Cebuano to Tagalog Phrasebook

Words that trap you

These exist in both languages but mean different things. They are where confident readers get caught, and where machine translation is least reliable.

• walahigh risk

  In Cebuano

  Left — the direction. It also carries the 'none' sense, so only context separates them.

  In Tagalog

  Nothing, none, absent.

  The sentence parses either way, which is what makes it dangerous — a Tagalog speaker being given directions in the Visayas can understand every word and still turn the wrong way.

• usahigh risk

  In Cebuano

  One — the numeral.

  In Tagalog

  A deer.

  One of the first words anyone learns in either language, and they could not be further apart.

• pilahigh risk

  In Cebuano

  How many.

  In Tagalog

  A queue, a line of people waiting.

  Common enough in both languages that it turns up in ordinary sentences rather than as a curiosity.

• bukidhigh risk

  In Cebuano

  A mountain.

  In Tagalog

  A field, farmland, the countryside.

  A Tagalog speaker told to head for the bukid pictures farmland; a Cebuano speaker means uphill.

• kalayohigh risk

  In Cebuano

  Fire.

  In Tagalog

  Distance — parsed as ka- plus layo, 'far'.

  Tagalog reads it as ka- attached to layo, 'distance'. It is a single indivisible word in the Visayan languages.

• asohigh risk

  In Cebuano

  Smoke.

  In Tagalog

  A dog.

  Two of the most ordinary nouns in either language. The Cebuano word for a dog is iro.

• langgamhigh risk

  In Cebuano

  A bird.

  In Tagalog

  An ant.

  Nothing in the sentence signals which one is meant, and both are plausible in most contexts.

• liboghigh risk

  In Cebuano

  Confusion; being at a loss.

  In Tagalog

  Lust, arousal.

  The Visayan sense is entirely ordinary and the Tagalog sense is not, which makes this the most awkward collision on the list.

• gamot

  In Cebuano

  A root.

  In Tagalog

  Medicine, a remedy.

  Related once — roots were medicine — but the two languages settled on opposite ends of that history.

• kamot

  In Cebuano

  A hand.

  In Tagalog

  To scratch.

  Both turn up in instructions and descriptions of physical action, so the swap is easy to miss.

• asa

  In Cebuano

  Where.

  In Tagalog

  To hope, to depend on someone.

  The Cebuano question word and the Tagalog verb sit in the same slot in a sentence often enough to confuse both.

• daan

  In Cebuano

  Old, of a thing.

  In Tagalog

  A road; also 'hundred'.

  Tagalog daan is a road; almost everywhere else it means old. Directions and descriptions get swapped.

• dalag

  In Cebuano

  Yellow.

  In Tagalog

  A mudfish.

  A colour in the Visayan languages and a freshwater fish in Tagalog.

How often the machine gets these right

We ran 287 Cebuano entries from the phrasebook below through the same engine this site uses, and compared each result against the human-written Tagalog. Categories are our own; the comparison ignores punctuation and casing. Neither Cebuano nor Tagalog is well resourced and the engine routes between them through English, so this measures two stacked translations rather than one.

Machine output matched or came close to the human Tagalog for 59.6% of 287 phrases. The rest were partly or entirely wrong.