Quotes About Translation

Efes Damim (No Blood), was originally published in Wilna in 1837 and included text in Hebrew, Latin, Russian, and Polish. The book was subsequently translated into German, French, and English. But on the other side of the debate, the scribblings of August Rohling, a fraudulent professor of Catholic theology who had taught in Milwaukee, Münster, and Prague, were also translated.

All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

easy'. Yet sometimes an easy word is translated into a bafflingly polysyllabic alternative. 'Rust', we are assured, is 'the red desquamation of old iron' or 'the tarnished or corroded surface of any metal', while a 'scale' is 'any thing exfoliated or desquamated'. Confusingly, when we turn to the entry for 'desquamation', we are told that it is 'the act of scaling foul bones'.

example, we can hear a note of doubt in his report that the word 'porcelain' is 'said to be derived from pour cent années; because it was believed by Europeans, that the materials of porcelain was matured under ground one hundred years'. In fact it comes from the Italian word porcellana, meaning 'cowrie shell'—a diminutive derived from the Latin porcus ('pig'), as the cowrie has commonly

She is written in a foreign tongue.

Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.

The difficulty in making sense of even simple speech is well appreciated by computer scientists who struggle to create machines that can respond to natural language. Their frustration is illustrated by a possibly apocryphal story of the early computer that was given the task of translating the homily "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." into Russian and then back to English. According to the story, it came out: "The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.

Translation is the other side of a tapestry.

In a sense Muhammad was less the messenger than the translator, struggling to give human form -- words -- to the ineffable.

Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem.

For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.

You might call me a tech intermediary. I know how to talk to the people in Silicon Valley and then take that information and explain it to everyone else.

Before the coast guard sent the FBI a decrypt, the coast guard clerks typed "SIS Dupe" at the bottom of the sheet, beneath the line that said "CG Translation" and "CG Decryption." These once-secret files, located in the National Archives and finally declassified in 2000, prove that the coast guard, not the FBI, solved these Nazi radio circuits.

Gregors', 'Greggs' or 'The Maccy-Gs' are all rabbit slang for law enforcement agents, named after Mr McGregor, the villain in the Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit books. In the dubbed-into-Rabbity version of Star Wars, Darth Vader is literally translated as 'Mr McGregor'.

And as he feels himself falling asleep he has an insight he believes is important, which he hopes he will remember in the morning, although it is one of those thoughts that seldom survive translation to the language of daylight hours

Art according to art! Love according to love! This is taking the salt away from Heaven. Do you think Our Savior tries to make Himself talked about? He does not ask to be recopied. God cannot be deified without ridicule. He likes to be lived. Dead languages are dead. One must translate Him into all the living languages, and help Him to hide Himself to do good just as the Devil hides himself to do evil.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.

The woman tried to teach Winnet her language, and Winnet learned the words but not the language.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.

Translations increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties.

I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.

On the day of the show, I sit down with someone that speaks very good English and someone who speaks the local language very well and work out what I'm going to say.

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.