Traducción de términos religiosos en los vocabularios filipinos (1565–1800)

The lexicographical production of the missionaries in the Philippines has been abundant and rich over the past centuries. During the early years of conquest, decisions about the use of religious terms in dialogues and texts written for the purpose of spreading Christianity had to be made. The Third Council of Lima (1582–1583) established that missionaries had to follow the same rules in order to avoid misunderstandings and to translate ad sensum. However, many missionaries chose to introduce Spanish loanwords while others chose less easy strategies such as adaptation, literal translation, the use of neologisms, definition or semantic substitution and addition etc. This paper aims to explore the strategies followed by Spanish missionaries in their bilingual vocabularies in the Philippines. For that purpose, I will study the religious terms of six different vocabularies in five Philippine languages are studied to extract the individual strategies of each missionary – if there were any – and expose the missionaries’ thinking about indigenous languages and translation as well as determine if the missionaries’ own ideals influenced the choice of strategy or if it was determined by the ideals of the religious orders to which they belonged.