Making Loyal Subjects: The Translation Regimes of the Qing and Ottoman Empires

Recent studies on the history of language in the Qing and Ottoman empires have enriched our understanding of the multilingual regimes in traditional Eurasian empires. While the Qing and Ottoman emperors allowed their imperial subjects to use diverse native languages, both empires found it important to resist a potential threat of disunity and relied on translation to construct connections between emperors and subjects. This paper will compare the translation regimes of the Qing and Ottoman Empires and discuss their implications for the exercise of universal power in the two empires.

This paper will argue that the Qing empire adopted as official languages Manchu, Chinese, and the native languages of various imperial subjects, such as Mongolian, Tibetan, and Uighur. Through the translation and production of simultaneous (Ma. kamcime, Ch. hebi) writing by official translators at the provincial and state levels, the Manchu emperors maintained a purposefully diverse but nevertheless unifying empire. Whilst the Ottoman empire allowed divergent peoples to use their native languages in their everyday life, only Ottoman Turkish – a literary language with a mixture of Turkish, Arabic, and Persian – was to be used by officials. Imperial translators who translated between Ottoman Turkish and other languages constituted a channel of communication between peoples and officials at the provincial level. The connection between Ottoman emperors and imperial subjects, however, was not as strong as that in the Qing empire. A comparison of the Qing and Ottoman translation regimes will explain their strikingly different post-imperial fates in the early twentieth century. Nearly all Qing borderlands were reconstituted under the Republican regime, while the Ottoman domains spilt into various national units.