Historians of empire have increasingly stressed the importance of hierarchical relations and institutional overlap for the survival of colonial regimes. A finely-tuned politics of knowledge underwrote many colonial administrations, and language skills were the linchpin of these systems. In this vein, my paper charts government recruitment of interpreters from across the Mediterranean basin in order to fulfill the diverse needs of the budding French colony in Algeria (1830-1848). I draw upon personnel files and archived correspondence from the French Ministries of War and Foreign Affairs and the Algerian Government General to illustrate the improbable ties that brought together philologists from the prestigious School for Oriental Languages in Paris; consular dragomans working in the Levant; retired Mamluk imperial guards from Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egypt Expedition; and illiterate tradesmen from Mediterranean port towns, forming the imperial interprétariat. The administrative politics of knowledge that I trace in mid-nineteenth-century Algeria, however, is a far cry from the “unbroken arc of knowledge and power” of Said’s Orientalism. Interpreters’ varied language skills and discomfort with certain types of translation meant that they were not interchangeable cogs within the bureaucratic machinery. Moreover, interpreters remained locked in competition, jockeying for promotions and haranguing their superiors for pay increases or relocations. The newly-constructed corps coexisted uncomfortably at best, and in open hostility at worst. Established interpreters demanded the dismissal of newcomers to the administrative order, citing their moral unfitness and lack of professional credentials, while these local subjects chided their foreign-born co-workers for their inability to grasp the Algerian dialect. I sketch out the growing pains of the Algerian colonial administration as reflected in the stilted career trajectories of some of France’s most renowned Orientalists, showing how administrative necessity opened the door of opportunity for a new cadre of functionaries——men who found official favor through their local cultural knowledge and flexible communicative practices. In doing so, I illuminate the tenuous corporatism of a transnational interprétariat upon whose cooperation the establishment of an operative colonial administration depended.