Quotes About Translation

A translator is someone trying to get in between a body and its shadow.

Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.

Tenir. Faire comme d'habitude. J'ai traité, pendant deux heures au téléphone, les problèmes de traduction anglaise de Une femme. Puis Leclerc. Le ciel bleu, les arbres ensoleillés, le froid, comme l'année dernière, les mardis de novembre.

the essence of a communication is often distorted in translation.

Like many American readers, I was first introduced to Magda Szabo's work when New York Review Books reissued the Hungarian master's profound and haunting novel 'The Door.'

I think comics can be the basis for great films, but I think the focus of such a project should be on making the film as good as possible, not on painstakingly replicating the comic.

When I was general director of City Opera, we were pioneers in the practice of projecting supertitles so that American audiences finally could know what all the singing was about.

Talk English to me, Tommy. Parlez francais avec moi, Nicole. But the meanings are different-- in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can't be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too.

Harold Henderson (1889–1974), who made haiku a part of our own literature, dubbed them "meditations . . . starting points for trains of thought." R. H. Blyth (1898–1964), who published six volumes of haiku translations, made the extravagant claim that "Japanese literature stands or falls by haiku.

To realize that who we are is not ours to know, that what we think or feel is always a translation, that what we want is not what we wanted, nor perhaps what anyone wanted – to realize all this at every moment, to feel all this in every feeling – isn't this to be foreign in one's own soul, exiled in one's own sensations?

When you sit players in front of doctors and surgeons, they use big, fancy words, and sometimes players get lost. It's hard to digest. But when you've been there and you can break it down into 'football language,' they can understand it better.

I think it's really hard for filmmakers to adapt books.

The best translations cannot convey to us the strength and exquisite delicacy of thought in its native garb, and he to whom such books are shut flounders about in outer darkness.

I'm a good communicator, and I'm a good translator. I can talk to engineers; I can talk to people for whom technology is not remotely interesting or even maybe scary - things like that.

You know, this is really a way of cooking. It's not my way. I'm deeply influenced by the Mediterranean way of being. I've spent a lot of time there. And I've sort of translated it; I've tried to make it available to people in this country to whom it might not be familiar.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.

Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn't occur to people - or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original.

There was a time when Stefan Zweig was the most widely read author in the world. He was lionized everywhere, translated into every language. For the first four decades of the 20th century, his novellas and biographies were devoured by rich and poor, young and old, well read or less so.

Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.

In film lyrics, I avoid Persianised words because they are not widely understood.

It's always tense when you move a character from a book to the screen. Always tense.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah, Oxford University Press, 1955. An English translation of the earliest biography of Muhammad—written by a pious Muslim. Virtually every page presents a devastating refutation of the whitewashed, peaceful Muhammad of PC myth.