Quotes About Translation

The best argument in favor of the universality of natural language expressive power is the possibility of translation. The best argument against universality is the impossibility of translation.

the Turkish language has changed so radically since the time of Kemal's "Nutuk" that a Turk living today would not be able to understand his actual words. The speech literally has to be translated for contemporary Turkish speakers. Most important, any record, history, or document created prior to 1929 is totally unreadable by all Turks

The Luther Bible was to the modern German language what the works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible were to the modern English language. Before Luther's Bible, there was no unified German language.

Soon everyone spoke German the way Luther's translation did. As television has had a homogenizing effect on the accents and dialects of Americans, watering down accents and sanding down sharp twangs, Luther's Bible created a single German tongue.

Something may have been lost in translation, but it certainly wasn't love

My mum translated this in her head to "witchfinder," which was good because like most West Africans, she considered witchfinding a more respectable profession than policeman.

Bollocks, I thought, or testiculi or possibly testiculos if we were using the accusative.

When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I'd memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium.

CAPTAIN RAMIREZ: "Ootunondumi rabo Caaguazu." FRANCISCO: "Bokinmaginum sinking." RAMIREZ: "Help.

I don't think know if anything's going to translate anywhere. You're making a movie, you hope it's going to be funny, you can't think about how it's going to go over.

There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.

Literature can appeal to the soul only through the mind. Music goes direct. Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.

Even though Spivak's translation met with some criticism and had to be revised several times, Of Grammatology achieved astronomical sales of nearly 100,000 copies.

Translating one region's works for another region has a beauty with an inborn connect. We might speak different languages but our culture and history is one.

I try to be as honest as I can in writing. That's what ends up translating and relating to people.

When I do my job, I dive into these characters and try to flush something out of myself into these characters, and hopefully that translates well.

This leads us to note further, that in any case the reader of an English Bible is already involved in interpretation. For translation is in itself a (necessary) form of interpretation. Your Bible, whatever translation you use, which is your beginning point, is in fact the end result of much scholarly work. Translators are regularly called upon to make choices regarding meanings, and their choices are going to affect how you understand.

It's kind of a joke. It was supposed to be 'Come alive with the Pepsi generation.' But it actually translates more like 'Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.

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The only thing that kept us from going bigger worldwide was the language barrier. All the corn that we did on 'Hee Haw,' it was hard to translate into their slang.

Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner, because English is the language that's spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication.

I firmly believe that you can't get a good movie without risking a bad movie. A good adaptation of your book is worth it because it is such a wonderful experience to see your world translated onto the screen.

I think a truly fantastic video is worth it. We spend so much time on the music, it only makes sense to have a really well-done visual translation of that music.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.