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 ...
It seems like there is no shortage of interest in the only Spanish-based creole language in Asia and one of the oldest creole languages in the world. While answering a survey on Chabacano, I realized that most of the times, Chabacano looks like Tagalog translated word for word into Spanish. When asked to translate the following sentences: how do you turn on the TV and how can you guys make money, I translated them respectively as que modo tu abri con el TV and que modo ustedes encontra cen . While the original sentences were in Tagalog, I based my answers on the English equivalent (selective reading much). So when I glanced at the Tagalog equivalent of the English sentences, I was surprised when I realized that my Chabacano translation of the word kikita and binubuksan were direct translations. I'm pretty sure though that there was a time in the past when word choice would be more aligned to Spanish instead of Tagalog. A more common way of saying turn on (an electric device...