In his oft-quoted essay “Methoden des Übersetzens” Friedrich Schleiermacher distinguishes between “mere interpreting” and translation. Yet in the context of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century the two were inextricably bound and they both played seminal roles in expanding the spaces of literature and politics. As a reaction to the Greek Independence movement that began in 1821, some functions of the Dragoman system, hitherto dominated by Greek Phanariots, was taken over by the newly formed Translation Chamber of the Sublime Porte. While the chamber’s activities were mostly limited to interpretation and diplomacy in the beginning, the fact that many of the important Turkish intellectuals of the Late Ottoman Empire were associated with the Translation Chamber exemplifies the unintended and far-reaching cultural consequences of the policies of modernization and centralization. The position of the Translation Chamber in politics and culture also illustrates the increase of the importance of Turkish but the Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century contained a multitude of communities with different languages and without a strict hierarchy governing these languages and their use. In this sense, the creative ways in which European works of literary prose, poetry and theater were translated and also appropriated/rewritten demonstrate the crucial roles translation has played in brokering translational and multilingual encounters. The repeated translations and adaptations of a singular work in the different languages of the empire, not only most widespread ones such Armenian, Greek and Turkish with the corresponding prevalent scripts but also hybrid forms such as Karamanlidika and Armeno-Turkish, show that the space of language and the agents within weren’t yet fixed. But the circulation of new modern political ideas created a literary space in which different communities experimented with new modes of writing and collaborated with and competed against each other. For example, theatrical performances were prepared and attended by a decidedly cosmopolitan and multilingual body of people and show that how the space of literature became increasingly political in the process of modernization. Tracing the debates surrounding translation and language, this presentation argues that the modernization, expansion and transformation of the Late Ottoman literary space is intertwined with the discussions of cultural and political belonging of different communities of the Empire and how they negotiated somehow contradicting ideologies of citizenship, cosmopolitanism multilingualism and nationalism as modernization efforts introduced new sets of rights and ideas also new senses of belonging.