Abstract

Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, Professor Emeritus of English & Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines (UP) and one of the foremost contemporary Filipina scholars on travel studies, once wrote: All travel writing is, in a sense translation. Travelers come to an unknown place and try to “translate” it, i.e. to make it comprehensible, for themselves first, and then for their readers (Hidalgo 2020). Travel writing as an act of translation is not only personal (i.e., making the unknown known through personal experiences) but also cultural. When we travel and write about these travels, we are not looking at the foreign places and peoples simply as they are (or in Kantian terminology, “noumenon” or “thing-in-itself”). We always