Burmese interpreting and translation

Burmese interpreting with care for background and politeness

Our Burmese interpreters work face to face in asylum and immigration interviews, GP and hospital appointments, mental health assessments, solicitors' offices and courts, and at school admissions for resettled families. Telephone interpreting runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and video interpreting is available on the SILA Linguists® app or the platform you already use, wherever the appointment takes place.

Political and ethnic background can be sensitive for people who have left Myanmar. You can ask for an interpreter with no connection to a particular community, and for a female or male interpreter. Our linguists are at home in the formal and colloquial registers of Burmese and in honorifics such as U and Daw, and they can explain to staff completing forms why Burmese names often have no family surname. For conferences and stakeholder meetings we offer consecutive, simultaneous and remote simultaneous interpreting.

Burmese translation, Unicode and certified documents

Older Burmese files and some software still use the Zawgyi encoding, which displays as nonsense on Unicode systems. We check incoming documents, convert Zawgyi where needed and deliver every translation in Unicode Burmese. Typical work includes national registration cards, household lists, education certificates, medical records, witness statements, contracts and trade correspondence, translated into and out of English.

Burmese names do not follow a given name and surname pattern, so for certified Burmese translation we copy the romanised name exactly as it appears in the passport. Each certified Burmese translation carries a signed statement of accuracy and is accepted by UK authorities, the Home Office, courts and universities among them, as well as by employers. Myanmar papers needed abroad can carry a US certificate of accuracy, be handled by a Canadian provincially certified translator, or be translated by a NAATI-certified translator for Australia.

Transcription and language analysis for Burmese

We transcribe Burmese audio and video, including interviews, recorded evidence and research material, and provide time-stamped transcripts with English translation. Where a speaker uses Rakhine (Arakanese), Tavoyan or another regional form, the transcriber notes it. For asylum casework, SILA Linguists® also offers language analysis for the determination of origin (LADO), carried out by specialist linguists.

Burmese support across sectors

Our vetted, trained and qualified Burmese linguists can support immigration lawyers, asylum interviews and tribunals, refugee charities, NHS and mental health teams, schools and colleges, local authority resettlement teams and companies trading with Myanmar. A single project team coordinates interpreters, translators and transcribers, every linguist is vetted and signs a confidentiality agreement, and data is held under UK GDPR. Burmese interpreters are available to resettlement agencies, courts and clinics in the US, Canada and Australia as well as in the UK.