About Ang Batang Maraming Bawal

“Ang Batang Maraming Bawal” is the winner of CANVAS’ second annual Romeo Forbes Children’s Storywriting Competition, and is a simple tale of innocent hope and imagination.

Written originally in Filipino, our biggest difficulty was the title, for which we could not find any appropriate translation.

Suggested English titles like “The Boy Who Couldn’t Do Much,” “The RX Kid,” “The Boy Who Couldn’t” or, what probably is the closest translation, “The Boy Who Wasn’t Allowed to Do a Lot of Things” – all couldn’t capture the spirit and humor of the original title.

In the end, we chose the easiest solution, which was to simply refuse to translate the title.