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 ...
The health of a language could be gauged by how many people speak it in a given locale. In this article, we are going to take an objective look into the health of the Chabacano language in Zamboanga city. Whenever people (including “experts”) are asked how many Chabacano speakers there are in Zamboanga city, they usually throw around whatever figure that comes into their mind. Depending on their biases, they will come up with a high or low figure. Admittedly, it is hard to come by official data that will give us an accurate number of Chabacano speakers in Zamboanga city. Today, we are going to consult the 2010 Census of Population and Housing published by the National Statistics Office. Unbeknownst to many, the government conducts a survey on the languages spoken in the country every ten years. The mid-decade census does not include this data. Unfortunately, the information that we can gather from the census is not as comprehensive as one might hope for. For example it does not det...