In the nineteenth century, the largest metropolises of the Ottoman Empire concurrently served as major literary centers for a relatively large number of linguistic and religious communities. In the Ottoman capital alone, literature was for instance written, published, consumed and, perhaps even more importantly, translated from and into multiple languages. In this distinctive cultural ecosystem of the late Ottoman Empire characterized by an uncommonly dense traffic in languages and texts, literary translation –and, in particular, the translation of foreign prose fiction- became, at a time marked by acute social and political change, a crucial vector of what Antoine Berman called the "experience of the foreign." Emphasizing local literary exchanges between communities as a way to counter the diffusionist narratives that have approached Tanzimat-era translation as a largely unidirectional phenomenon of transfer between Western Europe and the Ottoman world, the present paper mobilizes the notion of "script" in its exploration of the practice of translation in the late Ottoman Empire, a period in which the existence of shared alphabets and the complexity of the social uses of competing writing systems often interfered with the theoretical compartmentalization imposed by the so-called millet system. Examples of these tensions around scripts during the period included, among others, the coexistence of at least three writing systems used for the printing of Ottoman-Turkish (the Arabo-Persian script, as well as the Greek and Armenian alphabets), the debates around the choice of a "national" script among the Albanian intellectual circles of Istanbul, or the particular situation of Judeo-Spanish, commonly printed in the semi-cursive Rashi script interspersed with Hebrew block characters).In framing Tanzimat-era translation as "transcription," this paper reads the rapid and massive increase in the number of translations of foreign prose fiction in the various literary idioms of the Ottoman Empire during the second half of the nineteenth century in articulation with the proliferation of scripts employed for the printing of these translated texts. In making use of the various connotations carried by the idea of "script," this paper argues that a recourse to the concept and to its dual meaning of "typeface" and "template" or "convention" (as it is used, for instance, in the notion of "cultural scripts") can lay the ground for an analysis of late Ottoman translation going beyond the exclusive study of textuality and encompassing both typographic traces and cultural practices.