Multilingualism as a Form of Transcultural Expertise: A Study of Multilingual Ottoman Muslim Intellectuals in the Eighteenth Century

The Ottoman Empire is often presented as a space in which a myriad of people using different languages coexisted. However, scholars have often taken multilingualism in the Ottoman world for granted and, despite some valuable exceptions, they have rarely ventured to study it. Likewise, they have often focused on the multiplicity of the languages spoken in the Ottoman Empire rather than the people who spoke, wrote, and interacted with each other in these languages. This paper proposes to analyse how multilingual Ottoman translators defined their expertise by virtue of their knowledge of languages that their audiences did not necessarily know. As a case study, it focuses on a joint translation of Aristotle through Ioannis Kottounios’ commentary by a Greek-speaking Muslim and a Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christian in the eighteenth century. Drawing on the oft-cited metaphor of the tower of Babel, the essay engages with a discussion of transculturality in the Ottoman world of translation as expertise. Next, it explores how, if at all, these translators staged their expertise. It then analyses how their performing and staging of expertise was received by their primary audiences. Finally, it contextualises this collaboration among the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Muslim intellectuals who used sources written in Greek and Latin but produced works on ancient Greek history, philosophy and science in what the Ottomans called the elsine-i selâse, ‘the three languages,’ consisting of Turkish, Arabic and Persian.