Languages · Network pair
Filipino translation for public agencies.
A San Francisco threshold language, and the pair where the most common mistake is translating too thoroughly. Bay Area readers do not use the purified Tagalog that a dictionary will hand you.
- Filipino
- Vetted partner linguists
- Returned same business day
Decisions
What we settle before the first sentence.
These are choices, not defaults. Each one is agreed at intake, recorded, and carried into the next document so a set stays consistent with itself.
Filipino or Tagalog on the label
Filipino is the national language, standardized on Tagalog and the name most California agencies use on a language-selection list. Tagalog is the name many readers use for what they speak, and it is what appears on some older county materials. The text we deliver is the same; the label on your form or your language menu should match whatever your other materials already say, and we will match it either way.
Loanword register, set deliberately
Filipino has coined native equivalents for much of the vocabulary of government, and a translator can reach for them consistently. The result is formally correct and reads as stilted or unintelligible to a Bay Area reader who has only ever encountered those concepts in English or in the borrowed form. We use the borrowed term where that is what readers actually use, and reserve the coined term for the cases where it is genuinely current. This decision is the difference between a Filipino document that gets read and one that gets set aside.
Code-switching held at a consistent level
Mixed English and Filipino is the natural register for a great deal of Philippine public communication, but the ratio has to be held steady across a document set. Drifting between heavily English and heavily Filipino paragraph to paragraph reads as inconsistency rather than as natural speech.
Program names and agency titles
Kept in English on first reference, with a Filipino gloss, so a reader can match what they are holding to what a counter clerk or a phone menu will say.
Hazards
Where this pair breaks.
Most of what goes wrong in a translated public document is not a mistranslation. It is a production failure that survives approval and shows up in the file your reader receives.
Over-purification
The failure mode described above, stated plainly because it is the one that turns up in existing agency materials most often. If you have Filipino documents in circulation that readers report as hard to follow, this is usually why, and a review will say so.
Moderate text expansion
Filipino runs longer than English, mostly through affixation and repeated function words. Less than Spanish, but enough to overflow a fixed-width form field or a two-line heading in a template built to the English.
Terminology that varies by county
Benefits and public-health vocabulary is not standardized across Bay Area agencies. We work from whatever your office has already published in preference to imposing our own, and record the choices so the next document matches.
California context
Why Bay Area agencies buy this pair.
Filipino is a threshold language under San Francisco's Language Access Ordinance (Admin. Code ch. 91) and is a required language for several Bay Area county agencies. It is also frequently the third or fourth language in a citywide document set, which means it usually arrives on the same deadline as the others and with the same layout constraints.
We deliver Filipino through vetted partner linguists rather than a retained reviewer, so availability is confirmed when we quote. If you need it on the same clock as a Spanish or Chinese version of the same document, tell us at intake and the quote will say plainly whether that date holds.
Descriptions of the law here are general. What a particular department owes in a particular case is the department’s determination, not ours.
We deliver this pair through vetted partner linguists. The review and the certificate are identical to a core pair; the delivery date is confirmed against a linguist's availability before the quote goes out.
Send the deadline with the file and the quote will say whether it holds.
Intake
What we will ask you.
These are the Filipino questions specifically. Answering them in your first email shortens the quote and removes the round trip.
Does your language menu say Filipino or Tagalog? We will match it.
Do you have prior Filipino materials whose register we should follow?
Is this landing in a template with fixed field widths?
Is it needed on the same date as the other languages in the set?
Send us a Filipino document.
Attach the file, tell us the deadline, and answer whichever of the questions above apply. A written quote comes back same business day.