Languages · Core pair
Spanish translation for public agencies.
The highest-volume pair in California public-sector translation, and the one where register control matters more than vocabulary. A benefit notice and a community flyer are not the same Spanish.
- Español
- Retained reviewers
- 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.
Register, set per document
Official Spanish for benefit notices, determinations, and anything that carries a right of appeal — the tone a reader expects from an agency of record. Plain-language Spanish for outreach, signage, and campaign material, where the same formality reads as distance. We ask which a document is before we start, because the choice cannot be made after the fact by editing adjectives.
A readability target, not a literal transfer
English public-agency prose runs long and nominalized: passive constructions, stacked qualifiers, and defined terms in series. Translated literally, it produces Spanish that is grammatical and unreadable. We hold the translation to a readability target and flag the source sentences that had to be restructured to reach it, so you can see what changed and keep or reject each one.
Regional neutrality for a California audience
Not Iberian Spanish and not a single Latin American national variant. Californian readers arrive from many countries, and vocabulary that marks a document as belonging to one of them reads as not addressed to the rest. We choose the neutral term where one exists and gloss the unavoidable regionalism on first use.
Forms of address
Usted throughout for agency-to-resident communication, held consistently across a document set rather than drifting between notice and instruction sheet.
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.
Text expansion of roughly 20-25%
Spanish runs longer than English by about a fifth to a quarter. In running prose nobody notices. In a form, a table cell, a mailing panel, or a sign, it is the difference between a document that prints and one that overflows a field, breaks a two-column grid, or pushes a signature block onto a second page. We lay out to the expanded length rather than delivering text that fits the source and fails in the template.
Bureaucratic terms of art with no clean equivalent
Terms like fair hearing, good cause, overpayment, and share of cost carry defined meanings in program regulations. We keep a glossary per agency, retain the English term in parentheses where the reader will encounter it on a form or a phone line, and do not silently substitute a friendlier word for a defined one.
Deadline and date formats
A date written 03/04/2026 in an English notice is read differently by a reader accustomed to day-first order. In deadline-bearing text we set the month in words, which removes the ambiguity without changing your layout.
California context
Why California agencies buy this pair.
Spanish is the threshold language in effectively every California jurisdiction that has one. Under the Dymally-Alatorre Bilingual Services Act (Gov. Code §7290 et seq.), state agencies serving a substantial number of non-English-speaking people are directed to provide materials in the languages those people speak; in practice Spanish is the first language any such program reaches. San Francisco's Language Access Ordinance (Admin. Code ch. 91) covers it as well.
The consequence for a buyer is volume and repetition. Most agencies are not commissioning one Spanish document — they are maintaining a standing set of notices, applications, and web pages that must stay consistent with each other as the English changes. That is a terminology-management problem more than a translation problem, and it is why we keep your glossary rather than restarting from scratch on each job.
Descriptions of the law here are general. What a particular department owes in a particular case is the department’s determination, not ours.
We hold retained reviewers in this pair, which is what makes the standard turnaround a schedule rather than an aspiration.
- Standard
- Priority
- Scheduled
Intake
What we will ask you.
These are the Spanish questions specifically. Answering them in your first email shortens the quote and removes the round trip.
Is this an official notice or outreach material? The register differs.
Do you have an existing Spanish glossary, style guide, or previously translated version we should match?
Are there fixed-width fields, table cells, or print panels the text has to fit inside?
Should program names and form numbers stay in English on first reference?
Send us a Spanish document.
Attach the file, tell us the deadline, and answer whichever of the questions above apply. A written quote comes back same business day.