Both English Circuits and the Spanish congregation and group on Hawaii Island are meeting this weekend for our Special Assembly Day. I have an interview and a few lines for a demo for the English program and have been asked to help with simultaneous translation into Spanish which is cool. On Saturday, I'm supposed to be doing the same English interview for the Iloko Assembly which was cool too...until I was told last night at rehearsal that they wanted me to attempt at least some of it in Ilocano. Now, contrary to popular local belief, and as you can see from the title of this post (and this is a big pet-peeve of mine...I almost get violent over this one, people!) : Ilocano is NOT "the same" as Spanish (although there are some loan words like the days of the week and numerals).
Iloko/Ilocano (which I don't speak at all) is an Austronesian language related to Indonesian and Malay, while Spanish (which I do alright in) is a Latin language related to French, Portuguese and Italian. In other words, the interview on Saturday will not be as easy for me as some people might think. I'm basically going to have someone (Thanks, Gemma and Rina!) translate my answers orally, write down what I hear phonetically and read it straight off the paper. I'm still looking forward to it, though. Hope I can fake it. PS: Seeing the audience's initial reaction to hearing me in Ilocano when they were expecting English, was priceless. What a great group!
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