Translation Theme Semester-The War of Translation and the Friendship Among Languages: American English, Colonial Education and Tagalog Slang 1920s-1970s

A lecture by Vicente L. Rafael
Univ. of Washington, Seattle

Abstract: This paper seeks to inquire into the Filipino nationalist critique of American colonial education as a kind of counterinsurgency effort, whereby the teaching of English meant the repression of vernacular languages. Such amounted to a war of, as well as on, translation. I then ask if there is an alternative to this colonial and nationalist conception of translation as war and turn to the question of Tagalog slang as it is theorized by the renowned novelist Nick Joaquin. For Joaquin, what emerges in the history of Tagalog slang is a different politics of language.

Co-sponsored by the LSA Translation Theme Semester, Departments of Asian Languages, Comparative Literature, History, Center of Southest Asian Studies and the Language Resource Center.