Quotes About Translation

In my own research when I'm working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I'm doing if I'm solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I'm constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind's-eye picture.

I've been a visual artist my entire life, so translating music to imagery has always come naturally to me. Tycho is an audio-visual project in a lot of ways, so I don't see a real separation between the visual and musical aspects; they are both just components of a larger vision.

I couldn't do a record without knowing I'll translate it into something visual.

I don't think we have reached a point where art really translates into science. Perhaps for some people, having good visuals can help translate into science.

Language is very deceiving. In certain languages, there is certain vocabulary that doesn't exist in other languages. It totally changes how people feel about things.

With vocal and choral music, first and foremost, it's the text. Not only do I need to serve the text, but the text - when I'm doing it right - acts as the perfect 'blueprint', and all the architecture is there. The poet has done the heavy lifting, so my job is to find the soul of the poem and then somehow translate that into music.

The cool thing about doing a voice-over into a different language is that you get to bring the character of your own culture into it.

As voiceover artistes, we don't transcribe; we translate. One has to communicate what the character is feeling, and introduce humour where needed with a regional flavour that the audience can relate to.

When a scene is being shot, it is very difficult to know what one wants it to say, and even if one does know, there is always a difference between what one has in mind and the result on film.

Language is a traitor, a double agent who sleeps across borders without warning in the dead of night. It is a heavy snowfall in a foreign country, which hides the shapes and contours of reality beneath a cloak of nebulous whiteness. It is a crippled dog, never quite able to perform the tricks we ask of it. It is a ginger biscuit, dunked for too long in the tea of our expectations, crumbling and dissolving into nothingness. It is a lost continent.

Her fiercest sincerities were translated by the male ego, on arrival, into daffy flirtation. (p. 24)

All mankind is of one author and is one volume," John Donne wrote in one of his most beautiful meditations. "When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.

Alex?" I told him yes. "You're my translator, right?" I asked him to be slow, because I could not understand him. In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.

La palabra que yo traduzco por la isla volante o flotante es en el idioma original laputa, de la cual no he podido saber nunca la verdadera etimología. Lap, en el lenguaje antiguo fuera de uso, significa alto, y untuh, piloto; de donde dicen que, por corrupción, se deriva laputa, de lapuntuh.

Hay una hora de la tarde en que la llanura está por decir algo; nunca lo dice o tal vez lo dice infinitamente y no lo entendemos, o lo entendemos pero es intraducible, como una música

All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass?

Si vous traduisez Shakespeare, il faut traduire aussi librement que Shakespeare écrivait.

Get hold of a copy of Heine's Buck der Lieder—that should be easily done—get hold of a German-English dictionary, and then begin to read. You may be puzzled at first, but after two or three months you will find yourself reading the finest poetry in the world and perhaps not understanding it but feeling it, which is far better, since poetry is not meant for reason but for the imagination.

It's enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga (forced labor) is a Turkish word, too. And it's enough to discover on a Turkish map, somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called Nigde (russian for nowhere).

The reason English-speaking readers can hardly tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is because they read neither prose. They're reading Constance Garnett.

When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)

Yes. What you have here is what might be translated into raw individualism, you see, if you didn't realize that the center was also right there facing you in the other person. This is the mythological way of being an individual. You are the central mountain, and the central mountain is everywhere.

To translate knowledge and information into experience: that seems to be the function of literature and art.

He directed her attention to another question: "When I speak to you in your language, what happens to mine? Does my language continue to speak, but in silence?