Quotes About Translation

Now, for some reason or other best known to themselves, the translators of the Bible have carefully crowded out of existence and covered up every reference to the fact that the Deity is both masculine and feminine.

It's really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry, said Angus Lordie. In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find.

And so it was that I became an anthology piece translated along with many others out of the French into your small arms though I am a phantom

I think reading a translation is an act of faith.

Dorothy Koomson is the author of seven other novels: The Cupid Effect, The Chocolate Run, My Best Friend's Girl, Marshmallows for Breakfast, The Ice Cream Girls and The Woman He Loved Before –all of which have spent several weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her books have been translated into thirty languages and regularly top the bestseller charts around the

translating if you will, so that you perceive this room in the usual three dimensions.

Coming to worship the Lord in the "beauty of holiness" somehow gets translated into the "warmth of niceness." Almost entirely gone is the experience of being run through, pierced by the numinous.

Dr Muhammad Muhsin Khan

I could teach you how to speak my language, Rosetta Stone.

Movement is the translation of life, and if art depicts life, movement should come into art, since we are only aware of living because it moves.

In art as in life, some things need no translation.

It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.

I'm grateful to her. This habit women have - a role Helen often claimed not to want - of telling me what I'm feeling. Tremendously helpful. Like having an interpreter at hand to translate you to yourself.

Father-in-law comes to stay, goes to local church and returns saying he will spend the rest of his life translating New English Bible back into English.

Georg Grotefend began systematically translating the trilingual Persian inscription of Darius the Great on the Behistun Rock, which included a version in Babylonian cuneiform.

It suffered and died in translation.

One task is to identify what for some time I have referred to as the "epistemic politics" that often sever colonial pasts from their contemporary translations

Capitalism is a translation machine for producing capital from all kinds of livelihoods, human and not human.

I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.

My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poem from the last years of her life that begins "I lose my screams" dear Antigone, I take it as the task of the translator to forbid that you should ever lose your screams