Quotes About Interpretation

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.

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.

My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author's voice really is.

I read pretty well in French and Spanish. I don't want to read a book written in French or Spanish in translation.

To me, the process of art is very much a process of translation, of borrowing.

I have some English words on the first album, but any time I try to do it, you miss something. You think it's just a simple translation from French to English, but it's so different as far as the understanding.

Yes, translation is by definition an inadequate substitute for being able to read a masterpiece in the original.

Walter Benjamin used to think that languages expand their register thanks to translation, because translation forces ways of using words and structures that were alien to the original speaker of the target language.

Most of us do not, in fact, read another language, and so when we read a translation, we have no way of knowing what has been changed or added.

People are usually so disappointed with book-to-movie translations.

I think translations should convey the feelings expressed in the original work. This is what I have believed in and practised.

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.

I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.

And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.

When I act as a translator, I am really doing a performance for my fellow Anglophone readers in the West.

If a translation doesn't have obvious writing problems, it may seem quite all right at first glance. We readers, after all, quickly adapt to the style of a translator, stop noticing it, and get caught up in the story.

The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred.

Sometimes it can be difficult when you're talking to a journo after the game, saying, 'Yeah mate, I was on the burst.' And then the translator is trying to translate that into Japanese, and apparently there is no actual translation.

The barrier of communication is terrible if you don't speak the language. You cannot reach a player with a translator.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

Conducting is more difficult than playing a single instrument. You have to know the culture, to know the score, and to project what you want to hear. Some conductors are well prepared but cannot transmit their ideas to an orchestra, and others are good communicators but have nothing to transmit because they are not absorbed enough in the score.