Quotes About Translation

How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings? Can men fly?

Robin Buss is a writer and translator who contributes regularly to The Times Educational Supplement, The Times Literary Supplement and other papers.

dreamers--which the English call splash; Arabian poets gasgachau; and which we Frenchmen, who would be poets, can only translate by a paraphrase--the noise of water falling into water.

Balzampleu!" said the Swiss, who, despite the fine collection of oaths boasted by the German language, had taken to swearing in French.

BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.

BEHAVIOR, n. Conduct, as determined, not by principle, but by breeding. The word seems to be somewhat loosely used in Dr. Jamrach Holobom's translation of the following lines in the Dies Iræ: Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sum causa tuæ viæ. Ne me perdas illa die. Pray remember, sacred Savior, Whose the thoughtless hand that gave your Death-blow. Pardon such behavior.

already know by instinct we're not comfortably at home in our translated world.

The elves knew the true names of these rivers,' said Skifr, who'd made a kind of bed among the cargo to drape herself on. 'We call them Divine and Denied because those are as close as our clumsy human tongues can come.

Parlez-vous français, aussi?

A népnyelv e kifinomult szellem számára mindent túl közvetlenné, túl személyessé, túl reálissá tett volna. Szüksége volt arra a homályos, távolságtartó, könny? fátyolra, amelyet a latin nyelv vont a dolgok köré.

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.

Death? Translated into the heavenly tongue, that word means life!

If you are interested in Taoism, I would suggest that you read the Way of Life by Lao Tsu, the founder of Taoism. I personally prefer the Witter Brynner translation.

Mormons are taught to parrot the LDS Eighth Article: "We believe the Bible to be the Word of God as far as it is translated correctly." How does one know where it is not "translated correctly"? By very definition, that is wherever the Bible conflicts with Mormon doctrine (which is almost everywhere), in which case the latter is followed.

humor somehow comes through thanks to a gifted translator. Gianrico

The academic establishment. . . . argue over the diminution of Spanish because of the introduction of new Spanish words that are literally translations of England glish-- parquear, the park of "park," tales the plancelebratory of the more elegant estacionar which could be literally translated as "stationing.

What's really notable about the Logi's refusal to engage with us in our own language and media is how they've forced us to communicate on their terms. Our dire economic need to forge a productive relationship with another species has made us accept them and their demands. This gives them a lot more control over how they're seen, meanwhile forcing us to put all the effort into communication, such as our network of translators.

Lydia's never met a working translator as old as this before: usually they burn out, go into teaching, change careers (e.g., become drug dealers) or just retire.

There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.

You don't want to lose the foreign feel of a book entirely, but for me the prime requisite is to get it sounding good in English. If it sounds clumsy, readers will pounce on it of course.

The only french sentence he could call to mind was a passage which had caused him some trouble in class the previous day. So far as he had been able to judge the translation was: 'the gentleman who wears one green hat approaches himself all of a sudden.

English translation of the Koran. I wonder how, with such a repetitive farrago of platitudes, expressing so self-evident a theology and an ethic so puerile, Islam can have spread as it has.

It is generally felt that the educated man or woman should be able to read Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca in the original - with, anyway, the crutch of a translation.

Of all forms of commentary on the divine Word, a translation is the most subtle.