Against the backdrop of Eurocentric notions of modernization, recent scholarship has drawn attention to the interconnected nature of Ottoman modernities. In an attempt to contribute to this emerging body of work, my paper situates Turkish-Arabic contact in translation within the larger context of multilingual and multiscript interactions within the late Ottoman Empire and between the empire and Europe. In doing so, I draw on a set of archival finds: the 1869 edition of Ahmed Lutfi’s Arabic-to-Turkish translation of Robinson Crusoe, which is adorned with illustrations taken from a Greek translation of Crusoe, some of which contain words typeset in the Greek script; a copy of the 1880 edition of al-Jawaʾib’s Turkish-Arabic bilingual print of the Kanun-i Esasi (the first Ottoman constitution), in which Armenian-script annotations accompany the Turkish-Arabic print; and select issues of late 19th-century Turkish and Arabic periodicals (such as Servet-i Fünun and al-Muqtataf), in which Latin-script words appear along with their equivalents in the (Perso-)Arabic script. Embodying diverse translation practices at once, these documents reveal how Turkish-Arabic contact in the late empire was marked not only by European modernity but by a combination of internal and external factors, ranging from indigenous languages and scripts of the empire to European print materials and technologies, and the proliferation of new media, genres, and epistemologies that resulted from such interactions. Using the tools of translation studies, media studies, and book history to attend to the marks born by these documents—both conceptually, in their content, and materially, upon the page—I make a case for studying Ottoman modernity in its hegemonic and heterogeneous facets at once. In conclusion, I reflect on my own experience navigating physical and online archives, sharing insights into the often-overlooked ways critical translation scholars can employ archival research in their attempt to better understand Ottoman modernity.