Read Stories and Riddles by in Filipino

Literal but understandable

This Filipino translation follows the main principle of Interlinear translations on our site: the translations must be as literal as possible as long as they are still understandable. Here is an example:

The usual English wording would be "The king asked him" but Filipino uses quite a different structure to English, forcing us to look for ways to convey the meaning intended. However, even though the phrase above is certainly unusual, it is still perfectly understandable. Hence we have kept the words separate and translated them one-by-one and literally.

But see this translation:

Very hard to understand, isn't it? Hence we take such a phrase and translate it all together:

Following this method, we have managed to translate most of the book literally and nearly word-by-word, only merging very occasional hard-to-translate words or expressions.

Filipino or Tagalog?

We get asked: is this translation useful for learners of Filipino or Tagalog? The answer is: both! Filipino (the language used in this book) is built on the basis of Tagalog, except Filipino includes loan-words from European and other Philippine languages. However, since this book features stories from folklore and old literature, its use of exclusively-Filipino vocabulary is light and learners of Tagalog will find much use in this book.

Free audiobook included

To make our translation even more helpful to learners of Filipino, our translator and native Filipino speaker Genessa Zenith Bayno made a home recording of the entire text as an audiobook. The audiobook follows to the minute detail the text of the book, and it is spoken at a slow learner-friendly pace. The audiobook comes as a collection of mp3 audio files, which can be downloaded and played on your device. The audiobook is free for all buyers of the e-book!