Burmese medical interpreters
Real-time Burmese medical interpretation for healthcare teams, on phones, tablets, and computers.
95,320 people in the U.S. speak Burmese at home.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.
Darker states have more Burmese speakers; shading is logarithmic, relative to the state with the most speakers.
| State | Speakers |
|---|---|
| Indiana | 12,400 |
Where Burmese is spoken at home
State counts reflect the 15 most reported non-English languages in each state’s ACS table. States where Burmese falls outside the top 15 are shown without shading; the national total includes every state.
61,530
speakers of Burmese speak English less than “very well”: the federal threshold for needing language assistance.
65%
of Burmese speakers in the U.S. meet that limited-English definition.
12,400
people speak Burmese at home in Indiana alone.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.
Meet Opalite.
Real-time AI medical interpretation in 150+ languages and dialects, connecting providers and patients in seconds.
- Works on the devices care teams already carry: phones, tablets, computers, and telehealth platforms
- Integrates with all EHRs
- Built for HIPAA-compliant healthcare
- SOC 2 Type II attested security controls
What to know when interpreting Burmese
Every language has grammar that an interpreter must handle correctly. These are the Burmese features that the fewest other languages in the world share, according to the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS).
Sino-Tibetan · Tibeto-Burman · Burmese-Lolo · Eurasia
1.4%
of the world’s languages share this trait
Burmese uses the same form for “the doctor’s” and “the one the doctor saw”, so an interpreter must tell ownership from description by context.
WALS 60A · Genitives, Adjectives and Relative Clauses · Genitives and relative clauses collapsed
2%
of the world’s languages share this trait
Burmese uses its sentence-final negative word only together with another negative, so an interpreter must read the pair as one denial.
2.2%
of the world’s languages share this trait
Burmese forms ordinals like “first” and “second” in several unrelated ways, so an interpreter must know each one to keep a dose schedule in order.
How Burmese is structured
- Word ordersubject, object and verb
- SOV
- Adpositionsprepositions or postpositions
- Postpositions
- Adjectivebefore or after the noun
- Noun-Adjective
- Demonstrativethis and that, before or after
- Demonstrative-Noun
- Numeralnumber before or after the noun
- Noun-Numeral
- Genitivepossessor before or after
- Genitive-Noun
- Relative clausebefore or after the noun
- Relative clause-Noun
- Morphologyprefixing or suffixing
- Strongly suffixing
- Tonewhether pitch changes meaning
- Complex tone system
- Casesnumber of noun cases
- 8-9 cases
- Gendersnumber of noun genders
- None
- Classifierscounting words for nouns
- Obligatory
Source: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) 2013. WALS Online, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Burmese entry: wals.info BRM. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Values are reproduced as WALS codes them; each links to its datapoint. The clinical readings are Opalite’s own inferences and are not part of WALS.
FAQs about Burmese medical interpreters
Only one state’s published top-15 language table includes Burmese: Indiana, home to 13% of the nation’s speakers.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.
Opalite uses the same underlying interpretation techniques for Burmese as it does for Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese. In Opalite’s published validation study, those three languages were evaluated in clinical conversations, with over 90% fewer errors than certified medical interpreters across the conversations studied.
Try Burmese medical interpretation.
See a live conversation interpreted. Ask about setup and pricing.