The History of Translation and Translators in the Ottoman Empire

The History of Translation and Translators in the Ottoman Empire PDF Author: Mehmet Tahir Öncü
Publisher: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH
ISBN: 3832557628
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The Ottoman Empire covered a vast territory for more than five centuries and was therefore a multi-ethnic and multicultural state from the very beginning. Due to the need to negotiate military, political and economic matters both within and outside its borders, the state relied on the services of interpreters. However, despite the multicultural and linguistically diverse communication in the Ottoman Empire, the practice of translation was not formally institutionalised by the state. Until the modernisation efforts of the 18th century, translation was mainly seen as a facilitating or ancillary activity in the diplomatic context. The primary aim of this collection is to comprehensively analyse and define interpreting and translating activities within the Ottoman Empire. Particular attention is paid to the reasons for the lack of institutional structure and the impact of this lack of structure on the practice of translation. It also identifies individual actors, especially those who acted as language and cultural mediators and thus provided important services to the Ottoman Empire. By examining interpreting and translating activities and the agents involved in them, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of language mediation in the Ottoman Empire and the importance of this issue in the context of Ottoman history.

The History of Translation and Translators in the Ottoman Empire

The History of Translation and Translators in the Ottoman Empire PDF Author: Mehmet Tahir Öncü
Publisher: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH
ISBN: 3832557628
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Ottoman Empire covered a vast territory for more than five centuries and was therefore a multi-ethnic and multicultural state from the very beginning. Due to the need to negotiate military, political and economic matters both within and outside its borders, the state relied on the services of interpreters. However, despite the multicultural and linguistically diverse communication in the Ottoman Empire, the practice of translation was not formally institutionalised by the state. Until the modernisation efforts of the 18th century, translation was mainly seen as a facilitating or ancillary activity in the diplomatic context. The primary aim of this collection is to comprehensively analyse and define interpreting and translating activities within the Ottoman Empire. Particular attention is paid to the reasons for the lack of institutional structure and the impact of this lack of structure on the practice of translation. It also identifies individual actors, especially those who acted as language and cultural mediators and thus provided important services to the Ottoman Empire. By examining interpreting and translating activities and the agents involved in them, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of language mediation in the Ottoman Empire and the importance of this issue in the context of Ottoman history.

Migrating Texts

Migrating Texts PDF Author: Marilyn Booth
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474439012
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
Explores translation in the context of the multi-lingual, multi-ethnic late-Ottoman Mediterranean world. Fénelon, Offenbach and the Iliad in Arabic, Robinson Crusoe in Turkish, the Bible in Greek-alphabet Turkish, excoriated French novels circulating through the Ottoman Empire in Greek, Arabic and Turkish: literary translation at the eastern end of the Mediterranean offered worldly vistas and new, hybrid genres to emerging literate audiences in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Whether to propagate 'national' language reform, circulate the Bible, help audiences understand European opera, argue for girls' education, institute pan-Islamic conversations, introduce political concepts, share the Persian Gulistan with Anglophone readers in Bengal, or provide racy fiction to schooled adolescents in Cairo and Istanbul, translation was an essential tool. But as these essays show, translators were inventors, and their efforts might yield surprising results.

Tradition,Tension and Translation in Turkey

Tradition,Tension and Translation in Turkey PDF Author: Şehnaz Tahir Gürçaglar
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027268479
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
The articles in this volume examine historical, cultural, literary and political facets of translation in Turkey, a society in tortuous transformation since the 19th century from empire to nation-state. Some draw attention to tradition in Ottoman practices and agents of translation and interpreting, while others explore the republican period, starting in 1923, with the revolutionary change in script from Arabic to Roman coming in 1928, making a powerful impact on publication and translation practices. Areas covered include the German Jewish academic involvement in translation, traditional and current practices of translating from Kurdish into Turkish, censorship of translated literature, intralingual translations from Ottoman into modern Turkish, pseudotranslation, ideological manipulation and resistance in translation, imitativeness vs. originality and metonymics of literary reviewing.

The Dragoman Renaissance

The Dragoman Renaissance PDF Author: E. Natalie Rothman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501758489
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
In The Dragoman Renaissance, E. Natalie Rothman traces how Istanbul-based diplomatic translator-interpreters, known as the dragomans, systematically engaged Ottoman elites in the study of the Ottoman Empire—eventually coalescing in the discipline of Orientalism—throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rothman challenges Eurocentric assumptions still pervasive in Renaissance studies by showing the centrality of Ottoman imperial culture to the articulation of European knowledge about the Ottomans. To do so, she draws on a dazzling array of new material from a variety of archives. By studying the sustained interactions between dragomans and Ottoman courtiers in this period, Rothman disrupts common ideas about a singular moment of "cultural encounter," as well as about a "docile" and "static" Orient, simply acted upon by extraneous imperial powers. The Dragoman Renaissance creatively uncovers how dragomans mediated Ottoman ethno-linguistic, political, and religious categories to European diplomats and scholars. Further, it shows how dragomans did not simply circulate fixed knowledge. Rather, their engagement of Ottoman imperial modes of inquiry and social reproduction shaped the discipline of Orientalism for centuries to come. Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Dancing on Ropes

Dancing on Ropes PDF Author: Anna Aslanyan
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1782835520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
'Full of lively stories ... leaves the reader with an awed respect for the translator's task' Economist Would Hiroshima have been bombed if Japanese contained a phrase meaning 'no comment'? Is it alright for missionaries to replace the Bible's 'white as snow' with 'white as fungus' in places where snow never falls? Who, or what, is Kuzma's mother, and why was Nikita Khrushchev so threateningly obsessed with her (or it)? The course of diplomacy rarely runs smooth; without an invisible army of translators and interpreters, it could hardly run at all. Join veteran translator Anna Aslanyan to explore hidden histories of cunning and ambition, heroism and incompetence. Meet the figures behind the notable events of history, from the Great Game to Brexit, and discover just how far a simple misunderstanding can go.

Rebuilding the Tower of Babel

Rebuilding the Tower of Babel PDF Author: Mehmet Darakcioglu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bureaucracy
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Broadly, this dissertation examines the Ottoman administration's efforts to overcome the language barrier which appeared at two levels. First, a language divide existed between the Ottoman imperial authorities and segments of the population who did not know Turkish. Second, there was a communication problem between the Muslim Ottoman statesmen who refrained from learning European languages until the second quarter of the nineteenth century and the representatives of Western powers. The Ottoman government solved this problem by employing translators who were largely recruited from non-Muslim groups and local population. Specifically, the dissertation focuses on the translators who provided the diplomatic communications of the Ottoman administration with European states. Between the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the Greek Orthodox Christian imperial court translator served this purpose. After the Greek Rebellion of 1821, the Ottomans removed this Christian official, and began to train Muslim state servants in European languages. In this process, an institution called the Translation Bureau was born. This study is primarily concerned with the institutional history of the Translation Bureau and its place within the Ottoman Bureaucracy.

The Politics and Poetics of Translation in Turkey, 1923-1960

The Politics and Poetics of Translation in Turkey, 1923-1960 PDF Author: Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401205302
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
The present book is a bold attempt at revealing the complex and diversified nature of the field of translated literature in Turkey during a period of radical socio-political change. On the broad level, it investigates the implications of the political transformation experienced in Turkey after the proclamation of the Republic for the cultural and literary fields, including the field of translated literature. On a more specific level, it holds translation under focus and explores the discourse formed on translation and translators while it also traces the norms (not) observed by translators throughout the 1920s-1950s in two case studies. The findings of the study suggest that the concepts of translation both affected and were affected by cultural processes in the society, including ideological and poetological ones and that there was no uniform way of defining or carrying out translations during the period under study. The findings also point at the segmentation of readership in early republican Turkey and conclude that the political and poetological factors governing the production and reception of translations varied for different segments of readers.

Ottoman Translations

Ottoman Translations PDF Author: Marilyn Booth
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781399502573
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
SA vigorous translation scene across the 19th-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 among Ottoman languages, and between those and the languages of neighbours to the east. The proliferation and circulation of texts in translation and adaptation 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'. Through 8 collaboratively written case studies, stretching linguistically and geographically from Bengal to London, Istanbul to Paris, Andalusia to Bosnia, it peers over the shoulders of working translators to ask how they creatively transported texts between as well as beyond Ottoman languages. In doing so, it also ponders broader issues of cultural transfer and culture production in the Ottoman Empire, its European and Arabophone territories and south Asia in a period of emerging nationalist ferment.

Ottoman Translation

Ottoman Translation PDF Author: Marilyn Booth
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781399502580
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Studies translation into and among the Ottoman Empire's many languages A vigorous translation scene across the 19th-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 among Ottoman languages, and between those and the languages of neighbours to the east. The proliferation and circulation of texts in translation and adaptation leads us to ask: What is an 'Ottoman language'? Following on from Booth's earlier volume, Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean, 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'. Through 8 collaboratively written case studies, stretching linguistically and geographically from Bengal to London, Istanbul to Paris, Andalusia to Bosnia, it peers over the shoulders of working translators to ask how they creatively transported texts between as well as beyond Ottoman languages. In doing so, it also ponders broader issues of cultural transfer and culture production in the Ottoman Empire, its European and Arabophone territories and south Asia in a period of emerging nationalist ferment. Marilyn Booth is Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, University of Oxford. Claire Savina is an independent author, translator and researcher. She pursued Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne and was research associate at the University of Oxford.

Ottoman Culture and the Project of Modernity

Ottoman Culture and the Project of Modernity PDF Author: Monica M. Ringer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755616685
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Central to the nineteenth-century Ottoman Tanzimat reform project, the novel originally developed outside of Ottoman space, yet was adopted as a didactic tool to model and generate new forms of Ottoman citizenship. Essays in this book explore the appropriation of the novel as a literary genre and its deployment in the late Ottoman cultural project of constructing an Ottoman modernity. Analyzing key texts and authors, from the works of Ahmet Midhat Efendi to Mizanci Murad and Vartan Pasha, among others, the book's chapters explore the novel genre as far more than a case of importation of Western and non-Ottoman cultural productions, but rather as a vehicle for the cultivation of indigenous modern subjectivities.