Sunday, September 09, 2007 Cariño: Sa ulo ng nagbabagang balita By Linda Grace Cariño Paradigm Shift
LIKE many Baguio folk – especially my age and older -- my Tagalog sucks. It was learned essentially while in college in Diliman, and even then by what might be called brute force. I had to study Tagalog very hard while memorizing pages and pages of lines from plays done in Tagalog, though it was called Pilipino then. This was also when the academe, especially at the U.P, was bent on forging a national identity via language. Thus, the Theatre department (then called Speech and Drama) had all of these play classics translated before producing them.
Still, while my Tagalog leaves much to be desired, my ears flinch when I hear news programs in Tagalog begin with “Sa ulo ng nagbabagang balita.” One such program is this one that has the local news with Dobie de Guzman. He begins the newscast with “Sa ulo ng nagbabagang balita.”
Obviously, the use of “ulo,” which means “head,” is in reference to or transliterated from the “head” in headline. “Nagbabagang” is an adjective I know refers mostly to really hot charcoal embers, ergo, when used with “balita” – news – “nagbabagang balita” is supposed to mean “hot news.” Hmm, maybe we can sign off on that one. So “sa ulo ng nagbabagang balita” means “head of the hot news” or maybe “top of the hot news.” Really. All they’re trying to get across is: “The headlines.” It’s all we need to hear, too.
The transliteration of “headline” to “ulo” isn’t even a complete one. If one must transliterate “headline” one may as well go the whole hog: “ulo-guhit.” But the need of the hour is a translation, not a transliteration. It is meaning that must be captured. There are newscasts I’ve heard where they lead with “mga pangunahing balita,” clearly meaning news that leads, top of the news. Way more acceptable, methinks.
Simpler still: do the newscast in English. Or, if translation must be invested upon, translate into Iloco, and do so well, more apropos to making the news local.
