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Quotes About Translation

To him, English was still a mudslide of runny, slushy sounds that did not exist in his mother tongue—r, th, sh, and some particularly gelatinous vowels. Frawder thur prueless rare shur per thurst. Mirtler freckling thow. Gold freys yawder far cration. Crewl fry rackler friend thur. No shemling keal rearand for fear under shall an frick. Folger rich shermane furl hearst when pearsh thurlow larshes your morse claws. Clushes ream glown roven thurm shalter shirt.
~ Unknown
Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.
~ Hilaire Belloc
He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything they need to know.
~ Hilary Mantel
God knows our hearts. There is no need for an idle formula or an intermediary. No need for language either: God is beyond translation.
~ Hilary Mantel
I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person.
~ Hilary Mantel
In his spare moments he is studying to improve his Greek. Old Bishop Fisher was in his seventies when he began the language, and he is not to be bested by a dead prelate. In a year or two, he wishes to be able to join the divines in their subtle dissection of each point of translation
~ Hilary Mantel
Everything's better when you say it in Latin.
~ Holly Black
Conversations in foreign languages don't linger in my head like they do in English. They don't last.
~ Lily King
Je me souviendrai qu'elle m'a écrit par sms, vers la fin : J'ai travaillé. J'ai traduit ce qui meurt en ce qui dure. (Préface de Mathieu Terence, p. 8)
~ Unknown
From this process has emerged a parallel process of translating traditional working and living values into a new political and economic power - a power increasingly based upon the strength of money and those material things money can purchase.
~ Alex Campbell
The actor is there to translate what's on the page onto the stage or the screen. So I find it important that an actor manages to actually get out of the way, vanish as a person behind the character, never to be seen or talked about again. That's my philosophy.
~ Christoph Waltz
My books have been translated into various languages and sold in other countries, but I never have any contact with the foreign publishers and am so disconnected from that process that it seems almost imaginary. With 'How to Save a Life', I worked closely with Usborne editors and have been involved in the publicity.
~ Sara Zarr
You cannot be a conscious Christian without St. Paul. He translated the teachings of Christ into a doctrinal structure that, even with the additions of a vast number of thinkers, theologians and pastors, has resisted and still exists after two thousand years.
~ Pope Francis
The job of the screenplay is to identify and extract the essence of the story from the novel and reconfigure it for the screen, maintaining its essence in a different vehicle.
~ Barry Eisler
The guitar for me is a translation device. It's not a goal. And in some ways, jazz isn't a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination - a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.
~ Pat Metheny
There is a new venue for theory, necessarily impure, where it emerges in and as the very event of cultural translation. This is not the displacement of theory by historicism, nor a simple historicization of theory that exposes the contingent limits of its more generalizable claims.
~ Judith Butler
Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.
~ Michael Haneke
'The Sound of Things Falling' may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vasquez's prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean's idiomatic English version. All the novel's characters are well imagined, original and rounded.
~ Edmund White
The Japanese version comes with a translation, but that's different from the lyrics, so people could look things up and find a translation of their own if they're interested.
~ Utada Hikaru
For the version of this CD released in Japan, a translation of the English lyrics is included, but there are lots of places where meanings are lost in the process of translation.
~ Utada Hikaru
For some quixotic reason, Deborah had studied French in high school, and for a few seconds she apparently thought it was going to help her understand the man. She watched him as he raced through several paragraphs, and then finally shook her head. "Je nais comprend—Goddamn it, I can't remember how to say it. Dexter, get somebody up here to translate." The
~ Jeff Lindsay
word in block capitals, and when he wasn't certain of the spelling he put down the possible alternative letters below; he wanted to be sure of any translation the first time. "My, you do work late," whispered a voice from behind him. Adam spun round, feeling like a burglar who had been
~ Jeffrey Archer
Én vagyok a pont egy összetett mondat végén, amely mondat hosszú-hosszú évekkel ezelÅ'tt, egy másik nyelven kezdÅ'dött, és amelyet az elejétÅ'l kell olvasni, hogy érteni lehessen a végét – azt, amikor megérkeztem én.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
It was the English word she used. It was in English that the past was unilateral; in Bengali, the word for yesterday, kal, was also the word for tomorrow. In Bengali one needed an adjective, or relied on the tense of a verb, to distinguish what had already happened from what would be.
~ Jhumpa Lahiri