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The War of Translation: Colonial Education, American English, and Tagalog Slang in the Philippines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2015

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Abstract

This paper examines the role of language in nationalist attempts at decolonization. In the case of the Philippines, American colonial education imposed English as the sole medium of instruction. Native students were required to suppress their vernacular languages so that the classroom became the site for a kind of linguistic war, or better yet, the war of translation. Nationalists have routinely denounced the continued use of English as a morbid symptom of colonial mentality. Yet, such a view was deeply tied to the colonial notion of the sheer instrumentality of language and the notion that translation was a means for the speaker to dominate language as such. However, other practices of translation existed based not on domination but play seen in the classroom and the streets. Popular practices of translation undercut colonial and nationalist ideas about language, providing us with an alternative understanding of translation in democratizing expression in a postcolonial context.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2015 

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References

1 Cited in Camilo Osias, “Education and Religion,” in Encyclopedia of the Philippines, ed. Galang, Zoilo M., 20 vols. (Manila: E. Floro, 1950–58)Google Scholar, 9:126. For a more or less critical look at the first thirteen years of colonial education, see May, Glenn, Social Engineering in the Philippines (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 77126Google Scholar. See also Maria Teresa Trinidad Pineda Tinio, “The Triumph of Tagalog and the Dominance of the Discourse on English: Language Politics in the Philippines During the American Colonial Period,” PhD diss., National University of Singapore, 2009; and Barbara Gaerlan, “The Politics and Pedagogy of Language Use at the University of the Philippines: The History of English as the Medium of Instruction and the Challenges Mounted by Filipinos,” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1998.

2 See Kramer, Paul, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

3 Osias, “Education,” op. cit. note 1, 136; May, “Social Engineering,” op. cit. note 1, 81–83.

4 Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901). See also Burnett, Christina Duffy and Marshall, Burke, eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Exceptionalism and the Constitution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Philippines (Commonwealth) Commission of the Census, Census of the Philippines, 1939, 5 vols. (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1940–43)Google Scholar.

6 Renato Constantino, “The Mis-education of the Filipino,” originally written in 1959, first published in The Weekly Graphic, June 8, 1966. Republished in The Journal of Contemporary Asia 1, no. 1 (1970): 2036CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My paginations follow this reprint. The most engrossing biography of Renato Constantino is Rosalinda Pineda Ofreneo, Renato Constantino: A Life Revisited (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 2001)Google Scholar.

7 For an example of the unreconstructed and uncritical use of Constantino's essay in the context of Filipino-American studies, see Juan, E. San Jr., “Inventing the Vernacular Speech-Acts: Articulating Filipino Self-Determination in the United States,” Socialism and Democracy 19, no. 1 (2005): 136–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 152. See also Ina Alleco R. Silverio, “Removing Filipino as a Subject in College: A Betrayal in the Name of Business?” Bulatlat.com, July 23, 2014, http://bulatlat.com/main/2014/06/27/removing-filipino-as-a-subject-in-college-a-betrayal-in-the-name-of-business/ (accessed January 1, 2015).

8 Constantino, “Miseducation,” op. cit. note 5, 29.

9 Ibid., 24.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., 33.

12 Ibid., 31.

13 Ibid.

14 Saleeby, Najeeb Mitry, The Language of Education of the Philippine Islands (Manila, 1924)Google Scholar, quoted in Constantino, op. cit. note 5, 32. For a related critique of the limited utility of English, see also the speech of vice-governor and head of the Bureau of Education, George C. Butte, “Shall the Philippines Have a Common Language” (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1931), especially 14 and 19–20.

15 Paul Monroe, Board of Educational Survey, Philippines, A Survey of the Educational System of the Philippine Islands by the Board of Educational Surveys: Created Under Acts 3162 and 3196 of the Philippine Legislature (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1925)Google Scholar.

16 Ibid., 115.

17 Ibid., 127.

18 Ibid., 128.

19 See May, Social Engineering, op. cit. note 1, 83.

20 Monroe, Survey of the Educational System, op. cit. note 14, 40.

21 Ibid., 155.

22 For an early colonial Tagalog precedent for this linguistic practice, see Rafael, Vicente L., Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, especially chap. 2.

23 Monroe, Survey of the Educational System, op. cit. note 14, 158–59.

24 Barry, Jerome, “A Little Brown Language,” American Speech 3, no. 1 (1927): 1420CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Ibid., 15, 20.

26 Ibid., 16.

27 Ibid., 19.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., 17–18.

30 Ibid., 17.

31 Nick Joaquin's “The Language of the Streets” first appeared in 1963 and has been republished in Quijano de Manila, The Language of the Streets and Other Essays (Manila: National Bookstore, 1980), 321Google Scholar. For the most informative biographical information on Joaquin, see Resil B. Mojares, “Biography of Nick Joaquin,” Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, 1996, https://filipinoscribbles.wordpress.com/tag/resil-b-mojares/ (accessed February 7, 2015); and Lanot, Marra PL., The Trouble with Nick and Other Profiles (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1999)Google Scholar, republished in The Trouble with Nick,” Bulatlat 4, no. 13 (2004)Google Scholar, http://www.bulatlat.com/news/4-13/4-13-nick.html (accessed January 14, 2015).

32 Joaquin, “The Language,” op. cit. note 30, 3.

33 Ibid., 4.

34 Ibid., 4, 18.

35 Ibid., 12.

36 Ibid., 4.

37 Ibid.

38 See Rafael, Vicente L., The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 6.

39 Anderson, Benedict, Why Counting Counts: A Study of Forms of Consciousness and Problems of Language in Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008), 79Google Scholar. See also Romanillos, Emmanuel Luis, “El Chabacano de Cavite: Crepusculo de un Criollo Hispano-Filipino?” [The Chabacano of Cavite: The Twilight of a Spanish-Filipino Creole?], Linguae et Litterae 1 (1992), 914Google Scholar. See also Carme Guerrero Nakpil's account of speaking Ermita Spanish during the 1930s in her autobiography, Myself, Elsewhere (Manila: Circe Communications, 2006), 7576Google Scholar.

40 Indeed, as Anderson conjectures, had the United States not arrived and the First Republic survived, Spanish would have become one of the official languages of the state while “a kind of Filipino Spanish would have become, de facto, either the official language or the country's lingua franca” (Anderson, Why Counting Counts, op. cit. note 37, 84). It would have been, as Joaquin would say regarding Tagalog slang, a language that would be “open to everyone to adapt it, corrupt it, change it in accord with local needs” (86).

41 Joaquin, like many others who have written about Tagalog slang or Taglish, elides the presence of Hokkien contributions to the lingua franca or national language in the same way that he tends to repress the profound Chinese presence in Philippine history.

42 Joaquin, “The Language,” op. cit. note 30, 5.

43 Ibid., 18.

44 Ibid., 6.

45 Ibid., 8.

46 Ibid., 9.

47 Ibid., 19.

48 Ibid., 19–20.

49 Ibid., 21.

50 Ibid., 13–15.

51 Ibid., 3.

52 Ibid., 17–18.

53 This “venerable theory” of language, one predicated on translation as play, dates back further than the introduction of vaudeville to the Philippines. See, for example, the awit or songs of the sixteenth-century ladino, or bilingual poet, printer, and translator for Spanish friars, Tomas Pinpin as discussed in Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, op. cit. note 21, chap. 2.