanic languages	108,789	50,045
Other Indo-European languages	99,515	44,199
French, Haitian, or Cajun	84,720	29,204
Other and unspecified languages	49,988	14,335
Arabic	32,664	14,492
Other Asian and Pacific Island languages	24,686	13,396
Korean	6,155	1,960
Tagalog (incl. Filipino)	5,304	1,141
Vietnamese	2,515	1,414

Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2023 5-Year Estimates, table C16001. Figures are for Kings County, which is coextensive with Brooklyn. "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 Brooklyn

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 New York 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 Brooklyn

Application Support Center - Brooklyn, NY is at USCIS Application Support Center, 1260-1278 60th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11219.

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 New York documents

For documents issued in New York, the competent authority is New York Secretary of State. 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 Brooklyn: Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Polish and other Slavic languages. We cover more than 100 languages in total, listed on the languages page.