Our paper evaluates selections from the writings of the Cairo-based scholar Muhammad Farid Wajdi (1878–1954) and their translations into Ottoman Turkish by the Istanbul-based poet Mehmed Akif (1873–1936). The selections come from Al-Mar’ah al-Muslima: Fi Al-Radd ‘Ala Al-Mar’ah al-Jadida (The Muslim Woman: a Response to the New Woman, 1902), which was written in response to Qasim Amin’s Al-Mar’ah al-Jadida (The New Woman, 1900). Immediately after the 1908 Constitutional Revolution relaxed censorship laws in the Ottoman dominions, Wajdi’s book-length refutation was made accessible to an Ottoman readership in serialized form on the pages of the newly-established periodical Akif was head writer and greatest contributor to, the Sirat-i Müstakim (The Straight Path). One year later, Akif’s translation of The Muslim Woman was published in book form. Through an analysis of the Muslim Woman and its translation, we investigate the manner in which the “woman question” becomes the crux of a complex process for the translation of paradigms for seeing modernity from within specific social positionalities. We are particularly interested in tracing two crucial underpinning dimensions. The first pertains to the way the assumption of a division between a public/private/and domestic spheres is operative for the arguments on the “woman question” (interlaced with assertions concerning human nature). We look at the particular terms used to name and signal these divisions between Arabic and Ottoman, noting the hermeneutical and social provenances of these terms in both contexts and attending to how they factor in their respective readers. The other relates to central moments in the argument where the translation does not just move between Arabic and Ottoman but includes French (thought/social reality) too. Specifically, we look at the translation and engagement with the work of Auguste Comte (1798-1857). These examples sharply complicate the division between source/target language, pointing to the convergences and shifts in meaning and significance, which are not solely shaped by the operations of language and translations, but by how the latter occur across specific social formations and particular positions in them. In this manner, the translational encounter between Wajdi and Akif can be placed within wider debates on women, “human nature,” and civilization that are simultaneously global and context-specific (the context here including the language itself and its history).