Afar interpreting and translation

Afar interpreting for interviews, clinics and courtrooms

Our vetted, trained and qualified Afar interpreters are prepared for asylum and immigration interviews, legal advice sessions, court hearings, GP and hospital appointments and social services visits. We cover each of these in person, by telephone at any hour of the day or night, all year round, and by video through the SILA Linguists® app or the conferencing platform you already use.

Afar clients often describe clan affiliation, kinship and livelihoods built around herding and seasonal movement. Those details can carry real weight in a family or protection case, so our interpreters render them precisely rather than smoothing them over. For NGO workshops, consultations and multi-party meetings we can also provide consecutive interpreting, and simultaneous or remote simultaneous interpreting where the event calls for it. Relay through Amharic, Arabic or French is possible, though direct interpreting comes first. A female or male interpreter can be requested for sensitive appointments.

Afar translation in Qafar Feera and certified translation

Written Afar normally follows Qafar Feera, the standard Latin orthography, which doubles letters for long vowels and uses c, q and x for sounds English does not have. Our Afar translators work in that orthography by default and check with you if your readers expect Ethiopic or Arabic script instead. Typical work includes health information, consent forms, community notices, programme materials for humanitarian projects and personal statements translated from Afar into English.

Many documents brought by Afar speakers are actually issued in Amharic, Tigrinya, Arabic, French or English. We check the real source language of each page and then provide certified translation with a signed statement of accuracy, accepted by the Home Office, universities and other UK authorities, keeping names spelled the same way throughout the bundle.

Transcription and language analysis for Afar

Recorded interviews, voice messages and research recordings in Afar can be transcribed with time codes and translated into English, with any switches into Amharic, Arabic or French marked in the text. Where a protection claim turns on a person's origin, SILA Linguists® also offers language analysis for the determination of origin (LADO) and nationality assessment, carried out by specialist linguists and analysts familiar with the Ethiopia, Djibouti and Eritrea border regions.

Sectors we support in Afar

Our vetted, trained and qualified Afar linguists can support immigration and asylum practitioners, courts and tribunals, police, NHS trusts and community health teams, local authority social workers, refugee charities and international NGOs. You work with a single project team that vets every linguist, keeps your material under confidentiality agreements and UK GDPR, and stays with the case from the first booking to the final document.