Quotes About Translation

In English, there is one word for sister. In Chinese, there are two separate words, for elder and younger sister. This is actually a translation problem because if you see the word sister, you don't know how to translate it to Chinese because you don't know if it's an elder sister or younger.

It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening.

Words began to appear in English and to make some kind of equivalent. For what satisfaction it is hard to say, except that something seems unusually piercing, living, handsome, in another language, and since English is yours, you wish it to be there too.

True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.

The truth is, I have an excellent team, a staff that handles Blue Elephant, my translation company, perfectly. It is like a well-oiled machine.

My design has always been a derivative of people I meet. I want to translate who they are and their personality into a room.

If someone said, I want to translate your novel into Igbo, I would say, Go ahead. But when I write in the Igbo language, I write my own dialect. I write some poetry in that dialect.

Everyone wants to be open and inclusive, but nobody wants to pay for it. It's the biggest roadblock to translating living writers, especially poets.

Dear friends, whenever you want to understand a text of Scripture, try to read the original

Yet somehow, if the translation from reality into symbols is done artfully enough, the logic of calculus can use one real-world truth to generate another. Truth in, truth out.

Love . . . requires that you learn to read the lover in her own language, not translate her into yours.

You ask me what it feels like to have wings. I can only tell you the feeling with words. And words have neither feelings nor wings. Words are leaky vessels into which a cargo of meaning and emotion are placed, and when they leave you and reach the farther shore of another mind a considerable portion of that cargo has been lost at sea. Fallen overboard, gone to rot, consumed by vermin, decayed to a state unlike its original form.

There was a message to be translated, symbolism to be aligned and understood.

For even now, decades after I first adopted it, English does not pierce my heart the same way that my mother tongue does. The word division weighs less than bundan, and war is easier to say than junjeng.

entailing difficult technical philosophical terms are so different from those of European thought, that they can hardly ever be accurately translated.

Dâra Shiko the eldest son of the Emperor Shah Jahan heard of the Upani@sads during his stay in Kashmir in 1640. He invited several Pandits from Benares to Delhi, who undertook the work of translating them into Persian.

For Mandarin scripts, there's software now where you can just insert the Chinese script, and it comes out all in pinyin.

At Sussex University, I developed a system called WinLocX to help with the process of translating software into foreign languages.

I write the story that nobody reads. Someday, I'm going to write it in German to see if anyone notices.

Faccio dire agli altri quello che non posso dire altrettanto bene, sia per insufficienza del mio linguaggio sia per insufficienza del mio sentimento.

Out ahead of them, Arkady began something very like a marching song, chanting lines answered by the other ferals, their voices ringing out across the sky, each to each. Temeraire added his own to the chorus, and little Iskierka began to scrabble at his neck, demanding, What are they saying? What does it mean? We are flying home, Temeraire said, translating. We are all flying home.

Temeraire:) Can one hire a translator to say things properly? Yes; they are called lawyers, Tharkay said, and laughed softly to himself.

He says to land," Tharkay translated, with improbable brevity; at Laurence's frowning look he added, "and he calls us a great many impolite names; do you wish them all translated?

including one gentleman who had been introduced as a poet, although Laurence could not believe this had been an accurate translation: more likely the man was a clerk of some sort.