Translation and Revolution

This is the first comprehensive study of Jose Rizal’s 1886 Tagalog translation of Friedrich Schiller’s last and most famous play, Wilhelm Tell (1804). It introduces new computer-aided methods and techniques of discursive and textual analysis to the broad field of translation analysis and attempts to answer how Schiller’s play, described as the "Agit-prop play of German Idealism," could have been translated into a language so distant from its original socioeconomic context and so alien from the distinctively German intellectual culture that had produced it. In addition to its methodological contributions, this study is of interest insofar as it may give insight into some of the ideological dynamics constitutive of nineteenth-century nationalism in the Philippines, the implications of which may extend up to the present day.