Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Diplomacy, spying, and administrative intrigue were all part of the job done by these Ottoman translators, called tercüman. This Turkish term has come into English as dragoman, but in only slightly altered forms it can be found in dozens of other languages that had contact with the Turks. Azerbaijani trcüm∂çi, Amharic ästärg^wami, Dari tarjomân, Persian motarjem, Uzbek tarzhimon (таржимон), Arabic mutarjim, Moroccan Arabic trzman, and Hebrew metargem ( ) are all sound translations of tercüman. But whether written as dragoman or as tercüman, the Ottoman word for “translator” is not a Turkish word at all. It is first found in a language spoken in Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C.E., as a translation of the even more ancient Sumerian word eme-bal. Akkadian targumannu thus has a descendant by way of Turkish tercüman in an admittedly obsolete but still extant word of English—probably the only word with a stable meaning whose history can be traced in writing over a period of five thousand years.[69] The spread of one of the most widely used root words for “translator” from one of the cradles of writing in ancient Mesopotamia can hardly be bettered as evidence for the immensely greater antiquity of the practice of translation itself.

Top Ottoman dragomans became the equals of ambassadors. The first to be granted the title “Grand Dragoman” by the sultan was appointed in 1661 under the reign of Küprölü Ahmed Pasha—the famous Albanian grand vizier Quprili, whose many adventures are turned into fiction in the novels of Ismail Kadare. [70] A later grand dragoman, Aléxandros Mavrokordátos, founded a dynasty that eventually acquired princely status. His direct descendants became the royal family of Romania.

Because they were diplomats and negotiators using speech and not writing for the most delicate matters, dragomans dealt with their written tasks along lines more characteristic of oral translation. Dragomans altered the pasha’s language to put it in a form best suited to performing the act that the principal intended. They did this in order to remain faithful to the sultan—for disloyalty was punishable by death, if not worse. Far from being “free,” the dragomans’ reformulation of the words of the source expressed subservience to their principal’s intention. Despite appearances to the contrary—substantial amounts of contraction, expansion, and recasting—dragomans stuck rigidly to their brief, which was not to translate the sultan’s words but his word.

For example, when Sultan Murad II granted permission for English merchants to trade in the Ottoman lands, his original letter in Turkish refers to Queen Elizabeth as “having demonstrated her subservience and devotion and declared her servitude and attachment” to the sultan. For onward communication to the English court the letter was translated by the grand dragoman into Italian, which was still the international language of the Ottoman Empire.[71] In Italian, however, the letter doesn’t say nearly as much: it expresses the elaborate Turkish formula economically as sincera amicizia.[72]

Is this a “free” translation or an “unfaithful” one? I don’t think either term is appropriate. The dragoman’s occlusion of the words for “subservience” and “servitude” is not an expression of his freedom but of the political and administrative constraints of his own position. He knows that his own master will never regard the queen of England as a monarch of equal power; and as a seasoned diplomat he also knows that Elizabeth I cannot possibly accede to the expression of her “servitude” to the sultan, even in a conventional flourish.

Western embassies in Istanbul did not use the official court interpreters in the service of the Ottoman court, who were bound to be loyal to their sovereign. They employed less eminent, and mostly non-Muslim, bilinguals to be found in Istanbul. As they became less and less familiar with oral culture over the several centuries of Ottoman rule, Western diplomats increasingly described their Levantine intermediaries as unreliable and untrustworthy folk. In the first place, they grumbled, at least half of what they wrote and pretended to be translation “from English” was pure invention, in the following style: