Ottoman Translation

Studies translation into and amongst the Ottoman Empire's many languages

Offers eight collaboratively written, in-depth case studies of translation between Ottoman and associated languages, from scholars with diverse linguistic expertise
Focuses on texts translated or adapted from Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, English, French, and Greek into Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Ottoman Turkish, Greek, Karamanlidika, Persian, Bosnian and French
Displaces the epicentre of Translation Studies and Comparative Literature eastward, challenging views of translation and text dissemination that centre 'the West'
Includes case studies of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Shakespeare's Othello, Eug ne Sue's Myst res de Paris, Khayr al-Din Pasha's Muqaddima, Abdulhak Hamit's Tarik, Qasim Amin's Tahrir al-Mar'a, Muhammad Farid Wajdi's The Muslim Woman and Fatima Aliye's Nisvan-? ?slam

A vigorous translation scene across the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire government and private, official and amateur, acknowledged and anonymous saw many texts from European languages rewritten into the multiple tongues that Ottoman subjects spoke, read and wrote. Just as lively, however, was translation amongst Ottoman languages, and between those and the languages of their neighbours to the east. This proliferation and circulation of texts in translation and adaptation, through a range of strategies, leads us to ask: What is an 'Ottoman language'?

This volume challenges earlier scholarship that has highlighted translation and adaptation from European languages to the neglect of alternative translations, re-centring translation as an Ottoman 'hub'. Collaborative work has allowed us to peer over the shoulders of working translators to ask how they creatively transported texts between as well as beyond Ottoman languages, with a range of studies stretching linguistically and geographically from Bengal to London, Istanbul to Paris, Andalusia to Bosnia.