Translate Documents near San Francisco, California

Who needs a translator in San Francisco

About 19% of San Francisco residents aged five and over, 151,834 people, speak English less than very well. That is a substantial community, and in practice it is where almost all of our San Francisco work originates.

The largest group is Chinese, with 140,823 speakers. It is not the whole picture: 11 separate language groups in San Francisco have a limited-English population in the thousands.

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

Language group	Speakers	Limited English
Chinese (incl. Mandarin, Cantonese)	140,823	83,683
Spanish	89,269	32,614
Other Indo-European languages	24,187	3,292
Tagalog (incl. Filipino)	21,213	7,410
Other Asian and Pacific Island languages	17,960	6,703
Russian, Polish, or other Slavic languages	14,101	4,947
Vietnamese	10,534	6,505
French, Haitian, or Cajun	9,540	1,200
Korean	6,719	2,829
German or other West Germanic languages	4,661	243
Arabic	4,366	1,389
Other and unspecified languages	4,316	1,019

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 San Francisco

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 California 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 San Francisco

Asylum Office - San Francisco is at 75 Hawthorne Street, 7th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105.

An Asylum Office handles asylum interviews rather than general filings. Translations are filed with your paperwork either way. Address from USCIS; check your own appointment notice before travelling.

Apostilles for California documents

For documents issued in California, the competent authority is California 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 San Francisco: Chinese, Spanish, other Indo-European languages. We cover more than 100 languages in total, listed on the languages page.