Filipino to Irish: keep before attached to the event that sets the deadline
A temporal link tells the reader which action comes first
A Filipino instruction to finish printing before a visitor arrives sets an order between two events. It does not merely place printing somewhere near a visit in the story. An Irish translation should retain which action must happen first and which event supplies the reference point for that requirement.
The University of Hawaiʻi’s Tagalog grammar notes discuss bago among temporal conjunctions and distinguish sequential relationships from events happening at the same time. They also show that some linked clauses can change position while retaining their relationship. For Tagalog-based Filipino, the first action mentioned on the page is therefore not automatically the first action in the intended timeline.
When a before-clause is placed at the beginning, it can establish the deadline before the main instruction appears. When it follows the instruction, it can supply the same limit afterward. Read the link between the clauses rather than translating their physical order as a chronological list.
Irish can express the reference event in different constructions
The English–Irish dictionary on Teanglann illustrates before going away with both roimh imeacht dó and sular imigh sé in a reporting context. It separately gives sula n-imeoidh tú in an instruction to visit before leaving. These attested examples show that the event can be expressed through different grammatical structures, not by one invariant word substituted for before everywhere.
The forms belong to their documented constructions and time references. They are not interchangeable fragments to insert mechanically after a Filipino conjunction. In an Irish version of a printing instruction, preserve who prints and who arrives, together with the relevant timing, when deciding how to express the reference event.
This is especially useful when the Filipino sentence has different people in its two clauses. The person asked to print may not be the visitor whose arrival sets the limit. A compressed target expression must not silently merge those participants just because a shorter phrase looks easier to produce.
A deadline is different from a completed-event report
An instruction to finish before the visitor arrives does not establish that the printing is already finished. A later Filipino update saying it was completed before the arrival supplies that additional fact. Keep the instruction and the completion report distinct in Irish, rather than making the original request sound like confirmation that the work has been done.
A revised plan might move the visit later while keeping printing as the earlier action. Another revision might allow printing after the visitor arrives, changing the order itself. Those are different updates. Preserve the event that sets the deadline and the relationship between the actions, without inventing a clock time absent from the source. The useful Irish result lets the reader identify the required task, the person responsible and the event before which it must occur, even if the target expresses that event with a structure different from the Filipino clause.
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