Quotes About Translation

Translated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding style or figure or theme, obviously they're hard to digest.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else

Making a martial arts film in English to me is the same as John Wayne speaking Chinese in a western.

I heard someone say he [Carl Sandburg] was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language.

To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.

The words 'mainly in America' translated to me as 'this is bollocks' and I sat back in my chair with a sigh.

In our language," he said, "Alf means squid poop.

The Coca-Cola Company has changed the name of its soft drink in China after discovering the words mean 'bite the wax tadpole' in Chinese.

Freud, who spoke German, used the term zwangsneurose (obsessional neurosis). The word zwang was translated as 'obsession' in London, but 'compulsion' in New York. Faced with confusion, scientists introduced the hybrid term 'obsessive-compulsive', a label subsequently given to millions of people, as a compromise.

any utterance of more than trivial length has no one translation; all utterances have innumerably many acceptable translations.

It strikes me that EXIT signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES.

But, for my own part, it was Greek to me.

Say'st thou me so? is that a ton of moys? Come hither, boy: ask me this slave in French What is his name. Boy- Ecoutez: comment etes-vous appele? French Soldier- Monsieur le Fer. Boy- He says his name is Master Fer. PISTOL- Master Fer! I'll fer him, and firk him, and ferret him: discuss the same in French unto him. Boy- I do not know the French for fer, and ferret, and firk.

Ideally, poetry in translation should one day lead a reader to a reading of the poem in the original tongue. The poem in its native phonemes, we often forget, was primarily a poem, and a good one, presumably, if chosen for translation. A poem in translation should be faithful, if to anything, to this primary quality of the original—that of its being an effective poem.

I must thank the Hon. Gentleman for making me acquainted with the word "outwith," with which I had not previously had the pleasure of making acquaintance. For the benefit of English Members I may say that it is translated "outside the scope of." I thought it was a misprint at first.

Lenin was to Karl Marx what Omar was to Mahomet. He translated faith into acts. He devised the practical methods by which the Marxian theories could be applied in his own time.

Potrzeba, jedna z najbardziej natr?tnych, podczas pisania do?? pornograficznej miejscami Pornografii: przepu?ci? ?wiat przez m?odo??; przet?umaczy? na j?zyk m?odo?ci, czyli na j?zyk atrakcji... Zmi?kczy? go m?odo?ci?... Zaprawi? go m?odo?ci? - aby da? si? zgwa?ci?...

En castellano se está enamorado, pero en inglés se cae en el amor, y luego se está en él como en el centro de un capullo.

In my own pursuits I have drawn heavily from four traditional yoga texts: the Siva Samhita, the Goraksa Sataka, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, and Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines as translated by Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup.

So sorry," she bit out with the sweetness of alum, "but you're going to have to translate that one for me. I'm not fluent in brooding male grunting.

Her brown eyes were untranslatable…She was made entirely of a sweetness bordering on tears.

You cannot say— A body translates its you— you there, hey you even as it loses the location of its mouth. When you lay your body in the body entered as if skin and bone were public places, when you lay your body in the body entered as if you're the ground you walk on, you know no memory should live in these memories becoming the body of you.

Words work as release—well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture. A pulse in a neck, the shiftiness of the hands, an unconscious blink, the conversations you have with your eyes translate everything and nothing. What will be needed, what goes unfelt, unsaid—what has been duplicated, redacted here, redacted there, altered to hide or disguise—words encoding the bodies they cover. And despite everything the body remains.

I like to hope that Rumi's poems, even in translation, carry the essence of the transforming friendship of Rumi and Shams, that the sun can reappear, whole and radiant in any one of us at any moment.