When asked why he translated Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic The Little Prince into his native tongue, Jerome Herrera had this to say: love of, pride for, and respect to the Chavacano language. A hypernym for the several varieties of Asia’s only Spanish-based creole, Chavacano is reportedly spoken by almost a million Filipinos as their first language. Among these varieties are Chavacano de Caviteño (or “kitchen Spanish,” as Jose Rizal called it in a work by Gina Apostol), the now-extinct Chavacano de Ermiteño (once spoken in the Manila neighbourhood of Ermita), Chavacano de Ternateño or Bahra (a Ternate municipality in Cavite Province), Chavacano de Cotabateño (Cotabato City), Chavacano de Abakay (Davao City but presumed to be extinct), and Chavacano de Zamboangueño, the native tongue to almost half a million people—mostly in Zamboanga City where Herrera grew up.
In contemporary history, Herrera’s is the fourth translation of The Little Prince into a Philippine language, which first appeared in Tagalog-based Filipino (by Lilia F. Antonio in 1969 and then Desiderio Ching in 1991), then the Central Bikol or Bikol Naga language (by Fr. Wilmer S. Tria in 2011). Most of these titles, I suspect, are translations from the English—translations of translations.
In this interview, I asked Herrera about El Diutay Principe, his translation into the Zamboangueño Chavacano of Saint-Exupéry’s novella, devising a practical orthography towards a language that is departing from its original Castilian Spanish meaning, and other geolinguistic issues in translating into the mother tongue.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Growing up, how was the Chavacano language instilled in you? Was it taught in school?
Jerome Herrera (JH): My elementary school days were not very favorable towards the Chavacano language because I studied at a Christian school, where speaking it in class was discouraged. I guess this was a time in the nation’s history when they were trying very hard to promote Tagalog—I won’t call it Filipino for political reasons—as the national language.
Even with my inauspicious beginnings, I grew up with Chavacano all around me. At home, my dad would listen to radio news programs and watch TV news programs in Chavacano all the time and occasionally, I would even hear mass in Chavacano. At the public high school I went to, Chavacano was used heavily by the teachers (as a medium of instruction) as well as students; however, I had already become used to speaking only Tagalog at school and, after six years, the fear of getting reprimanded for speaking Chavacano was heavily embedded in my mind.
Even in college, I had a hard time accepting the fact that speaking Chavacano was allowed in the classroom, but during this time, I had already slowly begun speaking Chavacano with some friends and even with teachers. So until the age of twenty, I had mostly spoken it only at home and with family. The Chavacano subject was reintroduced in schools only in 2012.
AMMD: A magazine of literary translation had a special issue on Southeast Asian creole which featured the late Filipino poet Francis C. Macansantos’s self-translation of his own Chavacano poems along with other works in Chetti Malay (Malay-Tamil-English creole) and Portuguese-based creole in Sri Lanka (Sri Lankan Portuguese), Macau (Patuá), and Malacca (Melaka Portuguese). In her introduction, Stefanie Shamila Pillai writes this about Zamboangueño Chavacano:
Its status is stable, with about 300,000 speakers and a tradition of language education, literacy, and literature.
Can you speak about the current status of the language?
JH: According to the 2010 Census of Population and Housing, two in every five households in the city of Zamboanga reported speaking Chavacano at home. This was 43.4 percent of the population at that time. While it remained a dominant language over the years, the number of Chavacano speakers has been suffering a decline of about four percent decline every decade. The last decade that Chavacano was the language of the majority in Zamboanga city was in the eighties.
Today, the Chavacano de Zamboanga is facing many battles on different fronts; Cebuano, English, and Tagalog are all formidable languages that threaten the Chavacano de Zamboanga. The increasing number of migrants and the fashionability of speaking in Tagalog and English are all leading to the decreasing fluency of the Zamboangueño youth in the Chavacano language. If you ask young Chavacano speakers how they feel about their proficiency in the Chavacano language, most will say that they feel they are not fluent.
But not all is lost. Today, we are seeing a tremendous amount of Chavacano content in social media. The past decade had also seen an implementation of the mother tongue-based education, which brought back Chavacano as a subject in elementary schools.
AMMD: Were there poets, writers, and books in Chavacano you read growing up? What about now?
JH: No. Written works in Chavacano were (and still are) very scarce and inaccessible. Today, there are a lot of Chavacano songs that can be found online as well as some young writers sharing their Chavacano poems in social media platforms. But written Chavacano, to this day, is not mainstream.
AMMD: One of the struggles you grappled with in translating El Diutay Principe was on orthography. Like other Philippine languages, Chavacano does not have an officially sanctioned one. The language itself comes in different spellings: Chabacano, Chavacano, Chabakano. You then resorted to the etymology-based spelling prescribed by Zamboanga’s city government which, in your words, is “easy to understand and modern.”
JH: As suggested by the name of my blog on Chabacano, I prefer to spell the name of the language with a ‘b,’ but for this translation, I chose to spell the language with a ‘v’ because I understand that this is the socially accepted spelling, and I did make this book for Chavacano speakers.
The way I see it, Chavacano is an endonym for the language in Zamboanga city. Using ‘v’ makes some people who are familiar with Spanish uncomfortable but using ‘b’ makes it sound foreign for Zamboangueños. Anyway, it is essentially the same language and whether you spell it with a ‘b’ or a ‘v’ depends on your politics.
One thing that I’m sure many don’t realize is how social media is helping Chavacano form a standard orthography. Social media allows us to study and observe written conversations and statements in Chavacano. It may not happen immediately, but I think that it will only be a matter of time before people will clamor for an easier and more practical Chavacano spelling system.
While the city government of Zamboanga came out with a recommendation that all Chavacano words should be spelled etymologically, they did not establish specific rules and limitations surrounding that general rule. It wasn’t clear how etymologically pure or how close to the original language they wanted the spelling system to be. Thus, I decided to create a unique spelling system surrounding the general orthographic rule prescribed by the local government for El Diutay Principe.
AMMD: Another translation of The Little Prince into the Zamboangueño Chavacano, which was published by a German indie press in Hesse, came out in 2018 by a language scholar-professor. Can you speak more of authorial autonomy as one of the rewards of self-publishing?
JH: Self-publishing has its pros and cons. If you’re willing to put in the effort, you will find self-publishing to be very liberating and rewarding.
If you decide to self-publish, you’ll have to do everything by yourself. After I finished the translation, I realized that was just half of the task. There was still the layout, cover, as well as editing and proofreading to be done. Since these things cost a lot of money, I decided to find out if I could do these things myself. Fortunately, I have a lot of free time, which I devoted to studying how to design covers and layouts. My friends and family helped me proofread and edit the book.
I also had a tough time negotiating with printing presses because I didn’t know what book paper 70 meant, and other technical terms like C2S. So I had to do lots of research before I was able to get printing presses to take me seriously.
Translators need to have a tremendous amount of inspiration, as well as a strong WHY when translating, because translation is both an art and a science. I value my work very much, and I spent countless of hours on making this book a reality. It is my fervent hope that El Diutay Principe will become the preeminent piece of Chavacano literature—that it will also greatly aid in Chavacano becoming a standardized written language in the future. I also hope that it’ll create awareness about the Chavacano language in the Philippines and around the world, to legitimize it as well as elevate its prestige.
El Diutay Principe is a true labor of love. It is priceless. Not even all the stars in the sky can compensate for the amount of time and effort that has been placed in making this book a reality.
AMMD: Bien Chabacano, your blog, is a rich repository of the language—from word etymologies and reference grammars to conversational expressions, to name a few examples.
JH: It was not until I began working in Manila that I realized just how special the Chavacano language is. It’s funny how absence creates fondness. It was also during this time that I began to self-study Spanish in earnest (using a book I borrowed from the university library) to get a bilingual customer service position at a contact centre. Seeing all the glaring similarities between the two languages gave me the idea of writing about it in my blog. Initially, I wrote my articles about Chavacano in my personal blog, and only later, when I was churning several articles about the language, did I decide to create a dedicated blog to Chavacano.
Bien Chabacano seeks to instill pride and improve proficiency in the Chavacano language among young speakers by talking about its rich and colorful history, and demystifying its grammar’s many intricacies and nuances. The blog also aims to reinvigorate the usage of Chavacano among the youth of today by reintroducing words that have fallen into disuse, as well as become a one-stop resource center for the Chavacano language.
Writing is very therapeutic for me, and I love writing about my native tongue. In the future, I hope to be able to keep on writing articles that will spark interest in the Chavacano language, among both speakers and non-speakers alike.
Jerome Herrera is the translator and publisher of El Diutay Principe, a translation into the Zamboangueño Chavacano of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince or The Little Prince. Bien Chabacano, an online resource on anything Chavacano, is his brainchild. His articles about the Chavacano language also appear in Riquezas, an annual journal published by the city government of Zamboanga, as well as the International Year of Indigenous Languages Philippines website. He also writes about finance, travel, and food on his lifestyle blog All I Can Handle. In 2014, he won second runner up at SINAG, Sun Life’s Financial Literacy Digital Journalism Awards.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them) is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines. They’re the author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021), assistant nonfiction editor at Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and Atlas & Alice, and editorial reader at Creative Nonfiction. Their works of translation appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation (England), Asymptote, Reliquiae: Journal of Landscape, Nature, and Mythology (Scotland), Rusted Radishes (Lebanon), Tolka (Ireland), and anthologised in the Oxford Anthology of Translation. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas
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