A Historical Biography: Ahmet İhsan Tokgöz

Art in Translation, 2025

A critical assessment of the Late Ottoman print industry with a close focus on the life of Ahmed İhsan (1868-1942) – a pioneering name in illustrated publishing, whose legendary illustrated weekly Servet-i Fünun (The Wealth of Sciences) was published, almost uninterruptedly, from 1891 to 1942.

This article focuses on the publications of Garabed Panosian and examines the extent of readership achieved by the Armeno-Turkish newspapers in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. It specifically focuses on the linguistic, social, and political circumstances in which his newspapers were read. The readership of Panosian's newspapers was not only limited to Turkish monolingual Armenians but also extended to Armenian--Turkish bilingual Armenians. Moreover, his newspapers, along with other Armeno-Turkish materials, gained a non-Armenian readership. Thus, Panosian was able to use his newspapers to display the allegiance of Armenians to the Ottoman Empire, aiming at a favourable evaluation from government circles. Besides being a tool to reach out to Turkish monolinguals, Armeno-Turkish newspapers were also rich products of the culture of bilingualism and a medium shared by religiously diverse people. Thus, examining Armeno-Turkish materials elucidates the pluralistic society of the late Ottoman Empire.

mTm. Minor Translating Major-Major Translating Minor-Minor Translating Minor, 2016

When the translation of books is viewed as an international system, it appears that there is an uneven flow of book translations among various language groups. Conducting some research on the traffic of translation, Johan Heilbron widened the scope of studies on translation by foregrounding economic aspects (1999, 2007 and 2010). From his perspective, translated books can be placed into the most general category of goods, and also identified " as merchandise produced, distributed and consumed according to the logic of national and international markets " (Heilbron 2007: 94). Regarding this point, Bourdieu (1977; 1993) argues that symbolic goods (e.g. translated books) are subject to their own criteria of valuation, which directly points to a specific kind of economic relations. It is against this background that Heilbron argues that although four languages (English, French, German and Russian) have a central role in the international translation system, English overwhelmingly takes leading position , which implies that there is an enormous imbalance in the translation flow among languages. In order to discuss this assumption in the Turkish context, this study takes language groups, to use Heilbron's words, as " the basic units of the world-system of translation " (Heilbron 2010: 304) and then addresses the question of how Ahmet Ümit as one of the most translated (more than 20 languages) author from Turkish, a peripheral language, can gain recognition in the literary world of the central language. The main interest of this study lies in discussing book translations from Turkish (i.e. peripheral language) into English (i.e. central language), and attempting to develop a new perspective regarding possible courses that Turkish authors could pursue in order to publish and gain recognition in English, which is recognized as the most central language in the international translation system.

Selected Studies on Genre in Middle Eastern Literatures, 2023

Günil Özlem Ayaydın Cebe (“Biography: Modest Champion of Ottoman-Turkish Literature”) examines the concomitant rise of the novel and the biography in the late Ottoman Empire. She presents a brief history of the Ottoman biography and underlines its eminent role within the Ottoman literary framework, approaching this genre from a sociological perspective and investigating its generic development. Scanning hundreds of periodicals and printed books in the second half of the 19th century, Ayaydın Cebe underlines the importance of biography in the shaping of the prosaic world by focusing on the fictional aspects of biography and the biographical mechanisms of the novel. Firstly, she demonstrates that biography, far from being a peripheral genre, was in fact a key genre whose rise – as evidenced by statistical data – went hand in hand with the rise of the Ottoman-Turkish novel and supplied rich material for novelists to draw their characters. Secondly, counter to widespread claims, she shows that Ottoman biography was not a mere imitation of French models with no roots in the domestic culture. Rather, it owes its birth to the privatisation and individualisation of Ottoman society and the interest of novelists in intimate details of an individual’s life as a consequence of literary modernisation. The early precursors of Ottoman biography (the tercüme-i hal) can be situated much earlier than most literary histories situate them, namely at the end of the 18th century, as a reaction to the needs of the modernising Ottoman bureaucracy. Thirdly, Ayaydın Cebe assesses the development and changing features of biography, especially as affected by the development of printing techniques (illustrations) and the changing expectations of readers.

The compilation of this bibliography started with Saliha Paker (2001) and continued with Saliha Paker and Melike Yılmaz (2004). It was further expanded by Paker for the First International Symposium of Translators and Publishers of Turkish Literature (June 1–2, 2007), which was held by Boğaziçi University in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Akbatur (2011) updated the bibliography up to the year 2010 for the purposes of her PhD dissertation. See also Duygu Tekgül and Arzu Akbatur (2013); Şafak Horzum and Başak Ağın (2021).

Öz Bu makale, Osmanlıların ondokuzuncu yüzyılın sonlarına doğru yazdıkları dünya tarihlerini inceleyerek, dönemin dünya çapındaki insanlık tarihi kitapları arasında yer alma çabasını ve bu çaba üzerinden yazarların Osmanlılar'ı dünya medeniyeti içinde nasıl konumlandırdıklarını ele alır. Bu dönemde başka ülkelerde yazılmış dünya tarihleri, hızla modernleşen o toplumların bu yeni dünyada yerlerini alma çabasının yansımaları olarak düşünüldüğünde, Osmanlı umumi tarihleri, diğer dünya tarihlerinden çok farklı değildir. Öte yandan Osmanlı umumi tarihleri de, Aydınlanma Çağı sonrasında gelişen insanlık ve medeniyet tarihi anlayışı üzerine, kendilerine özgü ve dolayısıyla kendi içlerinde değerlendirilmesi gereken düşünceler katmışlardır. Özellikle Mehmed Murad gibi son dönem Osmanlı aydınları tarafından kaleme alınan bu tarihler, Osmanlı Devleti'nin modern dünyanın nasıl bir parçası olduğunu ve bunun tahayyülünü yansıtıyordu. Mehmed Murad'ın Umumi Tarih adlı eseri aynı zamanda yeni açılan yüksek öğrenim kurumlarının ders programında yeralan tarih derslerinin ihtiyacına da cevap veriyordu. Mizan gazetesini de çıkaran Mehmed Murad, Yahya Kemal'in deyimiyle 1870'lerde yazdığı bu son derece 'modern' altı ciltlik Tarih-i Umumi ile dünya tarihini bir Osmanlı disiplini haline getirmişti.

Journal of Islamic Studies, 2021

This book was a long time coming. As the author humorously explains in its opening pages, after completing work on his dissertation in 2008 (which this book is based on), Baykal's life ventured into the land of tech start-ups and IT consultancies, far away from the 'hallowed halls' of academia. Focused on the history of the Ottoman periodical press in Istanbul during the early twentieth century, this book is the latest in a growing body of literature on publishing in the Empire's varied languages. A few studies have examined how small religious presses operated by Armenian, Jewish, Greek, and other non-Muslim communities in the Ottoman world began slowly to churn out books in the late 1400s. Recent literature on the topic has largely focused on the publishing industry's important advancement during the long nineteenth century when private printing presses were producing all sorts of material for commercial use and were set up in many major Ottoman cities, from Istanbul to Beirut, Cairo, and Baghdad. Nevertheless, English-language studies on the history of the Ottoman press, specifically the periodical press, in Anatolia are few and far in between. (Most appear in edited volumes. For a selection, see Geoffrey Roper [ed.], Historical

RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2016

This article aims to investigate the effects of the Ottoman/Turkish morals and customs on the selection of novels to be translated from Western languages into Ottoman Turkish and the translation strategies deployed by the translators between the Tanzimat Period and the Alphabet Reform in witness of the prefaces written by the translators and publishers of the period. The novel, as a literary genre, entered the Ottoman/Turkish literary system in the Tanzimat Period and a high number of translated and original novels were produced in the historical period examined in the present study. Conformity of the content of the works with the Ottoman/Turkish morals and customs emerges as a major issue in the context of the translations in question. In terms of preliminary and operational norms (Gideon Toury), translators and/or publishers either viewed the content-related conformity as a criterion in selecting works for translation or they decided to change or omit the parts in the source texts that they considered inappropriate for the Ottoman/Turkish "national morals" (âdât-ı millî) and Islamic morals. While some translators were sensitive about the Turkish language, some others were specifically concerned about the material and spiritual characteristics of the Turks and the Turkish authors. In the present study, the forewords and afterwords by the translators and publishers will be discussed in relation to the memoirs of the translators and publishers. Moreover, the emphasis on the "idea of nationality" (millîlik) and the "cultural repertoire" (Itamar Even-Zohar) desired to be created accordingly by the translators and publishers will be examined via the analysis of a selected corpus of forewords and afterwords. The results of the examination will be evaluated in the context of contemporary theories of translation with the aim of shedding light on the function of the activity of translation-defined as a means of intercultural communication and interaction-in the context of Turkish nationalism in the relevant historical period.

American Journal of Islam and Society, 2020