Quotes About Culture

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.

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

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.

Translation is meaning.

It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

Food is our common ground, a universal experience.

The Spanish, contrary to a widespread misconception, do not eat hot, heavily seasoned food. They use very little pepper and very few herbs. I believe this conception of the Spanish diet must have originated in Texas, where they do Mexican and Spanish dishes in the hottest manner I know.

I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world. In my travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home.

Assim sendo a boa tradução não é impelida pelas motivações do domínio e da aquisição, mas pelo respeito. Tradução é uma palavra que deigna um conjunto de práticas mediante as quais aprendemos a conviver com as diferenças, com a fluidez da cultura e com a instabilidade do eu.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

I love short trips to New York to me it is the finest three-day town on earth.

The great question posed by the Catholic sexual abuse scandal is not How could priests and bishops have done this? Rather, given the global scale of the clerical crimes against children and the all-but-universal habit of Church denial that enabled those crimes, the great question is What in Catholic culture gives rise to this grotesquely massive dysfunction?.

scholars tell us that there was no word in ancient Latin or Greek for "self" as it is understood in contemporary usage.

It has become routine for Catholics today to denounce clericalism — the supernatural status claimed for priests. Clerics themselves denounce it. But what is suspect, finally, is the priesthood as such. It's an illusion to pretend that "clericalism" exists apart from the entire culture defined by the sacrament of holy orders, which is the formal name of the priestly ordination rite.

Tradition, meaning, and relevance

Back home, this Catholic kid was accustomed to a Protestant culture's condescension, but here he could see for himself the world-historic glories of Catholicism... [A Catholic American soldier's reaction to seeing St. Peter's Basilica during WWII.]

Does progress mean that we dissolve our ancient myths? If we forget our legends, I fear that we shall close an important door to the imagination

The Dordogne Valley is one long smorgasbord.

The universality of tattooing is a curious subject for speculation.

In addition to the research, I enjoyed learning French and assimilating the culture of another country.

There is a striking analogy between the situation at the end of the fifteenth century, when life had become thoroughly saturated by organized religion, and that of today, when the world has become saturated with politics.

Cultures are not matters of taste but systems of adaptation to specific circumstances that may prove irrelevant or even counterproductive in other settings.