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 was checking my Facebook account when the post above appeared in my news-feed. I was so intrigued by the word suruhano because it is a word which I have never heard of in my life. Unfortunately, the term suruhano is not found in any of my Chabacano dictionaries. I asked my friend what it meant because he knows all the hondo Chabacano words; he told me that a suruhano is sort of a quack doctor. He gave a scenario wherein a person suddenly acquires the ability to jump amazing heights which is a symptom of someone turning into a supernatural being (e.g. werewolf, vampire, etc) and the suruhano would prescribe the first egg of a hen to this person as cure. I asked another friend and she also said that suruhano is a quack doctor. But she quickly backtracked and explained that a suruhano is someone who conducts exorcisms. Suruhano may have come from the Spanish word zurujano which is an archaic variant of the word cirujano. The Spanish cirujano ...