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Amharic Interpreters

Professional Amharic interpreting, virtual or in person, for the settings where getting it wrong has consequences — asylum interviews, hearings, attorney meetings, medical appointments and school meetings.

Amharic is Ethiopia’s working language, which does not make it every Ethiopian’s first language

Can an Amharic interpreter cover any client from Ethiopia? Not reliably: Amharic is the language of Ethiopia’s federal government, but in the 2007 census only about 29 percent of Ethiopians gave it as their main language, and Oromo was the main language of more than a third. A client who dealt with schools, police and officials in Amharic may speak it well and still give a fuller and more exact account in Oromo, Tigrinya, Somali or another of the country’s languages.

So the question to ask is which language the client wants to testify in, not which passport they hold. Ask it before the date is set, because a witness who starts in Amharic and switches halfway through a hearing leaves two interpreters’ worth of record and an obvious line for cross-examination.

In the United States, the Census Bureau counted about 195,000 people speaking Amharic at home in 2009–2013. The largest community by far is in the Washington, DC, metro area (about 43,000), followed by Seattle, Atlanta, Dallas–Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Minneapolis–St. Paul and Denver. Amharic was also one of the 25 most common languages in immigration court every year from FY2012 to FY2016, ranked between 13th and 20th.

Dates in the Ethiopian calendar are the most common source of false inconsistencies

Ethiopia keeps its own calendar: twelve months of thirty days and a thirteenth of five or six, a new year that falls on September 11 in the Gregorian calendar, and a year count about seven years and eight months behind. Dates are written day–month–year. So a birth year on an Ethiopian document is seven or eight lower than the Gregorian one, and a date written 30/02/1987 is not a mistake: it is the 30th day of the second Ethiopian month, which an Ethiopian community association worked out for Canada’s refugee board as November 10, 1994.

This has already decided cases. In Georgis v. Ashcroft (2003) an immigration judge found an Ethiopian asylum applicant not credible partly over mismatched dates; the Seventh Circuit vacated the order, noting that everyone in the case seemed unclear about converting them, and that the translator’s own conversion of one letter’s date may have been wrong. In the UK, the Upper Tribunal has said it is not satisfactory to let the court interpreter convert dates without stating how the conversion was done.

What works: the interpreter renders each date as the witness gives it, says that it is an Ethiopian-calendar date, and leaves the conversion to counsel, done beforehand with a stated method and put in the record. If you send us the key dates (arrests, departures, births) when you book, we brief the interpreter to flag every Ethiopian-calendar date rather than silently convert it.

Documents in Ge’ez script have to be sight-translated, and the script is shared with other languages

Amharic is written in the Ethiopian syllabary descended from the script of Ge’ez, the old liturgical language, and the same script is used for Tigrinya and Tigre. Each character stands for a consonant plus a vowel, and it cannot be read by anyone who does not know it. A kebele letter, an arrest summons or a church record read aloud at a hearing therefore depends entirely on the interpreter sight-translating it.

Sharing a script does not make the languages interchangeable: a Tigrinya letter is not an Amharic letter, even though an English speaker cannot tell them apart. Tell us when documents will be read aloud and send copies if you can, so the interpreter sees them before the hearing rather than for the first time on the record. If what you need is a written translation for filing, that is certified translation, a different service.

Amharic is a limited-availability language

There are comparatively few qualified Amharic interpreters working in the United States, and the ones there are get booked. That is why Amharic carries the 25–30% limited-availability rate, and why lead time matters more here than with a common language: a week is comfortable, two days is a gamble.

We would rather tell you that before you book a hearing date than after. If your date is fixed and close, say so when you enquire and we will tell you honestly whether we can staff it rather than accepting and hoping.

The standard-availability languages are: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Polish, Italian, German, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Tagalog, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Tamil, Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, Romanian, Serbian, Bosnian, Somali and Nepali. Every other language we offer carries the 25–30% limited-availability rate. If a language is not on that list it is not because we cannot do it — it is because the pool of qualified interpreters in the United States is small enough that we will not promise a date without checking.

By video, by phone or in person

Virtual interpreting runs on Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, or over the telephone. It is quicker to arrange, costs less and carries no travel charge, and it suits appointments, calls and most meetings.

In person is what venues with their own rules tend to expect, and the right choice when documents are being signed or several people are speaking at once. Tell us the platform, or the city and the venue, when you send the request.

Where interpretation is used

The settings differ in what they demand of the interpreter, which is worth saying because they are frequently priced as though they were the same work:

• Asylum and immigration interviews. USCIS asylum interviews require the applicant to bring an interpreter, and the interview can be rescheduled if the interpreter does not appear or is not competent — which makes this the setting where getting it right matters most.
• Attorney–client meetings and declarations. Preparing testimony, taking a statement, going through documents.
• Depositions and hearings. Where the record is being made and accuracy is examined afterwards.
• Medical appointments. Note that hospitals receiving federal funding generally must provide language assistance themselves, so ask before you hire.
• School meetings. IEP meetings and parent conferences — districts also have their own obligations here.
• Business meetings and signings, such as real estate closings.

Each setting has its own page — who has to provide the interpreter, what the meeting asks of one and what it costs: see interpreters by setting.

What it costs

Rates are per interpreter, per hour, and billed from the scheduled start time rather than from when everyone actually arrives.

• Virtual — $80 per hour, one-hour minimum. Zoom, Google Meet, Teams or telephone.
• In person — $110 per hour, two-hour minimum.
• Limited-availability languages — add 25–30%. Which languages those are is listed below rather than left vague.
• Travel for in-person work — $0.70 per mile from the interpreter's location.

How the travel charge works out

Travel is charged at $0.70 per mile from the interpreter's location, which means you can work it out rather than wait for a quote: a 20-mile round trip is $14, a 60-mile round trip is $42, a 150-mile round trip is $105. There is no separate call-out fee on top.

We will not pretend to know in advance where the interpreter will be coming from — that depends on the language, the date and the venue. What we do is confirm the interpreter and the exact travel figure before you book, so it is never a surprise on the invoice. Virtual assignments carry no travel charge at all, which is one reason most of what we do is virtual.

How booking an interpreter works

• You send the request with the form below: the language, the setting, the format, the date and how long it should last.
• We confirm before you commit: the interpreter, the exact price and the travel figure if there is one. We reply the same business day, and no payment is taken at this stage.
• You confirm, and the interpreter is booked for your date.

What we will tell you before you book

Two things, both of which occasionally cost us the booking. Whether the venue supplies its own interpreter. Immigration court provides one. Hospitals receiving federal funding generally must provide language assistance. School districts have obligations of their own. If yours does, you should not be paying us — ask them first.

And whether we can actually staff your date. For a limited-availability language on short notice the honest answer is sometimes no, and we would rather say it than accept a booking we cannot fill. Interpretation is not translation: see certified translation at $24.95 per page if what you need is a document rendered in writing.

What to have ready

The more of this comes in the first message, the fewer exchanges before you have a price:

• The language, the date, the start time and how long it should run.
• Virtual or in person: the platform, or the city and the venue.
• The setting and the subject matter.
• How many people need interpreting for.
• Any credential the venue requires of the interpreter.

Request an interpreter

Tell us the date, the language and the setting and we will come back with the interpreter, the exact price and the travel figure if there is one — before you commit to anything.

Sources

The facts on this page about the language and its speakers in the United States were checked against these sources on October 28, 2026.

• US Census Bureau — Detailed Languages Spoken at Home and Ability to Speak English, 2009–2013 (October 2015)
• Executive Office for Immigration Review — FY 2016 Statistics Yearbook, Table 7: top 25 languages (March 2017)
• CLEAR Global (Translators without Borders) — Language data for Ethiopia
• US Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit — Georgis v. Ashcroft, 328 F.3d 962 (May 20, 2003)
• UK Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) — PA/03915/2018 (promulgated January 9, 2019)
• Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada — Conversion of Ethiopian calendar date 30/02/1987, ETH24354.E (July 3, 1996)
• Tilahun Gamta — Qube Afaan Oromo, paper to the 1992 Oromo Studies Conference (University of Pennsylvania African Studies Center)

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