The nineteenth-century Syrian polymath Mikha’il Mishaqa knew only Arabic and never travelled outside Bilad al-Sham and Egypt. But he was an active participant in debates that ranged across many languages and several continents. He was able to participate in these debates through two means: written translations and conversation with bilingual, or multilingual, individuals. This paper explores Mishaqa’s intellectual networks as he moved from Damietta to Dayr al-Qamar to Damascus. It examines his encounters with different sets of translated texts which profoundly shaped his views: first European Enlightenment writings rendered into Arabic by the ‘Damietta Circle’ of translators; later American Evangelical Protestant texts translated by Nahda writers such as Faris al-Shidyaq and John Wortabet; plus religious writings drawing on Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac sources. It reconstructs his acquisition of scientific, medical, and religious knowledge through conversation with bilingual friends and acquaintances; and traces how his own writings and speech were translated and propagated across multiple languages. As a monolingual Arabic speaker who was an avid consumer of translated texts and speech, and a prolific producer of texts and words for translation, Mishaqa provides a unique test-case for the role translation and bilingualism could play in nineteenth-century Arabic cultural production.