Tagalog Missionary Grammars as a Translation Resource: Translation, Book History and the Production of Linguistic Knowledge in the Spanish Philippines

Abstract

This article looks into missionary grammars as a resource for investigating translation and its entanglements with book publishing in the Spanish Philippines. Although current research directions tend to use them for studying early forms of non-European languages or for historicizing the initial stages of linguistics as a discipline, I argue that these grammars can also be examined as a translational corpus. Translation was an underlying procedure in their composition and, ultimately, in the production of linguistic knowledge under the colonial condition. This article shows how the Spanish-language grammars of Tagalog, the basis of the modern-day national language called Filipino, were produced as an academic and material response to colonialism. It traces the evolution of these grammars alongside the establishment of the printing press in the Philippines and the intricacies of Catholic missionary work. It proceeds to analyse the paratextual and linguistic contents of the grammars and the translation strategies employed in their creation. The article finally describes how the erosion of the theological foundations of language in the nineteenth century was manifested in later missionary grammars and how this coincided with the secularisation of book publishing.