Languages · Core pair
Vietnamese translation for public agencies.
Newly required by San Francisco departments as of January 2026. The failure mode in Vietnamese public documents is almost never the translation — it is the diacritics not surviving the file.
- Tiếng Việt
- 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.
One Unicode normalization, decided up front
Vietnamese tone and vowel marks can be encoded as precomposed characters or as a base letter plus combining marks. Both are valid Unicode and both look identical on screen in a font that handles them. They are not identical to a search index, a database field, a form validator, or a font with partial coverage. We fix one normalization form for a job, state which, and check the delivered file against it rather than letting the choice fall out of whichever tool touched the text last.
Terminology fixed in a glossary before drafting
Vietnamese renderings of benefits and health program terminology are not settled across California agencies — the same program can appear under two or three different Vietnamese names in materials published by different offices, and readers notice. We build a glossary from your existing published materials and any state-level source you point us to, agree it before drafting, and keep it for the next job so your documents at least agree with each other.
Formal register with plain sentence structure
Agency-to-resident address, held formal and consistent, but with the sentence length brought down. Vietnamese carries long English subordinate chains badly; the fix is to break them, not to mirror them.
Names, forms of address, and honorifics
Name order and the address terms used for a recipient are set per document type so a mail-merged notice does not read as brusque or as inappropriately familiar.
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.
Tone marks lost in PDF export
This is the single most common failure in Vietnamese public documents. Text that is correct in the source file loses marks when it is exported, flattened, or subset into a PDF by a pipeline that did not embed full glyph coverage. The result is not a typo — a Vietnamese word without its tone mark is frequently a different word, and in a benefits notice that can invert a sentence. We proof the exported PDF, not just the working file, because the working file is not what your reader receives.
Fonts with incomplete Vietnamese coverage
Many otherwise-standard fonts cover the Latin alphabet and some accents but not the full set of Vietnamese vowel-plus-tone combinations. The missing glyphs are silently substituted from another face, which shifts baseline and weight mid-word, or they render as boxes. We check the coverage of the font your template already uses and tell you before layout if it will not hold.
Copy-paste and CMS round-trips
Text pasted from a PDF into a content management system, or run through an uploader that strips or re-normalizes characters, is where marks disappear after a document has already been approved. If you are publishing to the web, we deliver text in a form that survives the paste and will check the published page against the file we sent.
Line breaking on syllable boundaries
Vietnamese writes multi-syllable words as separate spaced syllables, so an automatic line break can split a word in a way that looks like ordinary wrapping but is not. Headings and short fields are where this shows.
California context
Why San Francisco agencies buy this pair now.
Vietnamese came into San Francisco's Language Access Ordinance (Admin. Code ch. 91) requirements in January 2026, when the threshold for a covered language fell to 6,000 limited-English-proficient speakers. Departments that had a settled two-language workflow for years now have a third, and in most cases no Vietnamese glossary, no previously approved terminology, and no established reviewer.
That is the practical situation we are set up for. A first Vietnamese job for a department is really two deliverables: the document, and the terminology decisions that the next twenty documents will inherit. We write those down and hand them over as part of the delivery, whether or not you send us the next one.
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 Vietnamese questions specifically. Answering them in your first email shortens the quote and removes the round trip.
Has your department published anything in Vietnamese before? If so, send it — matching it matters more than improving on it.
Are we producing the final PDF, or is your team exporting from a template?
Which font does the template use? We will check its Vietnamese coverage before layout.
Is this going to the web as well as to print?
Is there a state or county source whose program terminology you need to match?
Send us a Vietnamese document.
Attach the file, tell us the deadline, and answer whichever of the questions above apply. A written quote comes back same business day.