Translate Documents near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Who needs a translator in Philadelphia

Philadelphia is mostly English-speaking. Of 1,485,930 residents aged five and over, 355,753 speak another language at home, and 167,637 of those (11.3% of the city) speak English less than very well. Smaller numbers, but the documents they need certified are exactly the same ones.

The largest group is Spanish, with 159,884 speakers. It is not the whole picture: 11 separate language groups in Philadelphia have a limited-English population in the thousands.

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

Language group	Speakers	Limited English
Spanish	159,884	69,898
Chinese (incl. Mandarin, Cantonese)	37,695	25,410
Other Indo-European languages	36,174	15,777
Other Asian and Pacific Island languages	22,700	12,189
Russian, Polish, or other Slavic languages	22,325	13,664
Other and unspecified languages	20,228	6,053
French, Haitian, or Cajun	18,629	7,179
Vietnamese	12,814	8,493
Arabic	12,378	3,930
Korean	4,822	2,513
Tagalog (incl. Filipino)	4,164	2,148
German or other West Germanic languages	3,940	383

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 Philadelphia

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 Pennsylvania 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 Philadelphia

Application Support Center - Philadelphia, PA is at USCIS Application Support Center, 10300 Drummond Road, Suite 100, Philadelphia, PA 19154.

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 Pennsylvania documents

For documents issued in Pennsylvania, the competent authority is Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth. 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 Philadelphia: Spanish, Chinese, other Indo-European languages. We cover more than 100 languages in total, listed on the languages page.