Quotes About Language

I started a company in 2005 for language services called Blue Elephant. We handle translation and interpretation services in over 120 languages.

By the age of nine, I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them.

I read the Bible to myself; I'll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

Translation is at best an echo.

Translation is an act of recreation.

Each language has its own take on the world. That's why a translation can never be absolutely exact, and therefore, when you enter another language and speak with its speakers, you become a slightly different person; you learn a different sort of world.

A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.

By the 1880s, English translations of both the French and the Russian editions were available, and Americans began to read 'War and Peace.'

Though I have seldom done anything to my own satisfaction, I am better satisfied with the translation of the New Testament than I ever expected to be. The language is, I believe, simple, plain, intelligible; and I have endeavored, I hope successfully, to make every sentence a faithful representation of the original.

Machine translation of signs, text, and speech brings down language barriers and facilitates ever more cross-cultural meetings of like minds.

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

I love the song 'El Rey.' And for years, I never knew what the song was totally about. It was something new for me. I'd never sung a song in Spanish before. Then I got the translation and saw what a really cool song it was.

I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money.

It was real Cheyenne. I would get the translations the night before, but it was very difficult because it was not like any other language you would be familiar with.

Though most of my titles are translated into about 7 to 8 languages, I feel that translations, to some extent, can lose the flavour of the colloquial words used otherwise in the regional narrative.

What's wonderful is to read the different translations - some done in 1600 and some in 1900 - of the same passage. It's fascinating to watch the same tale repeated in such a different way by two different centuries.

When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.

I thought that strange syntax was the language of story books. I didn't realize those were poor translations... English from Edwardian times.

When a translation is very good, it is fascinating to see how the book changes and yet stays the same. I think 'Out Stealing Horses' sounds more American for Americans than it does in Norway, and still, it is all there, everything that I wrote. It's amazing.

I suspect that most playgoers don't understand how inexact a science literary translation is. Even the simplest of lines may lend itself to multiple renderings.

Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.

'Translations Through Speakers' was literally, I'm translating very spottily what my aspirations are.