The task of researching the history of translation within the framework of a national literature overlaps with the task of interrogating the uses of translation in imagining a nation's history. Although translation may be represented in this context as a neutral and unproblematic search for equivalence between languages, translational acts have been employed, either wittingly or unwittingly, to privilege a past and inscribe it into the accepted national narrative. Such is the role of translation in the history of Hispanic Filipino literature. In this article I argue that the endeavour of writing a translation history using Hispanic Filipino texts is called upon to examine translation in history, of history and as history, that is, how translation operates as a material, method and mode of commemoration. Translation is considered here as a fundamental component in the production and mediation of a text. It fulfils a gatekeeping function through which historical information is repatriated into the national consciousness.

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This paper, which is based on the author’s undergraduate thesis on translation as a means of cultural appropriation, is a critique of the Taiwanese soap opera Meteor Garden (MG). It presents the various gender(ed) archetypes for both male and female characters employed in the serialized drama. Although the chinovela seems to be an innovation from its forerunners in Philippine media, the Hispanic American soaps, the traditional representations of gender found in said soaps are also evident in the text of MG. The paper also discusses audience interpretations of gender representations in MG These interpretations are the result of a translation exercise that required the adolescent viewers to provide their own Filipino translations of selected MG scenes in their original Chinese version with English subtitles. Although MG has a tendency to romanticize gender(ed) relations, its audiences remain enthusiastic viewers possibly because the soap enacts their dreams in ways that are understandable and uncomplicated.

In this paper, I shall examine how Spanish missionaries during the colonial period described the sexual mores of early Filipinos in missionary grammars and vocabularies, and how such description should also be regarded as a locus of translation. Since these missionaries wrote the first systematic analyses of the languages of the archipelago to aid their work of evangelizing early Filipinos, it is in their writings that sexualities were first interrogated through the lens of a colonial religion and polity. By looking into the lexicographical approaches for defining sex-related terms in a Tagalog missionary dictionary, and the authorial choices in incorporating sexualities in two bilingual confession guides, I shall argue that proselytization served as an important translational constraint that created a space where Filipino sexualities were exoticized, and where a particular vision of colonial polity was articulated from a privileged position of colonial rule.