THERE is a moment in every legal proceeding when the law stops speaking to lawyers and starts speaking to the public. In the ongoing impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte, that moment has arrived more than once in the form of a definition, and more than once in the form of a translation.
Start with the definitions. As the trial moved into its audit phase, with witnesses from the Commission on Audit (COA) called to explain how the Office of the Vice President’s confidential funds were spent and liquidated, the public was handed a small glossary.
A Notice of Disallowance, auditors testified, applies to disbursements found to be “illegal,” “irregular” or “improper” — three words that sound almost interchangeable in ordinary speech but that COA Circular 2012-003 defines with real precision. “Irregular” covers expenses that deviate from proper process or documentation without necessarily breaking any law. “Illegal” is reserved for expenditures that violate the law outright — unauthorized contracts, spending beyond appropriations, public money diverted to private use. “Improper” sits in its own category: expenses that may be perfectly lawful and properly documented but are unnecessary, excessive, extravagant or unconscionable — redundant services, luxury purchases, benefits beyond what any government operation requires.
This is the register of technical language doing what technical language is built to do: drawing boundaries fine enough that a bureaucracy can act consistently on them. But a courtroom is not only a bureaucracy. It is also a public event, watched live by people who have never read a COA circular and have no reason to know that “irregular” and “illegal” are not synonyms in this context. And so, a few days later, the trial produced a second and rather different kind of language lesson — this time delivered not by an auditor but almost by accident, in the middle of a cross-examination.
Reading aloud from the same COA circular that defines irregular, unnecessary, excessive, extravagant and unconscionable expenditures, private prosecutor Lorna Kapunan tried to render the English terms into Filipino for the benefit of the courtroom, and by her own admission, translation was “not her strongest suit.” She offered “kaduda-duda” for irregular, only to be corrected by presiding officer Francis Escudero, who supplied “hindi kinagawian o hindi pangkaraniwan” instead — a phrase that captures deviation from custom or convention more precisely than “suspicious,” which is what “kaduda-duda” actually connotes. “Unnecessary” she rendered as “hindi kailangan,” reasonably close. “Excessive” became “labis-labis,” an intensifying reduplication that Filipino uses well for this purpose. “Extravagant” stalled the room; someone offered “maluho” from the gallery, but Kapunan, unable to resist, landed instead on “bongga ka, ’day” — pulling a phrase from 1970s swardspeak and popular song into a solemn Senate proceeding to general laughter.
As a sociolinguist, I find this exchange more interesting than incidental. What happened in that hearing room was live, unrehearsed translation of legal register into everyday Filipino, performed under time pressure, in front of senator-judges, opposing counsel and a national audience — and it did not go smoothly, because it could not have. Legal English terms like “irregular” and “extravagant” carry precise institutional meanings shaped by decades of audit jurisprudence; their closest Filipino equivalents are drawn from everyday usage and inevitably carry different connotations, different registers, different emotional weight. “Kaduda-duda” suggests suspicion; the legal sense of “irregular” does not. “Bongga ka, ’day” is playful and colloquial, worlds away from the sober bureaucratic judgment “extravagant” is meant to convey. This is not a failure of Kapunan’s Filipino — it is a demonstration of a genuine translation gap between legal register and vernacular register, the kind that professional legal translators and court interpreters spend careers trying to close.
It also illustrates something linguists call code-switching for audience design: lawyers and witnesses moving between English legal terminology and Filipino explanation depending on who is in the room or watching at home, needs to follow along. The COA auditor’s testimony stayed largely in English, the register of the institution he represents. Kapunan’s attempt at Filipino translation was, whether by design or improvisation, an attempt to make that institutional language legible to a Filipino-speaking public that has no obligation to know what a Notice of Disallowance is. The laughter it produced — from the gallery, from opposing counsel, even from Escudero himself — was not disrespect for the proceedings. It was recognition, the kind that happens when formal language suddenly brushes up against the language people actually use with each other.
None of this bears on the merits of the case, which senator-judges alone are constitutionally tasked to weigh, and which is not the business of this column. What it does show is how much translation work — formal and informal, precise and improvised — a legal proceeding this consequential demands of everyone involved, from the auditors testifying in technical English to the lawyers rendering that testimony into Filipino for a watching public. Impeachment trials are usually remembered for their verdicts. This one may also be remembered, in a smaller way, for what it revealed about the distance between the language of institutions and the language of the people those institutions are meant to serve — and for how much can get lost, or unexpectedly found, in trying to close that distance in real time.
Ariane Macalinga Borlongan is a public intellectual, language scholar and migrant advocate. He is one of the leading researchers on English in the Philippines and one of the pioneers of migration linguistics. He is the youngest to earn a doctorate in linguistics, at age 23, from De La Salle University, and has had several teaching and research positions in Germany, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland and Singapore. He is currently associate professor of sociolinguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
