Document Translation in Sioux Falls, South Dakota

A language list shaped by resettlement

For a small plains city, the range of languages here is unusual, and it is the direct result of decades of refugee resettlement rather than of proximity to a border. Nepali is one of the most common, spoken by Bhutanese families who spent years in camps in eastern Nepal before arriving. Nepali is written in Devanagari, the script with the horizontal line running along the top of each word, where vowels attach to consonants as marks rather than standing as separate letters. The detail that catches out anyone handling these documents for the first time is the calendar. Nepali civil records are dated in Bikram Sambat, which runs roughly fifty-six years ahead of the Gregorian calendar and whose month boundaries do not line up with it. A certificate showing a year in the twenty-first century in Bikram Sambat is not a clerical error and not a future date; converting it correctly is part of translating the document, not a footnote to it.

Somali is written in Latin letters, and has been since the official orthography was adopted in 1972, so the page looks readable to an English eye while behaving differently underneath. Doubled vowels mark length, so aa, ee and oo are single sounds rather than typing errors, and the letters c and x stand for consonants English does not have. The naming system matters more than the spelling. Somali names are traditionally three parts: a person is given a name, then carries the given name of the father and then of the grandfather. There is no inherited family surname at all. When an American form treats the third element as a last name, siblings match each other but cousins do not, and a family can look unrelated on paper while being closely related in fact.

Swahili is widely spoken among families from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the wider region, and here the household language and the document language come apart. Congolese civil records are issued in French, so the certificate in the folder is French while the people holding it may speak Swahili or Lingala at home. That split is worth stating aloud when someone asks for a translator, because the language of the conversation and the language of the paperwork are two separate questions.

Karen families, who came by way of camps on the Thai border, bring documents in a script derived from Burmese. The letterforms are rounded, built largely from circular strokes, and word boundaries are not marked with spaces the way Latin script marks them, so a reader has to know the language to know where one word stops. Karen names often begin with a title rather than a given name, which is regularly recorded on American forms as a first name and then stays there for years.

Spanish has grown alongside all of this, mainly through the plants and the construction trades, bringing the familiar pattern of Latin American civil registry forms and the double surname that has to reach the English version intact. What every one of these languages shares is a practical reality: the document usually needs to travel in both directions. Into English for an office, back out of English so the person it concerns can read what they are agreeing to.