Quotes from David Bellos

The difference between a translation and an original is not of the same order as the difference between powdered and steamed coffee.

To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.

It is translation, more than speech itself, which provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought. We should do more of it.

in Israel it is said that God himself would not get promotion in any science department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Why not? Because he has only one publication—?and it was not written in English.

I express not the word for the word but the sense for the sense.

No opinions would be worth holding except by those who read works in the original.

Translation is another name for the human condition.

But a world in which all intercultural communication was carried out in a single idiom would not diminish the variety of human tongues. It would just make native speakers of the international medium less sophisticated users of language than all others, since they alone would have only one language to think with.

Translation is the opposite of empire

Would we have ever asked what it is that a translator 'carries across' the 'language barrier' if he or she were called a 'turner', 'tongue-man', or 'exchanger'? Probably not.

A desire to believe (despite all evidence to the contrary) that words are at bottom the names of things is what makes the translator's mission seem so impossible.

The expression "literal meaning," taken literally, is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, and a nonsense.

The real story is the other way around. Without translators, Western dictionaries would not exist.

To try to capture "all the words of a language" is as futile as trying to capture all the drops of water in a flowing river.

The natural way to represent the foreignness of foreign utterances is to leave them in the original, in whole or in part.

In many circumstances, formal education replaces the infant language with one that goes on to be used in adult life as the operative means of communication.

Translation-?based language teaching is no longer in fashion, but its ghost still inhabits a number of misconceptions about what translation is or should be.

The words of law often look like words of the language you speak, but when they are legal terms, they are not.

Few inhabitants of the subcontinent have ever been monoglot; citizens of India have traditionally spoken three, four, or five tongues.1

Translation is not just one thing; how best to do it depends on what you are doing it for.

There are many different ways of teaching languages. The Ottomans rounded up youngsters in conquered lands and brought them back as slaves to be trained as dil oglan, or "language boys," in Istanbul. Modern direct methods are gentler but rely on the same understanding of how languages are best learned—through total immersion in a bain linguistique, a kind of baptism of the brain.

This way of dealing with an untranslatable by not translating it while making it pronounceable (sound translation, homophonic translation: see here) could be considered the primary, original meaning of the term literal translation.

Among them we cannot possibly include the unfortunate but widespread idea that English is simpler than other languages.

speech is such an ephemeral thing - it's gone in a puff of warm air, which is all it is in a material sense