Quotes About Interpretation

We have a language that reflects how we learn to paint, but not how we learn to paint our paintings. How do you describe the [reader to place words here] that changes when craft swells into art?

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

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.

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

Translation is another name for the human condition.

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

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.

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

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.

the semantics of words is an intellectual mess.

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

I was like a well trained pianist who knows which note to hit, but can't make the music his own.

but the meanings hidden in great stories are universal,

I can but repeat that art is not a branch of pedagogy!

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.

If you would have a right to account of things from illiterate people, let them tell their story in their own way; if you put them upon talking according to logical rules, you will confound them.

You never know what they mean until you hear what they don't say.

By the study of Boltzmann I have been unable to understand him. He could not understand me on account of my shortness, and his length was and is an equal stumbling block to me.