Özet:

The issue of how the legacy of Islamic political thought was evaluated by Ottoman political thinkers is important for understanding how the Ottomans established contact with the scholar and intellectual accumulation that preceded them. Focusing on translations as one of the constitutive elements of Ottoman political thought, this study examines around 170 texts translated from Arabic and Persian in the field of political thought in the Ottoman Empire between the 14th and 18th centuries and focuses on the translation methods used by the translators who translated the works of Islamic political thought written in these two languages into Ottoman Turkish and what kind of changes they made while transferring the source text into Turkish. In this way, it is attempted to determine after which steps the translated works, which were one of the ways of producing political thought in the Ottoman Empire, were presented to the Ottoman agenda and what kind of contributions these works contain in terms of Ottoman political thought. This article, which limits itself to the texts of disciplines such as âdâb (siyasatnâme-nasihatnâme), philosophy-ethics, fiqh, hadith, and Sufism, first analyzes the information provided by a limited number of translators describing the translation procedure. Subsequently, the translated texts are compared with the source texts, and the translation methods of the translators are categorized under the headings of “literal translations”, “free translations”, “compilation type translations” and “partial/selected translations”. The literal translation method is a method that mostly manifests itself in early translations and involves a very limited contribution of the translator. Free translations are a more widespread type of translation that spans all periods. Numerous examples show that Ottoman translators considered it sufficient to provide the meāl-i munīf of the texts as an extension of the practical benefit they expected from the book they were translating. The compilation type of translations, on the other hand, is characterized by the selection and translation of hadiths related to certain topics (such as imâma, obedience, jihad, justice, etc.). This can also be seen in the compilations of political advice works made from different political books written in Arabic and Persian. “Partial/selected translations”, on the other hand, do not deal with work from beginning to end but translate a certain part of it in full. This method, which was frequently used by Ottoman translators, takes shape as an extension of the idea of “extending the benefit to everyone”, which was one of the primary purposes of translating works. In this method, the translators omitted the parts that they considered useless or unnecessary, and limited themselves to translating the parts that would be of direct use to the addressee audience. Finally, some texts that present themselves as “original” without mentioning their relationship with “the source text” have been identified and these have been handled under the concept of "implicit translation". The second part of the article focuses on how translators take initiative in translation. In this part, the subject is examined under the following headings: “Interventions that improve or reduce and clean the text”, “writing a separate introduction and conclusion to the translation, not translating the introduction of the author of the source text”, “adding depth to the language and subject matter”, “Domesticating (Hanafization and Ottomanization) of the text”, “correction of the source text, criticism or justification of its claims”, and “giving the translation an original name that often includes a reference to the source text”. Subsequently, the subjection of translated texts to interlingual translation is discussed.

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