Quotes About Translation

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.

There is really no good English translation for adab. It means behaving well or good etiquette. It is acting with heedfulness, beauty, refinement, graciousness, and respect for others. The Koran teaches us the importance of acting beautifully. "Do what is beautiful. God loves those who do what is beautiful." (2:195)

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says it means, nothing less but nothing more.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Na ja, bei ihm heißt Chard 'Phallus Impudicus', und ..." [...] "Er heißt 'unzüchtiger Pimmel'?

He looked unsmilingly upon Fancourt's astonishment. The writer rallied quickly. "Ovid?" "Catullus," said Strike, heaving himself off the low pouffe with the aid of the table. "Translates roughly: "So that's how you crept up on me, an acid eating away My guts, stole from me everything I most treasure? Yes, alas, stole: grim poison in my blood The plague, alas, of the friendship we once had.

the haiku. It has, of course, a three-part prosodic structure, five syllables–seven syllables–five syllables. But, as written in Japanese, it is usually represented in a single line and there is a long controversy about whether it should be translated as a one-line or a three-line poem.

againbite [agenbite] of inwit. James Joyce revived the expression agenbite [againbite] of inwit in Ulysses. it is a good example of Anglo-Saxon replacements of foreign words, meaning the "remorse of conscience" and originally being the prose translation of a French moral treatise (The Ayenbite of Ynwit) made by Dan Michel in 1340.

But things are not what they seem. The normal Arabic word for "philosophy" was and is falasifa and a "philosopher" is a faylasuf. Plato was a faylasuf and so were Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes, and al-Farabi. But the word that Rosenthal has translated as "philosophy" in the passage quoted above is hikma, and hikma has a subtly different range of meaning.

I want you to stay with me." "So do I." "Is that what you said in Arabic?" "It was close," she said. He waited for the rest. "It's just an old Bedouin saying." "Give me the rough translation." "I would not trade you for a thousand goats." Lucas laughed.

Ninety percent of all verbal expression has no filmic equivalent. "He's been sitting there for a long time" can't be photographed.

Nothing?' said Corlath. 'I said there were two things. I have told you the first. You told us what you saw as you saw it. But this is the second thing: you spoke in the Old Tongue, what we call the Language of the Gods, that none knows any more but kings and sorcerers, and those they wish to teach it to. The language I just spoke to you, that you did not recognize- I was repeating the words you had said yourself, a moment before.

That was the strange thing about translation, speaking someone else's words in a voice that somehow was and wasn't your own. You could fool yourself into believing you understood the meaning behind the words, but-as my father had explained long before I was old enough to get it-words and meaning were inseparable. Language shapes thought; I speak, therefore I think, therefor I am.

The beauty of things means virtue and value in them It is in the beholder's eye, not the worlds? Certainly. It is the human mind's translation of the transhuman Intrinsic glory. It means the world is sound.

As for the rest of him, his function is rather like that of an anti-computer: you feed him all kinds of carefully garnered facts, figures, and statistics and he translates them into garbage.

And I read a book that figured the part about the virgins is a mistranslation. The word is ambiguous. It comes in a passage full of food imagery. Milk and honey. It probably means raisins. Plump, and possibly candied or sugared." "They kill themselves for raisins?" "I'd love to see their faces.

I said it in Hebrew—I said it in Dutch— I said it in German and Greek; But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much) That English is what you speak!

What's the French for fiddle-de-dee?

feel very deeply. Even romantically. But those feelings live inside my heart and my head. I can't translate them to the rest of me.

I feel very deeply. Even romantically. But those feelings live inside my heart and my head. I can't translate them to the rest of me." Ling said "the rest of me" quickly and quietly. "I don't know if I want to be touched in that way. I don't know if my love is a physical love.

Yes, I am unalterably convinced that the translation of an experience into words depends more upon the temperament of the man who has lived through it than upon its actual content.

It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.

You translate everything-whether physical, mental, or spiritual into muscular tension.

Music 'says' things about the world, but in specifically musical terms. Any attempt to reproduce these musical statements 'in our own words' is necessarily doomed to failure.