Villaflor: Alcantara Memoir: Lost in (Google) translation

Saturday, April 9, 2011

A PACKAGE landed on my office desk today. It came all the way from Australia, from a man named Graeme Mackinnon, a football guru whose fondness for the Philippines is beyond words.

Graeme and I share a fascination for a historical football figure named Paulino Alcantara. Once, the phenomenal striker from the first quarter of the last century became a topic during a chat online. We called him The First Azkal. We discussed how great this Filipino was and how he had set the bar so high, yet how little information there is about El Romperedes, or The Net Breaker.

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We knew that Alcantara was born in Iloilo to a Filipino mother and a Spanish military officer. We knew he played for the Philippine national team, for Catalonia, and also for Spain. We knew he retired to become a doctor. We knew he remains as the all-time top scorer of FC Barcelona, with 357 goals in 357 games. We also knew he wrote a memoir.

What I didn’t know was that Graeme had a copy of the memoir. This got me all giddy. So I asked him if it was possible for him to email me the transcript so I can translate the whole thing. It’s a hard copy, he said. And it’s in Spanish. I said, “Bring it on!”

Graeme said he’ll send the photocopies to me in a package, all the way from Australia.

“Noel, I have posted the Alcantara memoirs to you today. Hopefully they will be there in 10 days,” Graeme said in a p.m. last March 3. Days passed and there still wasn’t any package. Graeme was getting worried. Finally, the package arrived yesterday afternoon, after more than a month. I informed Graeme, to his relief. He had also sent a copy to neighboring Malaysia at the same time, and it arrived within the week. “What can I say?” he said, referring to our postal service that is “slower than snail mail.”

Despite the delay, it was a wonderful surprise. I leafed through the thick manuscript in my hands. Then it occurred to me that going through Alcantara’s memoir would require way more patience than waiting for a package from overseas.

For one, I can’t read Spanish text. I speak a mere handful of Cebuanized Kinatsila terms, such as silya, lamisa, kasilyas, porbida, the affectionate letse, and the notorious redundancy way nada. My Spanish language education comes mostly from a pirated DVD of Dora the Explorer, a must-have for any home that harbors a toddler.

(“Come on, vamonos... Where are we going?”)

There was an obvious answer, of course: Google Translate. But it meant I had to encode every single Spanish character. Copy-pasting or encoding hard copy in English is one thing. Doing this letter by letter in a foreign language demands animal persistence, as what I discovered when I started encoding.

This was Alcantara’s first line: “Yo naci en Ilo-Ilo el 7 de octubre de 1896.” Then, Google’s instantaneous translation: “I was born in Ilo-Ilo on October 7, 1896.”

I could do this, I thought. The translation of the second sentence sought to disprove that.

“Voy, pues, haciendome un poquito viejo, en el terreno de los deportes” became “I go, making me a little old, in the field of sports.”

That sounded like someone who’s had a bit too much weed.

By the second sentence of “Mis Memorias Y Consejos Practicos Para El Entrenamiento” (Google Translation: “My Memories and Advice for Training”), I realized I had a better chance of figuring out the meaning of life than making sense of Google’s literal translation, which is fine for short text, and if the encoder doesn’t give a caca about nuances.

Seriously, what was this columnist thinking when he sought to translate 109 pages of Spanish text?

But a voice—Graeme’s perhaps—buzzed in my head: Alcantara’s tale must be told, in plain English, mate. In plain bloody English.

And so I decided to learn Spanish, at whatever cost.

Now where’s that Dora DVD?

(nsvillaflor@gmail.com)