International Translation Day (ITD) happens every year on 30 September. It's a day to focus on the age-old profession that brings people together – translation.
💡Do you know of the dragomans/terjumans of the Ottoman Empire?
My recent trip to the original Ottoman capital of Bursa, Türkiye 🇹🇷, reminded me of the once very important and powerful role that translators and interpreters, the famous dragomans (or terjumans to use their Turkish/Arabic term) had in keeping the diverse and multilingual Ottoman Empire functioning.
A while back when visiting relatives in northern Greece, a region that had been under Ottoman rule for over 5 centuries until as recent as 1912, when explaining my job to them I used the standard Macedonian word "preveduvach" (lit. "a person who transmits"), but this drew blank stares as it's a somewhat modern term for them. But when I used the older Ottoman-era term "dragoman" they understood me completely and immediately.
Dragomans knew not only the Ottoman Empire's three main literary languages:
☪ Ottoman Turkish (in many aspects, a different language from modern Turkish)
☪Persian
☪Arabic
but were often knowledgeable in many other languages, particularly Greek, Hebrew, various major European languages and others.
But it wasn't just languages they knew – they were also conduits of different cultures, customs and protocols, so their roles were more in the form of diplomats, with the most senior of them all, the Dragoman of the Porte, acting as the de facto Ottoman deputy foreign minister.
The skills required to be a dragoman were not drawn from some inherent gift or talent – they required devotional life-time study and maintenance, and were rewarded with prestige, respect and tax-free status.
📉 How have things since tumbled, where translators and interpreters are now increasingly treated as hindrances, patronisingly referred to as 'humans in the loop' auxiliary to technology AI, and have their role of being central to facilitating interhuman communication disregarded.
'The theme of ITD 2024 calls for us to protect
🌐 translation as an art
🌐 copyright and related rights
🌐 our livelihoods
thereby ensuring the future and sustainability of translation as a profession.
So let’s celebrate our creativity, longevity and unity.'
And if you need your text to be translated from Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Serbian or Serbo-Croatian into English, drop me a line at info@nicknasev.com.
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