Not Language Alone: Translation and Culture

Rendering a literary work into another language requires more than plain proficiencyin the original language of the piece. Culture and history are so meshed inlanguage that translation requires the translator to delve into the context that wentinto the creation of the literary text. This paper is based on the work that wentinto the making of my translation into Tagalog of four plays coming from differentcountries and climes. The plays confronted me with four different cultural andhistorical contexts that required to be clarified to make the translations reasonablyfaithful to the original works.