Our paper re-examines the role of translation and adaptation in late Ottoman penal reform, focusing particularly on the shifting legal articulations of sexual violence. Reading the Ottoman and Egyptian penal codes, adapted from the 1801 French criminal code, we investigate how legal status and representation of sexual violence were altered, displaced, received or renewed, tracing the emergence of rape, in particular, as a sexual crime whose delineation and penalization respond to the changing lexica of gender, (private) property, and (public) morality. The Ottoman Penal Code of 1858 combined its French original with tenets from existing shar?’a practice whereas the Penal Code introduced in 1875 in semi-autonomous Egypt was in fact a relay translation based on the Ottoman Code: it was replaced in 1883 by a direct translation from the French. Translation was not limited to the official codes themselves: versions in the many languages of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, including Italian and Greek, were printed and published in the press. While work in literary studies has identified rape as a metaphor for colonial translation, our paper examines a more material connection between the two. We investigate the legal codification of sexual violence as a process that occurred in translation: both the verbal translation of legal lexica across and within languages, and the cultural translation of one penal system into another. Translation, in this reading, is not a mere literary pursuit, but a social practice, key to legal articulations and representations of sexuality and gender, and participates, we argue, to the challenging definition of what is rape. Of course, legal change cannot be reduced to institutional penal codes: crime was produced and punished in streets, homes, police stations, forensic hospitals, courts and a range of media, in concert with - and sometimes in spite of - the codes themselves. Our study acknowledges their limitations as indicators of de facto legal and social practice; instead, it asks what they reveal about translation as a process of codification. Reading the official codes alongside the circulating translations in the press, and the legal texts they came to replace, we approach the text as a body in which legal and translation practices, and shifting notions of gender and sexuality, converge and interact with one another. If “rape is a form of social performance”(BOURKE, 2007), its codified wordings and forms of penalization embody the reform of society at stake in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and Egypt.