This paper examines how European knowledge and educational practices were indigenized in the operation of the Egyptian School of Languages, a foundational component of Muhammad Ali Pasha’s (r. 1805-48) educational reforms. I contend that examining this institution provides an ideal starting point for understanding how this Egyptian educational project of indigenizing knowledge required for technical progress and rationalizing its inclusion through moralizing legitimation strategies was foundational to larger literary, religious, philosophical and political trends in the Middle East in the latter half of the nineteenth century. First operating from 1836 to 1851, the School of Languages trained Egyptian students in the art of translation. Under the directorship of educational reformer and translator Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi (1801-1873), the school’s curriculum was one of the first to bridge secular European approaches to language and humanities studies with Egyptian and Islamic forms of knowledge. The school also operated as a translation bureau, through which European texts necessary for the newly reorganized system of technical schools were selected for their utility and translated into Arabic, a process through which this “useful” knowledge was indigenized and made both morally sound and legible for the local context. This paper details the institutional history of the School of Languages, concentrating on how its administration transformed contemporary European educational practices to fit the local context in day-to-day decision-making. It will also catalog and discuss the material translated by al-Tahtawi and his cadre of translators. I aim to uncover what kinds of knowledge were deemed useful, how these definitions shifted as requirements of the government changed, and how the translation process legitimized this knowledge as permissible within the local context. To do so, this paper draws on published archival sources and bureaucratic memos housed at the Dar al-Watha‘iq al-Qawmiyya, catalogs of Arabic published materials, al-Tahtawi’s writings on education, and the educational journal Rawdat al-Madaris. Understanding how and why European knowledge and educational practices were chosen and “translated” – both literally and figuratively - for use in the School of Languages and the larger technical educational system will not only shed light on what Egyptians defined as useful and modern in this period of rapid change, but also contextualize how this knowledge’s inclusion informed both the discourse on modern education and early approaches to expanding ‘ilm in the mid-nineteenth century.