Quotes About Translation

The first rule of translation: make sure you know at least one of the bloody languages!

Asking my father to ask the waitress the definition of "sloppy Joe" or "Tater Tots" was no problem. His translations, however, were highly suspect.

From time to time, her dialogue will be rendered in ordinary English, which Louise does not speak. To do full justice to her speech would require a ladder of footnotes and glosses, a tic of apostrophes (aphaeresis, hyphaeresis, apocope), and a Louise-ese/English dictionary of phonetic spellings.

The only word in the Martian language is written phonetically: Kay-ray-kh-kuh-ko-kex. It means whatever you want it to mean.

Bono was short for Bono Vox of O'Connell Street, but the boy Guggi was no Latin scholar. "Strong Voice" was an accidental translation. Bonavox was a hearing aid shop in Dublin.

we use an English word for a farm animal and a French word for the cooked meat it provides.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.

Jen and I were accustomed to our father's last-will-and-testament diction, and were at times free to interrupt Atticus for a translation when it was beyond our understanding.

En la vida siempre hay cosas demasiado complicadas para explicarlas en cualquier idioma.

In Moscow there were a hundred different words for sadness, and one of them was joy.

Wann, endlich, wird diese Seite auch für deutsche Leser benutzerfreundlich? kann doch nicht so schwer sein.

Human writing reflects that of the universe; it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.

It's a complicated process being so bilingual. Sometimes it's a mere word or sentence that comes to me, if I'm writing the book in English, in French. It's not always easy to deal with. Sometimes even during an interview somebody can ask me a question in English that I want to answer in French and vice versa - that's the story of my life!

Musicals are written in English, and then we import them to Japan. When we translate them into Japanese, the sounds of the language are completely different. The Japanese language is not the best for singing, in terms of sound.

Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle.

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.

Yeah, my drum programming especially is based on my knowledge of playing a drum kit. For the bass too, definitely. It was the first thing that I translated any sort of ideas through. It must have shaped it somehow.

For more than three years, I'd been part of a complex and frustrating dance as my nonfiction, fact-based material was translated from book to movie by scriptwriters whose visions, goals and sensibilities often were quite different from mine.

I have the responsibility to translate peace and stability for future generations.

One of my biggest fan bases is probably Macedonians, they always get behind me. They're always hitting me up on Facebook speaking Macedonian to me which I don't understand, so I get my dad to translate it for me.

I like to say, 'Chop suey's the biggest culinary joke that one culture has ever played on another,' because chop suey, if you translate into Chinese, means 'tsap sui,' which, if you translate back, means 'odds and ends.'

Musicians from the beginning of time have been there to express the mood and the musical feelings in the air for whatever's going on in that particular culture. It's the greatest joy as a musician to be able to translate that, be part of something and watch the scenery around you.

I had always wanted to expand to beauty, but I knew I wanted to be able to translate my design aesthetic in an authentic way.

Basically I'm a female human being with brown hair, enjoy precision, reading the news, eating delicious food with my delicious friends and laughing at ridiculous things that don't translate while you are desperately trying to make them.