Translating Philippine Folk Tales into Chabacano

After working on Voces del Alma which is a collection of Chabacano poems, I decided to create a book of Philippine Folk Tales in Chabacano. Voces del Alma was special because it was the first book I designed from scratch (since El Diutay Principe was patterned after the original French edition layout), but this book is the first one where I did some very heavy editing. For Voces del Alma, much of the work went into looking for Chabacano poems since there really aren't a lot of people writing Chabacano poems and then designing the book itself. I did very little editing for that book since it was poetry and, in my opinion, you shouldn't really be editing poetry (save for the spelling and punctuation). The Philippine Folk Tales translation is different because it is a work of translation, and I made a conscious effort to ensure that the Chabacano used reflects the everyday language that people actually hear and use. Of course, the occasional Spanish word can't be avoided as well as the awkward sounding translations. Since this is a bilingual book, I am putting emphasis on faithfulness to the original which appears without modifications in the book.

The editing was excruciating work because I had to edit the translations by themselves and then afterwards compare them with the original. So, unlike translating something yourself, I had to do several layers of editing for the submitted translations. Since this was the first time that I was doing something like this, I honestly did not know what I was getting myself into. When I met with the late Dr. Yap-Aizon once, he told me that he was very tired from editing the works submitted for a Chabacano book that he was working on at that time. I never understood what he meant by that, until now. I probably will not be doing this ever again.

The new book features selected Philippine legends, fables, and other classic stories translated into Chabacano. Some of these stories I know from school but now I realized that the version we were told as kids is different from the original. Also, there are different versions of the original because these stories also change based on who provided them to the author. Most of these stories are violent just like Grimms Fairy Tales. Translating these stories written in the early 20th century was a very different experience compared to translating Le Petit Prince.

One of the challenges encountered was the archaic writing style employed in the English original. I had to do some research to check what certain parts meant. Hard-to-translate words were things that we no longer use or do today.

One of the differences between the folk tales and the French classic is the absence of technical terms like asteroid and western words like Christmas tree. Since the setting of the Philippine folk tales were primarily ancient Philippines or Colonial times, the words found in the stories were more plain. In El Diutay Principe, I used several English words that I felt like had already been assimilated into Chabacano such as Christmas tree and asteroid. 

The folk tales were written with long winding sentences (with the word and appearing excessively as well as phrases like after a while or after some time) so it was a bit difficult to make the translation sound natural in Chabacano and at the same time remain faithful to the original. I'm not sure if this sounded natural or even well-written at that time but I still chose not to make any changes to the original and made sure that the translation was faithful. Obviously, for the Chabacano translation to sound more natural, the translation does not a hundred percent follow the style found in the source text.

Aside from editing the submitted translations, I also translated the story of Bantugan which was a bit difficult especially the battle parts. I had to travel back in time to my childhood and think about the terms we used as kids whenever we played with toy ships and airplanes and acted out make-believe battles. I wasn't satisfied with translating destroyed boat as simply destrozao barco which felt very plain and after several days I finally remembered the word bunca. Maybe it won't resonate with the digital-native kids today, but my childhood was filled with memories of saying and hearing "buncao ya el campo" (the camp is destroyed).

When I translated Le Petit Prince into Chabacano, I did not yet possess a copy of Lexicography, the Chabacano dictionary published by the local government of Zamboanga City that implements the general orthography rule released by the city hall in 2016. For consistency, I had to create a unique spelling system for El Diutay Principe which can be found here: El Diutay Principe's Unpublished Translator's Notes. The truth is the 2016 Chabacano orthography is a rabbit hole! I mean there are so many words you think come from one language, and then later you find out they actually come from another. And then some of these languages do not even have a standard spelling system!

One of the recurring themes surrounding Chabacano is its spelling which again arose while creating this book. I already knew that I was going to follow the general orthography rule but unlike in the past where I developed a unique Chabacano spelling system entirely for El Diutay Principe, I am using a less labor-intensive approach for this project. For this book, I am using the Chabacano dictionary published by the City Hall in 2018 as my main source for the spelling. If not found in that dictionary, my second reference is the dictionary by ADZU published in 2010. Camins' dictionary is also an additional reference if the word is not found in the first two dictionaries. 

The dictionary published by the city hall is the latest one and implements the general orthography rule they released in 2016. I have not really studied the Lexicography until I created this book and to be honest, I noticed a lot of inconsistencies in that dictionary, but I have to believe that these were intentional because, with all the PhDs involved in its creation, surely the inconsistencies have to be intentional!

Several words from Philippine languages were spelled with a C and not with a K such as tacuri (kettle) and cuba (hunchback).  I can't figure out what the reason behind this was because they spelled kalayat with a K and not as calayat.

Some words were spelled differently in the addendum at the last part of the second volume of Lexicography compared to in the actual dictionary. For example, the word for grass appears as sacate in the actual dictionary but appears as zacate (same spelling as Spanish) in the addendum (page 606). Uste which is the Chabacano pronounciation and spelled as usted in Spanish appears as usted in the actual dictionary but uste in the addendum.

The word vira is one of my favorite words in Chabacano. It is used to indicate going back to a certain place, rotating something, or turning around. It is a versatile word that you will use almost everyday in Chabacano. I wrote about this word here back in 2023. I have reason to believe that it is from Spanish so my heart broke when I saw that they spelled it as bira in Lexicography. 

This is the same case as the word chongo which is found in regional Spanish vareieties but was treated as a native word spelled in Lexicography spelled as chonggo. However, it was not treated entirely as a native word because if they had used Filipino orthography, they would have spelled it as tsonggo. So chonggo is a hybrid between Filipino and Spanish orthographies. 

The same is true for the word fugera in the dictionary which would be fuguera when using Spanish orthography or pugera when using Filipino orthography. 

Another thing I noticed is that they used different spellings of the same word, perhaps to differentiate them when the meaning changes. For example, to protect is protégé (with accent marks), but to ward becomes proteje with a J. The word for seed is pipita, which matches how we pronounce it in Chabacano, though in Spanish it’s spelled pepita. Interestingly, the dictionary does include pepita, but defines it as nugget.

The word for beans is similia (because beans are technically seeds), but then it becomes semilla when listed under seed. 

Meanwhile, again appears as otravez (yes, one word), and otra vez is anew.

At first, I thought that this was a way to differentiate words but then later I realized that all these words were practically synonyms. And that's when it hit me, these could also be just a way of listing variations of the SAME word. In other words, otravez and otra vez are accepted. Of course, this isn't applicable to all words listed above.

It was only when I consulted the dictionary published by the city hall while creating this book that I realized that they used accent marks on some words. However, it's a bit hard to decipher the system for using them. For example, por que appears with accent marks just like in Spanish, but the usage of the accent marks is not the same as in Spanish because there are a lot of words written with an accent mark in Spanish that appear without one in the dictionary.

So, as you can see, even just following the spelling used in Lexicography was difficult because of all these inconsistencies. In the end, I did choose the follow the spelling system used in that dictionary with some very minor modifications which I explained in the book. 

Aside from being bilingual, the new book features mirroring punctuations to maintain textual isometry between the English and Chabacano versions so this makes it good for Chabacano language learners. Depending on whether the stars shall align and of course, the will of the gods, the book is coming out very soon!