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 ...
I once heard a friend at the office say. “ esta roto ?” Then somebody replied “ todo esta roto ”. They were talking about the computers in the office. Hearing this conversation gave me the idea to write about the Chabacano roto and rompido . What’s funny is that the word rompido does not exist in Spanish. Saying rompido in Spanish would be incorrect as roto is the past participle form of romper . Here is an example of how the word roto is used in Spanish: Las paginas del libro estan rotas (meaning the pages of the book is torn) La television esta rota (meaning the TV is broken) In Chabacano, though both roto and rompido are used. The word roto is used solely for clothing articles like socks, shirts, and pants. It can be used both as a noun and as an adjective and would mean 'a hole' or 'a torn part'. Note that the Chabacano word roto can't be used to mean that something is broken like in Spanish. In Chabacano, we normally use malo or he...