While Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) written by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry in 1943 now has over 300 translations in different languages worldwide and is now considered the world’s most translated book (not counting religious works), there have been surprisingly only two translations of his book in the Philippines (Filipino and Bicol). El Diutay Principe is only the third edition featuring a Philippine language. The Little Prince is a classic French novella about a pilot who gets stranded in the desert after a plane crash and encounters a little fellow who asks him to draw a sheep for him. Through the course of their meeting, the pilot rediscovers the true meaning of life and what people should value the most. When I came across the book in 2013, I found that I could relate very well to the negative image given to “growing up” in the book. When the idea to translate the book into my mother tongue was presented to me, I didn’t think twice. I thought, ‘a lot of people my ...
In the course of learning Spanish, I was able to unravel one of the biggest secrets of Chabacano. Over the past few years, I have always wondered why most past tense verbs in Chabacano like the words burned, changed, arranged, and seated are different from their Spanish counterparts. In Spanish, one would add -ado to verbs ending in -ar like quemar , sentar , and cambiar while in Chabacano, we tend to say quemao , sentao , cambiao , and arreglao (instead of quemado , sentado , cambiado , and arreglado. This has always been a mystery to me until I heard a Spanish podcast explain that in Spain, this is an informal (or lazy) way of pronouncing the -ado words. The person in the podcast even went as far as saying that her father would often get irritated when she pronounces these words in this manner. Quite "Chabacano" (of bad taste) indeed. Probably one of the most prominent theories out there as to why Chabacano is incorrect Spanish is the fact that the natives just parroted...