Quotes About Translation

I try to sort of make myself emotional in the moment when I'm writing, and that always translates better. When I'm writing, I can't do abstract.

The issue of doing an adaptation of a book is the theater of the mind, and so you always face that.

I can speak passable Mandarin. I will not be translating at the U.N. anytime soon.

The hemlock tree is named spruce-pine, while spruce is he-balsam, balsam itself is she-balsam, laurel is ivy, and rhododendron is laurel.

It is natural for a translator to be prejudiced in favour of his adopted work. More impartial readers may not be so much struck with the beauties of this piece as I was. Yet I am not blind to my author's defects.

IBN FADL?N Ibn Fadl?n and the Land of Darkness Arab Travellers in the Far North Translated with an Introduction by PAUL LUNDE and CAROLINE STONE

En los países en donde no hay caballos, a los burros se les llama caballos.

There is a translation of a Persian book into English, not from Persian, but from a French translation of an Urdu rendering of a classical Persian abridgment of an Arabic original.

She'd been in America almost three years now, but she still wasn't used to it, the same language sure, but they had different words for everything; she'd learned that a scone was a biscuit, that sidewalk meant a pavement, and that autumn was fall.

At last either Betsie or I would open the Bible. Because only the Hollanders could understand the Dutch text, we would translate aloud in German. And then we would hear the life-giving words passed back along the aisles in French, Polish, Russian, Czech, back into Dutch. They were little previews of heaven, these evenings beneath the lightbulb.

At last either Betsie or I would open the Bible. Because only the Hollanders could understand the Dutch text, we would translate aloud in German. And then we would hear the life-giving words passed back along the aisles in French, Polish, Russian, Czech, back into Dutch.

The Bible has been through at least half a dozen translations by the time you read it. Plus, when the word of God is infected by the hand of man, that is, written down, it is tainted.

It was stupid, she now understood, to think that privilege translated to protection. To mistake privilege for grace.

The existence of another, competing translation is a good thing, in general, and only immediately discouraging to one person - the translator who, after one, two, or three years of more or less careful work, sees another, and perhaps superior, version appear as if overnight.

I don't think most books can be justifiably translated on screen. The film versions can't convey the right emotion, fuel your imagination or allow you to visualise every line the way books do.

One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.

Even though I believe a superlative translation can achieve timelessness, that doesn't mean I think other translators shouldn't attempt other versions. The more the better, in the end.

It has since been agreed that speeches given in English will be translated into French and vice versa, and even into German and Italian when necessary. No doubt translations into Esperanto will also soon be in demand.

Some things that work in a comic don't work in a film, and vice versa.

I translated an Emile Zola book, 'The Belly of Paris,' because I didn't find an existing translation that captured his sense of humor. Humor is the first victim of translation.

The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated.

I would have thought even you could understand such a simple sentence, Father. Shall I repeat it in Latin for you?

Then there are the tables in Liber Loagaeth, at the end of which (Sloane MS. 3189) Dee has appended eight tables from "Aldaraia Sive Soyga," the mathematical methods of which have been demonstrated by Jim Reeds. They appear even on the surface to be cryptographic tables, though no one to date has made a systematic study of their content, nor provided any translation or decryption or methodology. They remain the most hermetically sealed of all Dee and Kelley's documents.

Stifle it,' Longmore told the boy. He needed a clear head to find his way through Sophy's rabbit warren of a mind. He couldn't do that and translate the boy's deranged version of English at the same time.