Quotes About Translation

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.

The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!

I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.

Now, every organization has to have a translator for the Hispanics on the teams, and that helps a lot.

And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.

My mom is a translator for the school district in Delaware. She'd hear these different stories from working with families there. Those stories stuck with me.

When I act as a translator, I am really doing a performance for my fellow Anglophone readers in the West.

I remember what it was like when my parents couldn't help me with my homework because they couldn't speak the language, or being a translator for my parents. I did that a lot.

I never used a translator, never thought that the journalists might not understand.

If I make a speech, I need a translator. But music does not need a translation. People understand me through the sound. That I think is very important. This is just one planet, like one family.

You know it was really hard to do a set, or even to do interviews in English, because in Europe, we always had a translator with us.

If a translation doesn't have obvious writing problems, it may seem quite all right at first glance. We readers, after all, quickly adapt to the style of a translator, stop noticing it, and get caught up in the story.

The only problem was that I couldn't communicate with Dario. He speaks Italian and I don't. We had a translator the whole time. I just felt that something was lost with the go between. He was a delightful man, but I wish we could have spoken the same language.

Sometimes it can be difficult when you're talking to a journo after the game, saying, 'Yeah mate, I was on the burst.' And then the translator is trying to translate that into Japanese, and apparently there is no actual translation.

Shibani Sharma got me a job as a translator in NDTV. Then NDTV India got launched and I worked on the desk for a while.

The goal of Bible translation is be transparent to the original text - to see as clearly as possible what the biblical authors actually wrote.

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights ' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'

Apéritif: French for a set of dentures.

In every house of marriagethere's room for an interpreter.

And if I am asked today to advise a young writer who has not yet made up his mind what way to go, I would try to persuade him to devote himself first to the work of someone greater, interpreting or translating him.

when my own works disappeared from the German language I could more clearly grasp his lament at being able to produce the created word only in translation, in a diluted, altered medium.

If today I were to counsel a young writer who is still unsure of his way, I would try to persuade him first to adapt or translate a sizable work. In all sacrificing service there is more assurance for the beginner than in his own creation, and nothing that one has ever done with devotion is done in vain.

At first when you're learning a foreign language, what seems strange is that a different set of words exists for the things you know. But then, after a while, what seems strange is that so many words are the same, that two entirely different peoples, an ocean apart, would choose the exact same sounds. In the end, what causes the most trouble are the words that sound the same but mean different things: déception, nostalgie, grâce.