Quotes About Translation

If you take society's definition of knowing oneself, you will become lost in the many translations.

I have met many minds able to store and translate a pregnantly large amount of information, yet they haven't an ounce of talent for wisdom or the appreciation of passion.

Light means knowledge in the Greek language it can also be translated as illumination, knowledge, insight, understanding and wisdom

Bill Bryson's is a synthesizing intellect, capable of translating myriad data into a digestible narrative – rare currency in an increasingly atomized society.

For Cantonese - because there's no standardized pinyin system - I have to have someone read it to me, and then I rewrite the whole script in my own Cantonese pinyin.

Whatever your Bible translation is, it stands on the shoulders of one man - William Tyndale.

Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one.

Pope's couplet again may possibly best convey the pomposity of some Idylls and the point of others. And there may be divers considerations of this kind. But, speaking generally, where the translator has not to intimate stanzas — where he has on the contrary to intimate that there are none — rhyme seems at first sight an intrusion and a suggestio falsi.

Several recent writers on the subject have laid down that every translation of Greek poetry, especially bucolic poetry, must be in rhyme of some sort. But they have seldom stated, and it is hard to see, why. There is no rhyme in the original, and primâ facie should be none in the translation.

still I cannot see why, in making a version of (say) Theocritus, one should not use by way of preference those names by which he invariably called them, and which are characteristic of him: why, in turning a Greek author into English, we should begin by turning all the proper names into Latin.

Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it.

There is no Christian theology without the Bible. There is no Bible without an inspirited community to write, remember, and translate it, to guard it and pass it on, study it, live by it, and invite others to live by it.

I think writer is a word without gender, and a good writer observes, absorbs, hopefully empathizes then translates that into character and story. You don't have to do or be or have experienced, traveled to, but you have to imagine all of that, very well–and believe it completely during the bubble of the work.

Tres Cuatro y Cinco

If we are perplexed by an apparent contradiction in Scripture, it is not allowable to say, The author of this book is mistaken; but either the manuscript is faulty, or the translation is wrong, or you have not understood.

Ah, Houellebecq. I've only read him in English translations so I'm sure I'm not getting the full greatness of his work, but golly, he writes better sex scenes than anyone else alive.

Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.

La lengua inglesa, que puede expresar los pensamientos de Hamlet y la tragedia de Lear, carece de palabras para describir el escalofrío y el dolor de cabeza.

If his Russian was music, his English was murder.

If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one's own writings in translation.

The organs concerned in the production of English speech sounds are the larynx, the velum, the lips, the tongue (that punchinello in the troupe), and, last but not least, the lower jaw; mainly upon its overenergetic and somewhat ruminant motion did Pnin rely when translating in class passages in the Russian grammar or some poem by Pushkin. If his Russian was music, his English was murder.

Mr. Wilson affirms that the only characteristic Nabokov trait in my translation (aside from an innate sado-masochistic urge to torture both the reader and himself, as Mr. Wilson puts it in a clumsy attempt to stick a particularly thick and rusty pin into my effigy) is my addiction to rare and unfamiliar words. It does not occur to him that I may have rare and unfamiliar things to convey; that is his loss.

I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses

Two of them hiding behind their mother tongues as there was no way to bridge the gap.