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Hebrew medical interpreters

Real-time Hebrew medical interpretation for healthcare teams, on phones, tablets, and computers.

Dialects supported by Opalite:ModernSephardic

221,400 people in the U.S. speak Hebrew at home.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.

Hebrew speakers by state
StateSpeakers
New York62,460

Where Hebrew is spoken at home

  1. 1New York62,460

State counts reflect the 15 most reported non-English languages in each state’s ACS table. States where Hebrew falls outside the top 15 are shown without shading; the national total includes every state.

32,020

speakers of Hebrew speak English less than “very well”: the federal threshold for needing language assistance.

14%

of Hebrew speakers in the U.S. meet that limited-English definition.

62,460

people speak Hebrew at home in New York 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 Hebrew

Every language has grammar that an interpreter must handle correctly. These are the Hebrew features that the fewest other languages in the world share, according to the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS).

Afro-Asiatic · Semitic · Eurasia

1.6%

of the world’s languages share this trait

Hebrew marks a noun’s role with short words that lean on the word after them rather than with endings, so an interpreter has to hear those small unstressed words to know who did what to whom.

WALS 51A · Position of Case Affixes · Prepositional clitics

2.5%

of the world’s languages share this trait

Hebrew packs tense, who is acting and whether the action is done or received into a single verb ending, so an interpreter must hear the one syllable that flips “I was given” to “I gave”.

WALS 21B · Exponence of Tense-Aspect-Mood Inflection · TAM+agreement+diathesis

3%

of the world’s languages share this trait

Hebrew builds words by changing the vowels inside a root as well as adding endings, so an interpreter recognizes related terms by their consonant skeleton rather than by how they sound.

WALS 20A · Fusion of Selected Inflectional Formatives · Ablaut/concatenative

How Hebrew is structured

Word ordersubject, object and verb
SVO
Adpositionsprepositions or postpositions
Prepositions
Adjectivebefore or after the noun
Noun-Adjective
Demonstrativethis and that, before or after
Noun-Demonstrative
Numeralnumber before or after the noun
Numeral-Noun
Genitivepossessor before or after
Noun-Genitive
Relative clausebefore or after the noun
Noun-Relative clause
Morphologyprefixing or suffixing
Weakly suffixing
Tonewhether pitch changes meaning
Not coded
Casesnumber of noun cases
No morphological case-marking
Gendersnumber of noun genders
Two
Classifierscounting words for nouns
Absent

Source: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) 2013. WALS Online, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Hebrew entry: wals.info HEB. 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 Hebrew medical interpreters

Only one state’s published top-15 language table includes Hebrew: New York, home to 28% 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 Hebrew 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.

States where Hebrew is a top 15 non-English language

All states

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