Ottoman Translation: Circulating Texts from Bombay to Paris

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.

Marilyn Booth is Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, University of Oxford. Her most recent monograph, The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt (2021), is amongst numerous publications on early feminism, translation, and Arabophone women’s writing in Egypt and Ottoman Syria. Initiator of the Ottoman Translation Studies Group, she edited Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Translator of eighteen published works of fiction and memoir from the Arabic, she was co-winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies.

Claire Savina is a translator and independent researcher. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature and Arabic Studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 2018. She is co-editor (with Frédéric Lagrange) of the bilingual Les Mots du Désir la langue de l’érotisme arabe et ses traductions / Words of Desire: the language of Arabic Erotica and its translations (Diacritiques Editions, 2020).