Publisher's Synopsis
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'.
