Much of the scholarship on Arab modernity of the nineteenth and early twentieth century has almost exclusively emphasized translations from European languages as the driving force behind cultural transformations throughout the Arab world. To demonstrate that translations from Turkish played a crucial role for Arab modernity, my paper gives a close reading of two works by the Iraqi intellectual, Maruf al-Rusafi (1875–1945), Daf’ al-hujna fi irtidakh al-lukna (Overcoming Flaws in Speech Defects, 1913) and al-Ruya fi bahth al-hurriya (Dream in the Search for Freedom, 1909). In particular, I examine the sections in Daf’ al-hujna in which al-Rusafi describes the characteristics of the Ottoman language and lists the mistakes in the use of Arabic language that arise from the influence of translations from Turkish to Arabic. Later, I compare both in terms of content and linguistic style al-Rusafi’s Ruya with the Turkish source text from which it was translated, Rüya (Dream, 1908) by Namik Kemal (1840–1888). Through this comparative analysis, my paper argues that the increasing number of translations between Arabic and Turkish during the late Ottoman Empire allowed a transculturation of ideals and values of modernity, while ironically decreasing the transculturation of Arabic and Turkish languages that has characterized the cultural cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman cultural elite. These translations thus generated a common repertoire of themes, imagery, and style that constituted what I call a language of modernity in Arabic and Turkish writings, while their translators also set up a role model for their respective languages by excising “foreign loanwords” that come from source texts and languages. In addition to reframing the Arab modernity (nahda) within the context of a multilingual Ottoman cultural milieu, my paper also contributes to translation theory as it demonstrates that translations can substantiate the boundaries of source or national languages. Furthermore, while Iraqi intellectuals played a key role for modernity in the late Ottoman Empire, they received less attention in the Anglophone scholarship that has often focused on intellectuals from Egypt, Beirut, and Istanbul. I thus demonstrate that a shift of focus toward the writings of Iraqi intellectuals will reassess the key assumptions about what the prominent critics Nurullah Ataç and Jamal al-Din al-Shayyal have called “the age of translation” of the Ottoman Empire.