Skip to contentClinically validated by researchers at Johns Hopkins
All languages

Ukrainian medical interpreters

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

184,000 people in the U.S. speak Ukrainian at home.

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

Ukrainian speakers by state
StateSpeakers
Washington26,330
Oregon5,356

The 2 states with the most Ukrainian speakers

  1. 1Washington26,330
  2. 2Oregon5,356

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

83,410

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

45%

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

26,330

people speak Ukrainian at home in Washington 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 Ukrainian

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

Indo-European · Slavic · Eurasia

8.4%

of the world’s languages share this trait

Ukrainian says “two tablets each” with a separate word placed before the number, so an interpreter must catch that small word to keep a per-dose instruction from becoming a total.

WALS 54A · Distributive Numerals · Marked by preceding word

8.7%

of the world’s languages share this trait

Ukrainian puts the verb before the object but adjectives before the noun, so the describing word arrives before an interpreter hears what is being described.

WALS 97A · Relationship between the Order of Object and Verb and the Order of Adjective and Noun · VO and AdjN

9.4%

of the world’s languages share this trait

Ukrainian places “not” between the subject and the verb, so the denial arrives before the action and an interpreter must carry it through the rest of the sentence.

WALS 144A · Position of Negative Word With Respect to Subject, Object, and Verb · SNegVO

How Ukrainian is structured

Word ordersubject, object and verb
SVO
Adpositionsprepositions or postpositions
Prepositions
Adjectivebefore or after the noun
Adjective-Noun
Demonstrativethis and that, before or after
Demonstrative-Noun
Numeralnumber before or after the noun
Numeral-Noun
Genitivepossessor before or after
Not coded
Relative clausebefore or after the noun
Noun-Relative clause
Morphologyprefixing or suffixing
Strongly suffixing
Tonewhether pitch changes meaning
Not coded
Casesnumber of noun cases
Not coded
Gendersnumber of noun genders
Three
Classifierscounting words for nouns
Not coded

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

Washington holds 14% of the nation’s Ukrainian speakers, and Ukrainian appears in the published top-15 tables of just 2 states.

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

Opalite uses the same underlying interpretation techniques for Ukrainian 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 Ukrainian is a top 15 non-English language

All states

Try Ukrainian medical interpretation.

See a live conversation interpreted. Ask about setup and pricing.