A brief for english in Philippine education

Title

Language

English

Source

Panorama XX (6) June 1968

Year

1968

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

■ This interesting and sound article in favor of the use of English in the higher schools in the Philip pines deserves the attention of educators and leaders. A BRIEF FOR ENGLISH IN PHILIPPINE EDUCATION Let us assume for the sake of argument that Pilipino can be an effective medium of instruction for high school and college; the next ques tion is: “Who are the great scholars who are going to translate all the great clas sics and all the technical books into Pilipino?” We already stated that the INL couldn’t even translate the instruction on how to plant seedless watermelons. Only recently Mr. Romeo Vertutio translated Dr. Zhivago into Tagalog. .This is a very com mendable task. But let us not kid ourselves. Vertutio’s translation is not genuine. Why? Because he translated the English version of Zhi vago. So it is actually a translation of a translation. Translation, they say, is trea son. So to translate from a translation is compounding a felony. The same is true of Rufino Alejandro’s Ru baiyat of Omar Khayyam. It was not translated from the original Persian, but from the English translation of Fitzgerald. The Tagalog version of the Bible was also executed in the same way — not from the original He brew and Greek, but from an English translation. What about science? Our educational authorities since time immemorable have been highly concerned with the population explosion prob lem. Now we have another explosion — the information explosion. It is no longer valid to simply say that we live in the Atomic Age. For we also live in the Cyber netic Age, the Space Age, and the DNA Age. Of all the scientists that existed since Man began, 90 per cent are alive today! The other ten per cent are spread back as far as 100,000 years. The great achievements of science were made in the 42 Panorama past 50 years — notably durina the past 20. Scientific knowledge is doubling every 10 years! One half of the vocabulary of all advanced languages consist of scienti fic terms. There are no less than 70,000 scholarly jour nals published regularly! If placed on top of one another, it would be 500 meters high. Russia has had to employ 26,000 translators just to keep up with American research. The Lupon sa Agham (Committee on Science) has reportedly completed a 6,000word “English-Pilipino Integ rated Science Vocabulary” — but even this is a mere drop in the bucket. Not to men tion the fact that compiling words is one thing. Getting them accepted and under stood is another. And the real1 question is: Can they ever. hope to cope with the tremendous amount of trans lation that would be neces sary? We will repeat: Scientific knowledge is doubling every decade! By the time a translator has fi nished a book, it may be obsolete; In this aspect, we Filipi nos are fortunate because we have the English lan guage already established as our medium of instruction. The Philippines today is ei ther the third or fourth larg est English-speaking nation in the world. Next to Chi nese, English is the most spoken language on earth. But Chinese is concentrated only in Eastern Asia. En glish is spoken all over the globe. It is in fact the closest thing to an interna tional language that the world has ever known. En glish today is the leading scientific tongue. Even the Japanese scientists who tra ditionally had employed German as a medical lan guage are now substituting it with English. Are we going to forego this tremen dous advantage? And if so, what advantage would we get? It seems to us that a shift from English to Pili pino in our school system would be the greatest leap backward that we could make. It would be tanta mount to committing national suicide because it has been already established that an economically underdeveloped country is nothing else but a scientifically underdevelop ed nation. — By Alejandro Roces in Sunday Chronicle, June 16, 1968. June 1968 43

pages

42-43

Media