Quotes About Translation

You do know what's coming up when you're translating. I suppose the concentration, then, is on finding a formulation which is speakable and in character - and economical as well, actually.

To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.

They fully bloomed in the pages of the Bible and the Quran, where the Sumerian word ilu became transliterated as Elohim in Hebrew and Allah in Arabic.

A prophet, claim the Shi'ah, is someone who has, by the divine will, become conscious of God's eternal message, which forever envelops creation like a numinous ether we cannot escape, while the Imam is someone who explicates that message for those who possess neither the prophetic consciousness necessary to recognize it nor the power of reason to understand it. Put another way, the prophet transmits the Message of God, while the Imam translates it for human beings.

Por eso, al final el mundo es invadido por Tlön, la realidad se disuelve y se altera. El narrador se refugia nuevamente en la lectura; en otro tipo de lectura esta vez, una lectura controlada, minuciosa, la lectura como traducción. El traductor es aquí el lector perfecto, un copista que escribe lo que lee en otra lengua, que copia, fiel, un texto, y en la minuciosidad de esa lectura olvida lo real.

Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!

They named me Kristin after some whale scientist in Australia, worked on the original translation team.

Tossing the chalk thoughtfully for a moment, I decided what to do. I wrote 'The cat sat on the mat' once in copperplate English, then translated into Latin, then French and finally, for good measure, in Italian.

Did you know that there is no exact rhyme in the Russian language for the word 'pravda'? Ponder and weigh this insufficiency in your mind. Doesn't that just echo down the canyons of your soul?

He wished for access to all the world's languages at once, for then he would have a better word for how he felt and what she was.

Having an interpreter doesn't mean you are getting the right information. Immediately it should raise the red flag.

Thus does the beginner, who has acquired a new language, keep on translating it back into his own mother tongue; only then has he grasped the spirit of the new language and is able freely to express himself therewith when he moves in it without recollections of the old, and has forgotten in its use his own hereditary tongue.

Some examples for you: 'Mi wantem' is 'I would like'. 'Mi wantem' sounds like 'Me want them', which equals 'I would like'. 'Bitwin' is 'between'. 'Bisnis' is 'business'. By now you've probably got the hang of it, so I don't have to tell you what 'Gud moning' means. If you're still struggling you're a 'dik ed'.

To claim, therefore, inerrancy for the King James Version, or even for the Revised Version, is to claim inerrancy for men who never professed it for themselves.

The Bible is God's Word given in man's language

The greatest missionary is the Bible in the mother tongue. It needs no furlough and is never considered a foreigner.

For us Indians, I don't think English can ever exude that magic of emotions which our mother tongue can.

This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.

If music could be translated into human speech, it would no longer need to exist.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it's still a melody.

There's something to be said about all music being some translation of our languaging, our way of communicating. It's a language. This is a new language.

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