Quotes About Translation

Mathematics to me is like a language I don't speak though I admire its literature in translation.

Language The clichéd image of an alien emerging from a flying saucer and declaring 'Take me to your leader' highlights one problem in alien narratives. As soon as aliens speak, their otherness becomes compromised, because we associate language with a way of life and view it as one of the defining characteristics of humanity. One way out of this impasse in early SF was to use the convenience of an instant translation device.

It is not possible to translate a language that does not exist.

Intellect doesn't translate across cultures; intuition does.

Be as vigilantly on guard against translating such a sentence into the passive voice as you would against committing murder.

We could go up to the top of the hill, and restructure our entrance, do away with the contradiction of being nowhere but here, the assumed proportion of a presence that will always escape, of being nowhere but near the presumed indifference that solicits our wakefulness. Day begins its indiscreet translation once again, flowing through the pearl white of loss, or the indelible deep blue of fractured words. Remove emptiness. Replace nothing.

there is no word in Hebrew for "goddess," so the word cannot appear in the Old Testament.

les moules — comment dit-on—?

Secondly, is there "something" to be defined or translated? Derrida resisted the suggestion that there is a concept of deconstruction, simply present to the word, outside of the word's inscription in sentences and phrases determined by the undecidables. There's no such concept simply to pass over into other words, other languages.

Há muitos anos que me ocupo dessa tradução: a esfera privada na qual, todavia, ainda não me instalei confortavelmente, e onde tudo deve caminhar com conscienciosidade e responsabilidade, é a língua alemã.

She understood the specific kind of appreciation that comes to a person witnessing a thing of beauty alone, how the spectacle seems to sit whole inside the soul, undiminished by conversation, by any attempt at translation or persuasion.

The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally "a walled garden.

why is a hard question to answer in any language

To program is to translate between the chaos of human life and the line-by-line world of computer language.

1) Use mathematics as shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can't succeed in 4, burn 3. This I do often.

I can't translate myself into language any more.

stubbornly unsolved, and of the laborious and ongoing task of decipherment and translation. For the curious amateur

there exists a single complete copy, is written in Annaren, the principal language spoken in Annar. In translating

THE Naraudh Lar-Chanë (or Riddle of the Treesong), one of the key legends of the lost civilization of Edil-Amarandh, is here translated in full for the first time. This great classic of Annaren literature

Most writers in older lands despaired of being understood by those who had not lived their language.

I've spent enough time studying languages to know that almost any phrase can have two meanings

I had been reading magazines a lot, and I love magazines, and so I was always asking myself why is it that these gorgeous articles just don't translate well to the web? Presentation was one aspect of it.

Dort sind Runen, die durch den Rubin leuchten, doch ich kann sie nicht lesen!« »Ich kann sie lesen«, teilte uns Zokora mit. Wir schauten sie fragend an. »Und?«, fragte ich sie ungeduldig, als sie nichts sagte. »Was steht dort?« »Bitte dreimal läuten.«

Stick." I said in Russian. I had no clue what the word for stake was. I pointed at the silver ring I wore and made a slashing motion. "Stick. where?" He stared at me in utter confusion and then asked in perfect English, "why are you talking like that?