What is “Hala Bira” in English?

By Noel Galon de Leon

That was the question that floated across my screen like confetti during Dinagyang season, innocent, mischievous, and almost aggressively Ilonggo. It sounded simple, even naive, but anyone who has lived long enough under the Visayan sun knows that some questions are traps. They pretend to ask for vocabulary, but what they really want is culture, memory, and a confession of who you are.

Dinagyang season has that effect on us. The drums grow louder, the streets feel warmer, and suddenly everyone remembers Sto Niño, even those of us who only visit church when guilt, nostalgia, or a festival forces our hand. Along with the drums comes the chant. “Hala Bira, Iloilo!” blares from speakers, tricycles, and the collective throat of the city, thanks largely to the iconic theme song written and popularized by Dante Beriong. You do not just hear it. You absorb it.

If your relationship with the festival is more devotional than performative, you will hear “Hala Bira” paired with “Pwera Pasma,” shouted by devotees who believe that faith, sweat, and stubbornness can scare illness away. It is prayer disguised as bravado. It is theology shouted at the top of one’s lungs. I know, because I shouted it myself the last time I found my way back to San Jose Placer Parish Church, half sincere, half amused, and fully Ilonggo.

Then came Facebook, that great anthropological laboratory of our time. While killing time scrolling, I saw a post on the Adulting Iloilo page. “Hello! Ano sa English ang Hala Bira man?” It was a pure, well-meaning question, the kind that assumes every word has a twin in another language. It was also the kind of question guaranteed to summon comedians, linguists, and chaos.

The comment section did not disappoint. People offered translations that ranged from the enthusiastic to the unhinged. “Go harder.” “Harder.” “Let’s go.” “O baby please don’t stop.” Someone even went full Freudian and typed “I have a hard on,” as if linguistic inquiry were an open invitation to collective immaturity. Others leaned into meme culture with “forda go” or the deeply unsettling “go daddy.” It was ridiculous, predictable, and honestly very Ilonggo.

I laughed, of course. You would have to be emotionally dead not to. But I also felt that familiar itch, the one that says a joke is hiding a serious question. Because behind the laughter was a genuine curiosity. Can Hala Bira be translated? And if it can, what exactly do we lose in the process?

The internet, ever eager to simplify the world, already offers an answer. According to the most accessible definitions, “Hala Bira” is a Hiligaynon phrase that roughly means “give it everything you’ve got” or “go all out.” In festival contexts, it becomes “let’s do this with all our heart.” That explanation is not wrong. It is also painfully insufficient.

Language is always contextual. “Hala Bira” lives in the heat of the street, in the rhythm of drums, in bodies that are tired but refuse to stop. It is shouted, not spoken. It is collective, not individual. Translating it as a polite English motivational phrase feels like serving batchoy without broth. Technically present, spiritually empty.

The phrase is inseparable from the Ati-Atihan Festival of Kalibo, often described as the mother of all Filipino festivals. There, “Hala Bira! Pwera Pasma!” is screamed while dancing for hours under the sun, faces darkened with soot, sweat pouring like rain. The belief is simple and profound. If you give everything to the celebration, sickness will not dare touch you.

Dinagyang, inspired by Ati-Atihan and localized in Iloilo in the late 1960s, adopted “Hala Bira” as its battle cry. In this context, the phrase expresses gratitude, resilience, and communal pride. It is not just encouragement. It is a declaration of presence. We are here. We are moving. We are grateful.

There is also a historical whisper behind the chant. Some local narratives trace “Hala Bira” to old battle cries, allegedly shouted by Panay defenders during 17th century encounters with Moro raiders. “Hala Bira” was said to mean “hit them” or “strike now,” a call to collective resistance. Whether fully verifiable or partially mythologized, the story matters because people believe it.

Cultural expressions are not dictionaries. They are archives. As historian Zeus Salazar reminds us, indigenous terms often carry historical consciousness rather than abstract definitions. When you shout “Hala Bira,” you are not just motivating yourself. You are echoing generations of movement, resistance, and devotion.

This is where translation theory enters, uninvited but necessary. Peter Newmark calls expressions like “Hala Bira” culture-bound items. They are embedded so deeply in social practice that removing them from their context damages their meaning. You can translate the words, but not the life around them.

Eugene Nida’s concept of functional equivalence helps explain the problem. “Hala Bira” does not exist to inform. It exists to act. It energizes, unifies, and ritualizes collective behavior. Its meaning emerges from drums, heat, exhaustion, and faith. English phrases like “go all out” convey intention but not transformation.

In linguistic terms, “Hala Bira” is performative. Saying it does something. It pushes bodies to move, voices to rise, and communities to synchronize. English has performative utterances too, but none that live at the intersection of Catholic devotion, street dancing, and precolonial memory.

Roman Jakobson reminds us that languages segment reality differently. “Hala Bira” is semantically dense. It bundles encouragement, command, celebration, defiance of fatigue, and spiritual offering into two syllables. English prefers to unpack meaning, which immediately kills the urgency and rhythm of the original.

To translate “Hala Bira” properly, you would need a paragraph, maybe a lecture, possibly a short documentary. That alone tells you that no single English phrase occupies the same semantic space. Brevity is part of its power, and English cannot match that without cheating.

There is also the issue of cultural flattening. When we translate deeply rooted expressions into generic motivational slogans, we erase their historical depth. “Hala Bira” becomes gym language. It becomes corporate talk. It becomes something shouted by a life coach instead of a devotee.

Lawrence Venuti argues for the legitimacy of non-translation. Keeping foreign terms intact resists ethnocentrism and preserves cultural integrity. In academic and anthropological writing, untranslated terms are often glossed rather than replaced, precisely because replacement distorts meaning.

In this sense, refusing to translate “Hala Bira” is not intellectual laziness. It is intellectual honesty. It acknowledges that some meanings are lived before they are explained, danced before they are defined.

This is why the Facebook jokes, while funny, also miss the point. “Go harder” accidentally captures the physical intensity but misses the devotion. “Let’s go” sounds like a road trip. “Go daddy” belongs in therapy. Humor works because it reveals the gap between languages, but it cannot bridge it.

The desire to translate “Hala Bira” into English reflects a deeper anxiety. We want validation. We want our culture to be legible to outsiders. We want proof that what we shout in the streets is not nonsense. Ironically, its untranslatability is precisely what proves its richness.

Not everything meaningful needs an English equivalent. Sometimes explanation is better than substitution. Sometimes the correct answer to “What is that in English?” is “Sit down, let me tell you a story.”

“Hala Bira” survives because it refuses to be neat. It thrives in noise, sweat, and contradiction. It is prayer and party. It is discipline and abandon. It is reverent and irreverent at the same time.

When shouted during Dinagyang, it is gratitude made loud. When shouted during Ati-Atihan, it is endurance turned sacred. When whispered in historical narratives, it is resistance remembered.

Translation, at its best, builds bridges. But bridges require solid ground on both sides. In the case of “Hala Bira,” English simply does not have the terrain. There is no shared ritual, no shared myth, no shared memory to anchor it.

So what is “Hala Bira” in English? It is not “go all out,” not “give it everything,” and certainly not whatever nonsense Facebook came up with at two in the morning. Those are explanations, not equivalents.

“Hala Bira” is a cultural act disguised as a phrase. It is language doing work. It moves bodies, binds communities, and carries history forward through sound.

The most accurate translation, paradoxically, is none at all. Keep it. Explain it. Contextualize it. Let it remain slightly foreign, even to those of us who shout it, because that strangeness is part of its power.

“Hala Bira” does not need English. English needs “Hala Bira” to be reminded that not everything important can be reduced to a clean definition. Some things are meant to be shouted, not translated.