I just posted Ang Malagim na Hangin a few days ago, so I thought it might be a good time to bookend my previous post on starting my translation journey while the process is still fresh in my mind.

The short version? It was extremely difficult, much more challenging than I assumed it would be at the outset. More times than I am proud to say, I wanted to abandon the project altogether. How many people will read a Filipino high-fantasy story anyway? How much time and effort am I wasting working on something few people will read, when I could be working on a new story in English? These thoughts often crossed my mind.

Even now, I still find it very challenging to translate many words and phrases into Filipino. In my recent novel, I sometimes re-worded sentences altogether to avoid these. Although I worry that the Tagalog version ends up conveying a different meaning than the English version, sometimes it couldn't be helped. It was better that my story was understandable and easy to read, even if there were small deviations in the nuances.

Emotional Constipation

Having limited vocabulary is one of the challenges I already mentioned in my previous translation post. And I did expand my vocabulary as I persevered through the draft, but there were still instances when I couldn't find a Filipino word with the right feel.

Many times, I found myself grasping for emotions. There is a wide array of words in English to describe very specific emotions, whereas I know only a handful, more generalized words in Filipino. One example would be the words "warm" and "hot," in the context of internal feelings. These two words in English have different connotations; the former evokes a nice, cozy feeling, while the latter evokes intensity. In Tagalog, I only knew the word "mainit," which aligns more with "hot." Every time I used "warm" in English, I struggled to find a translation that conveyed the same feeling.

Least and Most

In Filipino, whenever we want to say "least", we append a prefix to the adjective that we are indicating. This makes it hard to say "least" when there isn't a specific adjective, such as in the case "at least he's still free." A similar phrase in Filipino is "kahit papaano," which sort of means "despite" or "even though."

But there was one scene in Chapter 12 where I said, "the least he could do was keep the atmosphere light and hopeful." Here "kahit papaano" doesn't seem to fit, and I ended up saying something more along the lines of, "he is only useful for providing joy and hope." And it just doesn't feel the same.

Speaking of "least," the opposite of that is just as difficult. I have no clue how to say "as fast as he can" or "as much as he was able." I think for "run as fast as he can," I ended up with "tumakbo sa pinakamabilis na makakaya niya." But that feels really clunky and long. When I read that, I don't get the feeling that he's going very fast, because I'm reading slowly.

Loan Words

I talked pretty extensively about loan words in the previous post as well, so I'll try not to get too ranty about that here. But loan words are the bane of my existence. Writing a story with a setting inspired by precolonial Philippines, and having to use words like "atake" or "idea" or "diskarte" feels like reading a historical fantasy and getting slapped in the face by "google." It just takes me out of the setting altogether, and breaks the immersive aspect of reading. I intensely wish there were other novels set in precolonial Philippines written in Tagalog, so I can have a reference of what words are acceptable to use.

I will forever lament my decision to give a character the epithet "Great Arbiter" in English. I could not find a suitable translation of arbiter in Filipino aside from "arbitro," which takes us back to the loan words issue. I have surrendered to the fact that this character from here on out will always be breaking readers from immersion. Might as well have named her Google.

Consecutive Adjectives

There are several passages in my novel where I described things, places, and people extensively. The good thing with English is that when you want to use multiple adjectives, you simply string them along in a chain, separated by a good, old comma.

In Filipino, when you want to chain adjectives, you have to use 'na' in between, or use the ligature '-ng' in the preceding word if it ends in a vowel. This gets pretty tiresome when there are more than two adjectives. Saying 'adj1 na adj2 na adj3' doesn't provide a good flow.

It is also easy to negate adjectives in English. You can say "un-" something, or something "-less". The Filipino equivalent of that is to prepend the word with "kawalan." Do you see how much longer that is to say? And this isn't really all that common in oral Filipino nowadays, so having to say "kawalan ng pag-asa" for something as simple as "hopeless" makes me feel hopeless.

Inconsistent spelling

Is it "anong" or "ano'ng"? Is it "balewala" or "baliwala"? Is it "gayon pa man" or "gayumpaman"? Is it "ninyo" or "niyo"? Is it "kaniya" or "kanya"? Why is it "pwede" but it's "kuwento"?

Pilipinas, explain! I am confusion!!

It wouldn't be so bad if dictionaries could have pointed me out to a standard way of spelling. But I had three dictionaries open the entire time I was doing my translation, and they all said these were all valid!

At least give me a set of words that go together. You know, like if I used "niyo" then I have to use "kanya." Or is it okay to just jumble them up?

I could have sworn these were real words

Siring. Pampanan. Usod.

I grew up hearing these words all the time. I thought they were real words. If they are, then at least five dictionaries are gaslighting me, because these words are not in any of them. I know that there are multiple Tagalog dialects, and maybe these words are specific to the particular dialect in the region I lived in in the Philippines. But oh boy, it was a blow to find out they weren't in the standard Filipino dictionaries. Not even the ones online that included slang.

Old Tagalog words mean different things now

I was really excited getting a chance to incorporate some of the old historical words I read during my research. But I found out that either the definition has diverged significantly that it just wouldn't make sense to use them in my context now, or there is another word of the same spelling that is more prevalent these days.

For example, old Tagalogs used the word "laho" to indicate the serpent-like creature that ate the moon. This mythology is actually the reason why the term for eclipse among the Tagalogs is "paglaho ng buwan." But these days, "laho" no longer refers to the mythological creatures. Rather, it means to disappear or dissipate, or an actual eclipse itself. It retains the traces of its origins, but when I tried to use "laho" to refer to the sea-serpents in my story, my editor suggested for me to use the direct translation of sea-serpent instead, "ahas-dagat."

Another word I tried to use is "dulohan," which according to Scott's Baranggay, refers to a chief's following. But in today's age, "dulohan" would be more associated with the root word "dulo," which means the end or edge of something. So I understand why using this term would cause some confusion.

How do you tell time?

I have a really hard time trying to convey the passage of time. Anything along the lines of "it happened ten years ago," or "it's the worst thing that's happened within the last few years."

I looked up various translations of these phrases, and I get back something like, "sampung taong nakalipas" which sounds… awkward somehow. It's worse when I don't have a specific number in mind. I'm never certain how to replace "a few" or "several" with an equivalent quantity in Filipino.

I think because English has become so prevalent in Philippines, we simply say "ten years ago" too. It's strange to think that certain phrases are so under-used, that when I actually hear them, the sound weird.

Who is "Siya"?

We don't have gendered pronouns in Filipino, just separate pronouns for he/she ("siya") or it ("ito"). This makes it difficult to write sentences where I refer to different people, because unless I always use their names, it can be easy to lose track of which person "siya" refers to. When I read in Filipino, I notice that some authors would sometimes substitute the pronoun for "it" to refer to the person who is not the main actor in the sentence. Initially I found this strange, because I was never taught this growing up, and when I looked up grammar books, I couldn't find anything regarding this technique.

I even asked my followers on Tumblr what they thought of this strategy, and it appears that they too found it ungrammatical. Unfortunately, I did end up using "ito" in rare cases when I just couldn't get the sentence to flow properly.

Of course, that left me in a bind when I had to talk about the Ghoul, who was once referred to as "it," but whom the main characters realized was really human. I feel as if I lost the significance of that shift every time I had to use "it" to refer to somebody.

Lack of Support

The most disappointing part of embarking on this translation journey was the dearth of resources for Filipino writing. Even something as simple as a spellcheker on my word processor was difficult to find. I came across a plugin, but it was poorly maintained, and it kept flagging legitimate words as misspellings.

In hindsight, I dived into this project with rose-tinted lenses, hoodwinked by the popularity of Wattpad among Filipino writers. I'm not on Wattpad myself, but being in the tech industry here in Toronto means I hear about Wattpad a lot as an example of a Canadian start-up success story. One point that Wattpad touts often is how huge its base is in the Philippines, and that Filipino writers on their platform often go on to have publishing deals, TV show deals, and movie deals in the country.

So I thought, great! Self-publishing must be robust in the Philippines! I mean, sure, most people on Wattpad are probably amateur writers, but coming from a fanfiction background myself, I know just how much work writers put in their stories even when they don't get paid. And how high the quality of those works can be. And because there seems to be a Wattpad-to-publishing funnel going on, surely there's got to be a lot of support for these writers.

Nope. I don't know if that's because I just don't have my foot in the correct doors; perhaps there does exist support for Filipino writers, but you have to be part of the right networks to access it. Or perhaps there really isn't. For the most part, my searches for self-publishing resources in Filipino turned up empty, even after changing my geolocation on Google and using Tagalog keywords. It's not like in English where millions of results will crop up, blog post after blog post giving tips about anything from plot outlines to character sketches, from editing to book covers.

It took me a long time to find a copy editor in Filipino, and it was mostly out of luck that I saw they were offering a copy editing service on their website. If you're writing in English, platforms like Reedsy nowadays make it extremely easy to find an editor with the right experience for the genre you're writing in. In Filipino, you'd be lucky to find any kind of editor at all, let alone one who is right for your story.

I worry about this, because if I can't find good resources to help me with writing in Filipino, then it might mean that the Filipino versions of my stories will always be inferior to the English versions. I don't want that.

(As an aside, I had once thought that maybe one day I would be good enough to write a story first in Filipino, and then translate it afterwards in English. Knowing how limited editing resources are in Filipino, I doubt that would be a smart strategy even if I were to become very adept in the language.)

Pushing forward

Thank you for coming to my TED Rant.

No, really, if you made it through all that, thanks. I just had to get them off my chest. As you can tell, I had a lot of frustrations with my experience, but if you ask me if it was all worth it?

Yes, it's absolutely worth it.

The thing is, who else is going to do it? Who else is going to give me Filipino high-fantasy in Tagalog without love triangles? If there's one thing my googling has shown me is that Filipino writers these days are more interested in writing in English and getting published abroad. And who can blame them? That's where the opportunities are.

Besides, even if nobody else reads these stories, I would. The younger me would have liked them. As much as "write to market" gets touted a lot these days (which isn't a terrible advice), sometimes it's enough to write self-indulgently. Sometimes writing for yourself is the goal.

I have not changed my mind about translating each of my stories to Filipino. I did learn a lot of valuable things over the past year. For example, I need to stop giving characters epithets I can't translate. And I continue to improve my wield on the language as well, so I'm confident that as I keep practicing, it will eventually get easier.