Quotes About Translation

He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back. Through the panel he calls, "I am not killing you. I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come." He pauses, fumbling to translate. "The song, light of the moon?" She almost smiles.

He translates one book of the Iliad, two of the Odyssey, plus an admirable slice of Plato's Republic. Five lines on an average day, ten on a good one, scribbled onto yellow legal pads in his crimped pencil-writing and stuffed into boxes beneath the dining table. Sometimes he believes his translations are adequate. Usually he decides they're terrible. He shows them to no one.

Nostos, yes. The act of homecoming, a safe arrival. Of course, mapping a single English word onto a Greek one is almost always slippery. A nostos also means a song about a homecoming.

But as he reconstructs Zeno's translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don't know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we're doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool's errand.

But as he reconstructs Zeno's translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

My first published writings were trying to take scientific concepts and make them clear for a general audience.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

A lot of linguists in the market, especially interpreters of foreign languages, do not have a great command over the English language, especially if they are translating into English.

'Escargot' is French for 'fat crawling bag of phlegm'.

What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.

Some words, you know, it's amazing but some words would come only in French, and when I speak French, it would only come in English. And so the adjustment is very difficult sometimes.

I do almost all my movies in French. I dub them.

I speak French, and I grew up with French, so my English is Franglais.

It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French.

when Miss St. John called "le bon pain," "lee bong pang.

For them, 'mektub al mellah', as the Fremen say. The thing was written with salt, Irulan translated.

Ima trava okolo! I korenja okolo!" Jessica translated silently: "These are ashes! And these are roots!

No, hay algo más para hoy: si usted distrae un solo minuto de su sueño para dedicarlo a la tarea de traducción será como si me estuviera maldiciendo. Porque si algún día se me somete a juicio, no habrá largas investigaciones, bastará con afirmar: él la privó del sueño. Eso bastará para que me condenen, y con razón. De modo que estoy luchando por mí cuando le ruego que no vuelva a hacer algo así.

Language is but a poor translation.

My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.

Whenever I come across an Arabic word mired in English text, I am momentarily shocked out of the narrative.

Anything based on ancient texts is difficult for a modern reader to get their head around.

The language is the hardest thing. My technical Russian is much better than my conversational Russian, and it has to be good enough to explain problems to them in their technical control center.