I saw a clip of Melanie Marquez’s Q&A during the 1979 Miss International pageant on one of our resto’s Samsung HDTV and it cracked me up. But Janina San Miguel, 2008 Binibining Pilipinas World titleholder, caused an uproar when she delivered her answer in a rather embarrassing way.
Venus Raj’s “major major” was actually “minor minor” compared to the degree of suffering other contestants have to endure. Now, this brings one “major major” issue back to the table: why not get an interpreter and let our Pinay beauties speak in Tagalog?
The insistence of our local pageant organizers to conduct Q&A’s in English may be good, but it limits a candidate’s ability to express herself well. Why the unwanted pressure? Being a country with the third largest number of English-speaking citizens in the world does not mean that we do speak the language well. Some of us never really had an access to quality education and grew up learning English from the television sets. Others grew up in an English-speaking community but can be as dumb as anyone else. The ability to speak in English should never be equated to intelligence.
Beauty contestants are judged based on their beauty, character and brains, but not the language. South American titleholders of Miss Universe have always been aided by an interpreter, a practice no one took against them. They were able to share their thoughts well without looking stupid. Why not do the same to our own local candidates who are not comfortable expressing themselves in an alien tongue? After all, no one really expects our beauty contestants to be grammatically correct.
