Quotes About Translation

The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.

Poems of Akhmatova, selected and translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward, gives

Some translators turn an author's words from gold to stone, others from stone to gold.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

A poet can translate birdsong much more faithfully than the biologist ever could.

It were vain for me to endeavor to interrupt the Silence. She cannot be done into English. For six thousand years men have translated her with what fidelity belonged to each, and still she is little better than a sealed book. A man may run on confidently for a time, thinking he has her under his thumb, and shall one day exhaust her, but he too must at last be silent...

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

Indeed, the Catholic Church insisted on maintaining Latin as the sole liturgical language until the twentieth century—even though the New Testament had originally been written in Greek.)

Scripture scholars contend that the original language of the Beatitudes should not be rendered as "Blessed are the single-hearted" or "Blessed are the peacemakers" or "Blessed are those who struggle for justice." Greater precision in translation would say, "You're in the right place if...you are single-hearted or work for peace." The Beatitudes is not a spirituality, after all. It's a geography. It tells us where to stand.

Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread.

La memoria es una traductora simultánea que interpreta los recuerdos al azar o siguiendo un orden arbitrario: nadie puede manipular el recuerdo y quien crea que pueda es aquel que está más a merced del arbitrio de la memoria.

Dharma, in any case, is at the heart of the poem; it is not only untranslatable, but the Mahabharata's characters are still trying to figure it out at the epic's end.

Buchstaben zu empfinden, sie nicht nur mit den Augen in Büchern zu lesen, - einen Dolmetsch in mir selbst aufzustellen, der mir übersetzt, was die Instinkte ohne Worte raunen, darin muß der Schlüssel liegen, sich mit dem eigenen Innern durch klare Sprache zu verständigen, begriff ich.

This is what writing is: I one language, I another language, and between the two, the line that makes them vibrate; writing forms a passageway between two shores.

I suppose I could still read Virgil or Sophocles with the help of a dictionary, but I do not do so, because it would give me no pleasure

Pantolon için, elden düÅŸme deÄŸil)... götten düÅŸme denmesi laz?m.

Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece? But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation And every bit of us is lost in it (Or found — I wander through the ruin of S Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness) And in that loss a self-effacing tree, Color of context, imperceptibly Rustling with its angel, turns the waste To shade and fiber, milk and memory.

Cinco hundred dollars. No habla español

Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir. They'd sent for a translator, but nobody had shown up yet.

Uh, that wasn't French, Rhonda.

The big problem in translating is that we had to translate the language. People may not know that we record the podcast in Japanese, translate it to English and then actors play us on the podcast. I'm not actually Scott Aukerman, I'm the actor who plays his voice on the podcast. Unfortunately, it's cost prohibitive on a television show.

The US and the European Union needs to help in the translation of the demand for democracy into a political will.

Scientists in different disciplines don't speak the same language. They publish in different journals. It's like the United Nations: You come together, but no one speaks the same language, so you need some translators.

I'm interested in the murky areas where there are no clear answers - or sometimes multiple answers. It's here that I try to imagine patterns or codes to make sense of the unknowns that keep us up at night. I'm also interested in the invisible space between people in communication; the space guided by translation and misinterpretation.