The Ottoman Empire outsourced its diplomacy with Europe to a corps of official interpreter-diplomats, the dragomans. From 1661 the post of Grand Dragoman — first held by Panagiotis Nikousios and then by Alexander Mavrocordatos — became the near-monopoly of Phanariot Greek families, who parlayed language skill into real power, negotiating treaties and eventually ruling Ottoman provinces. The role died with the empire itself and the rise of foreign ministries staffed by trained diplomats who spoke their own languages.
Dragoman of the Sublime Porte no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1100 – 1600
Toledo, print and the vernacular Bible
Toledo's translators turned Arabic learning into Latin and fed Europe's universities; Gerard of Cremona alone accounted for over seventy scientific works. Printing then made translation dangerous as well as influential: vernacular Bibles broke the Latin monopoly on scripture, Luther's German shaped a language, William Tyndale's English New Testament was smuggled in cloth bales and cost him his life in 1536, and the humanist printer Étienne Dolet was burned in Paris in 1546 over three words added to a Plato translation.
What else was happening then
1522
Luther's eleven-week New Testament
Hiding in the Wartburg castle under an assumed name, Martin Luther translates the entire New Testament from Greek into German in about eleven weeks. The "September Testament" sells out instantly, and Luther's plain, spoken German — he insisted on listening to "the mother in the house, the children in the street, the common man in the market" — helps standardize the modern German language.
1840
The Treaty of Waitangi's two versions
Missionary Henry Williams and his son Edward translate Britain's treaty with the Māori chiefs into Māori overnight, on 4–5 February. Their rendering of "sovereignty" as "kāwanatanga" (governorship), while guaranteeing chiefs "tino rangatiratanga" (full chieftainship), left the two texts promising different things — a translation gap New Zealand's courts and the Waitangi Tribunal are still working through today.
1945–46
Nuremberg invents the simultaneous booth
The Nuremberg trials, run in English, French, Russian and German at once, adopt simultaneous interpretation through IBM's headset system under interpreter Léon Dostert — the first large-scale use anywhere. The trials made the four-language courtroom possible and founded the modern conference-interpreting profession, the translator's spoken-word sibling.
1954
The Georgetown–IBM experiment
On 7 January 1954 in New York, an IBM 701 translates more than sixty Russian sentences into English using a 250-word vocabulary and six grammar rules. Researchers predict machine translation will be solved within three to five years; the 1966 ALPAC report, finding little progress, cuts US funding for a generation instead.
Where that work lives now
The profession that carries meaning between languages — from the Septuagint and Jerome's Vulgate to Toledo, Nuremberg's booths and the machine-translation age.
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