Quotes About Language

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

Translation is meaning.

the semantics of words is an intellectual mess.

The survivor language, English, is not necessarily the best suited to the job; it's just that nothing has yet happened to knock it out.

It can be done only by guessing what the context and genre of the utterance are.

Quotation is more universal and more ancient than one would perhaps believe.

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.

There is no weapon like words, no armor against words, and with words the Master Philologist has conquered me. It is not at all equitable: but the man showed me a huge book wherein were the names of everything in the world, and justice was not among them. It develops that, instead, justice is merely a common noun, vaguely denoting an ethical idea of conduct proper to the circumstances, whether of individuals or communities. It is, you observe, just a grammarian's notion.

Yes, I repeat, there is always something to be done with words, and here are thirty-two authentic words from the Master Philologist himself, not to speak of three commas and a full-stop. Oh, I shall certainly go far with this.

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

The art of communication is the language of leadership.

Profanity is the linguistic crutch of inarticulate fuckheads.