Legal translation
Contracts, court orders, witness statements and disclosure bundles for solicitors and the courts. Legal Aid Agency rates accepted for eligible work. Full detail on our legal translation services page.
Translation Services
Native-speaker translators in more than 300 languages, working for NHS trusts, UK courts, solicitors and businesses since 2013.
Prism Linguistics provides professional translation services in more than 300 languages, from a UK head office in Warrington. We translate certificates, contracts, medical records and business documents for NHS trusts, HM Courts & Tribunals, local authorities and UK solicitors, with certified translation accepted by the Home Office, UKVI, HMCTS and universities.
Every job is translated by a native speaker of the target language and read by a second linguist before delivery. Send us the document and you'll have a fixed quote within one working hour during office hours. That's been the routine since 2013, and it hasn't needed changing.
Ring most translation agencies and you get a call queue, or a web form promising that someone will be in touch. We run things differently. Prism Linguistics has been trading since 2013 from our head office in Warrington, and when you contact us during office hours a project manager replies within one working hour. With a price, not a holding message.
That matters more than it sounds. Translation work tends to arrive with a deadline attached: a tribunal bundle due on Thursday, a tender closing on Friday, a visa application that has sat in a drawer for too long. An agency that takes two days to acknowledge an enquiry has already cost you time you didn't have.
The same person stays with your job from quote to delivery. Ask them anything. Which documents actually need certifying (often fewer than people expect), what a realistic turnaround looks like, or how a long file can be trimmed to just the sections a caseworker will read. There's more on how we operate as a UK translation agency, including what to ask any agency before you commit.
When a UK authority asks for a certified translation, it wants the translation plus a signed statement confirming the work is complete and accurate. Ours are accepted by the Home Office, UKVI, HM Courts & Tribunals Service, HM Passport Office and UK universities. You receive a PDF, and a stamped hard copy by tracked Royal Mail if the receiving body prefers paper.
Most certified work is personal paperwork: birth and marriage certificates, academic transcripts, divorce decrees, police clearance letters. A certified Polish translation for a UKVI application is one of the most common jobs on our books. The full detail is on our certified translation page, including when you need a notarised translation instead (rarely, but it happens). Against a hard deadline, same day translation is often possible for short standard documents.
Certified certificates are only part of the workload. Our document translation service handles contracts, witness statements, medical records, technical manuals, school reports and anything else that arrives as written text. Word files, PDFs, scans, and quite often a photograph of a paper document taken on someone's kitchen table. As long as every word is legible, we can work with it.
Layout stays close to the original so the reader can put source and translation side by side. That sounds like a small thing until a caseworker is trying to match paragraph seven of a Romanian document translation against the original at speed.
Different documents fail in different ways, so we match the translator's background to the material, not just the language.
Contracts, court orders, witness statements and disclosure bundles for solicitors and the courts. Legal Aid Agency rates accepted for eligible work. Full detail on our legal translation services page.
Patient records, GP letters, discharge summaries and consent forms, translated by linguists who know the terminology. Full detail on our medical translation services page.
Tenders, HR policies, supplier agreements and reports for UK firms trading abroad. Plain, accurate English coming in; the same standard going out.
Multilingual sites and brochures that read as if written in the target language. See website translation and brochure translation.
Accounts, audit reports and bank statements, handled with the accuracy the financial sector expects. Numbers get checked as carefully as words.
Letters, family paperwork and certificates for visa, university and employment applications. Usually certified; always treated as sensitive.
Every job goes to a professionally qualified translator who is a native speaker of the target language and has experience in the subject. A second linguist then reads the translation against the source before it leaves us. Nothing is delivered on one pair of eyes alone.
The 300+ figure includes the rare languages most agencies turn away: Tigrinya, Kinyarwanda, Dinka and dozens more where the UK pool of qualified translators is genuinely small. The full language list is worth a look if yours is unusual. And if you already have a translation and just want it checked, our proofreading service gives it an independent second review.
Direction matters. An English to Urdu translation goes to a native Urdu speaker; an Arabic tenancy agreement coming into English goes to a native English speaker who reads Arabic fluently. Our Arabic translation services page explains the pairing in more detail, and the same principle holds for every language we offer.
A fair spread. In any given week the work includes:
The mix keeps us honest. Public sector work demands process and accountability; private clients want a human on the phone. We try to give both to everyone.
No account, no minimum spend. The whole thing usually starts and finishes by email.
Upload a scan or clear photo through the quote form, or email it over. Tell us the language, the deadline and which organisation will receive the translation.
We reply within one working hour during office hours with a fixed price and turnaround. Certificates are priced per document, longer files per word, and the quote is the price you pay.
A native-speaker translator does the work and a second linguist reviews it. You get the finished translation by email, with certified hard copies posted by tracked Royal Mail where needed.
Two models. Standard certificates are priced per document, so a birth certificate costs the same whether it takes us an hour or three. Everything else is priced per word, which is fairer than per page (pages vary wildly) and means you can sanity-check a quote yourself.
Three things move the price: the language pair, the subject matter and the deadline. A common European language with plenty of UK-based translators costs less than a rare dialect with a handful. Dense legal or clinical text costs more than a school letter. Genuinely urgent work carries a premium, though we'll always tell you if waiting a day would save you money.
We accept Legal Aid Agency rates for eligible legal work. We don't publish one headline rate here because it would be wrong for half the jobs we quote; our pricing page sets out honest ranges instead. For your document, the quote itself is free, fixed and with you within one working hour during office hours.
A good deal of what we translate is sensitive: medical records, court evidence, immigration files. Our handling of your documents is UK GDPR compliant, files are shared only with the linguists working on your job, and we'll sign a non-disclosure agreement where your organisation requires one. Discretion here is routine, not a special request.
Translation is written; interpreting is spoken. If someone needs live language support at a GP appointment, an immigration tribunal or a custody-suite interview, you want our interpreting services, which include 24/7 telephone interpreting in 300+ languages. Language-specific pages such as Polish interpreter go into individual languages, and everything else we do is on the services page.
Send the document, tell us the deadline, and a project manager will reply within one working hour during office hours.