Top 100 In Translation Quotes
#2. Government exists to create and preserve conditions in which people can translate their ideas into practical reality. In the best of times, much is lost in translation. But we try.
Gerald R. Ford
#3. Mathematics to me is like a language I don't speak though I admire its literature in translation.
David Quammen
#4. I feel French is very close to Urdu. Both languages are beautiful. Sadly, their beauty is lost in translation.
Amisha Patel
#5. He who reads the Bible in translation is like a man who kisses his bride through a veil.
Hayim Nahman Bialik
#6. I've personally reached the point where the sound of MP3s are so uncompelling, because so much is lost in translation.
Beck
#7. Chinese readers are buying books in translation, particularly non-fiction about China, in large numbers.
Evan Osnos
#9. Let twelve angels come into being to rule over chaos and the underworld. And look, from the cloud there appeared an angel whose face flashed with fire and whose appearance was defiled with blood. His name was Nebro, which means in translation 'rebel'; others call him Yaldabaoth.
Rodolphe Kasser
#10. I need to explain all this to Adam in private. I can't get McGillicuddy to explain it to him. Something will be lost in translation."
"Well, excuse me that I can't look at him all googly-eyed," my brother said.
"And he's liable to punch you," I said.
Jennifer Echols
#11. '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
#12. I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
Robert Morgan
#13. I wanted to know if the 'Iliad' in the original was as relevant and contemporary as it was in translation. I then started Latin. I had finally found something I enjoyed and was good at: dead languages!
Caroline Lawrence
#14. Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
Jonathan Lethem
#15. I feel sometimes that I'm in a constant state of being lost in translation, and I guess that why I write songs.
Laura Marling
#16. You look like a Greek God sent down by the immortal Zeus from Mount Olympus to taunt the rest of us inferior beings with your astonishing beauty, I said, which somehow in translation came out as "you look fine, why?
John Boyne
#17. Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Anne Michaels
#18. Visit any bookshop in Europe, and the shelves are filled with English novels and non-fiction books in translation - while British bookshops stock mainly English and American works.
Kate Williams
#19. Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.
Robert Frost
#20. Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
Paul Valery
#21. I find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It's only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understand and relate to. He's a very international writer.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#22. I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.
Robert Frost
#23. In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.
Fanny Howe
#24. In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing. You have to attempt what they did in that language - say, in Arabic - and try to accomplish a version of that in English, and you're constantly serving two masters.
Elliott Colla
#25. I'm not a statistician, but it doesn't take a genious to work out that 100 million children being denied an education is ridiculous. There is nothing lost in translation here, it's obvious that's wrong.
Scarlett Johansson
#27. If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one's own writings in translation.
Vladimir Nabokov
#29. "Lost in Translation" by Sofia Coppola. It's a masterpiece. I laughed a lot but was also overwhelmed by the story - a rare combination.
Emmanuelle Bercot
#30. It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.
Virginia Woolf
#32. Those were the good old days when educated Americans read foreign literature in translation, even works written in non-Western languages.
Minae Mizumura
#33. Scarlett Johansson was wonderful in 'Lost in Translation,' and then, seemingly within a couple of weeks, she became completely Hollywoodised. I was shocked. I didn't recognise her. I hope to God it's just a phase.
Ian Holm
#34. Essential truths gained by loss in translation. The essence of beauty not perfection, but the doomed aspiration.
Brian McGreevy
#35. She had understood all that he had said, with no way of knowing what he meant. It was as though he himself existed here in this town in this state in translation, ambiguous, slightly wrong, too highly colored or wrongly nuanced. Within him was the original, which no one could read.
John Crowley
#36. I've realized I have to be very careful in what I say. I speak my heart out. Such honesty is not appreciated in the film industry. Instead, it is twisted and distorted. A lot of what I say is lost in translation.
Sonam Kapoor
#37. 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.
Rumi
#38. I love working with the actors eye-to-eye. I think something gets lost in translation, not only through a monitor, but when you leave the area where the actual scene is taking place.
Drew Barrymore
#39. You've often heard me say - perhaps too often - that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more.
Robert Frost
#40. Beyond the offer tables and online bestseller charts are many other narratives: books that take readers away from what they know, challenge the assumptions that underpin life elsewhere and present a strikingly different world ["How Books Get Lost In translation," Financial Times, January 15, 2015].
Ann Morgan
#41. I'm really tired of people saying what is lost in translation. Look at what you gain. You gain three universes worth of books. It's worth it to lose something in translation, if you can get a hundred more texts that are going to change your life.
Arshia Sattar
#42. When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.
Etgar Keret
#43. The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.
Salman Rushdie
#45. Some say; "Poetry is what gets lost in translation!"
In this sense, my life is a bitter poem. But that is the force of nature.
I already changed it to my alternative order: "Poetry must find ways of breaking distance.
Fereidoon Yazdi
#46. A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#47. The subtle differences in language and humor that get lost in translation, for example, make it almost impossible for big companies to do something that will appeal at home and abroad.
Larry Gelbart
#48. I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in translation.
Pharrell Williams
#49. I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation.
Etgar Keret
#50. Scarlett Johansson has a smile she tries to suppress in every movie she makes. She's been trying to keep a straight face since she appeared with Bill Murray 11 years ago in her breakthrough, 'Lost in Translation.'
Steve Erickson
#51. Something may have been lost in translation, but it certainly wasn't love
Erich Segal
#52. [T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of.
Paul Auster
#53. Boys," Lindsay agreed, nodding. "What doesn't get lost in translation?"
"Things with the letter X in front of them," Rachel posited. "Like X-Box. And X-rated movies.
Nenia Campbell
#54. 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
#55. Translation is a two-edged instrument: it has the special purpose of demonstrating the learner's knowledge of the foreign language, either as a form of control or to exercise his intelligence in order to develop his competence.
Peter Newmark
#56. I would love mainland Chinese to read my book. There is a Chinese translation which I worked on myself, published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many copies have gone into China but it is still banned.
Jung Chang
#57. I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.
Sylvia Plath
#58. I don't know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people's websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries.
Tim Berners-Lee
#59. In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person wholly out of one class into another. Perfect translation from one language into another is impossible. Class is the British language.
William Golding
#60. Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together.
Terence McKenna
#61. He's got a box with a demon in it that draws pictures," said Rincewind shortly. "Do what the madman says and he will give you gold.
Terry Pratchett
#62. the best of Cervantes is untranslatable, and this undeniable fact is in itself an incentive [for one and all] to learn Spanish.
Aubrey F.G. Bell
#63. When Lionel Giles began his translation of Sun Tzu's ART OF WAR, the work was virtually unknown in Europe. Its introduction to Europe began in 1782 when a French Jesuit Father living in China, Joseph Amiot, acquired a copy of it, and translated
Sun Tzu
#64. There is a point in every philosophy at which the "conviction" of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery: adventavit asinus, / pulcher et fortissimus. (Translation: The ass arrives, beautiful and most brave.)
Friedrich Nietzsche
#65. The King! I thought him enough of a philosopher to realize that there is no such thing as murder in politics. You know as well as I do, my dear boy, that in politics there are no people, only ideas; no feelings, only interests. In politics, you don't kill a man, you remove an obstacle, that's all.
Alexandre Dumas
#66. FALCKNER, DANIEL. Curieuse Nachricht from Pennsylvania. Translation by Julius F. Sachse. Lancaster, Pa.: 1905. Series of 103 questions and answers, on all aspects of Pennsylvania Conditions. Written at close of the seventeenth century. Several editions printed in Germany.
Anonymous
#67. Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle.
Gilbert Murray
#68. The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.
Woodrow Wilson
#69. Though her grasp of English was modest and his Italian non-existent, their rapport was at once intuitive and intimate, founded more on physical attraction and a shared love of the outdoors than meaningful conversation.
Robert Radcliffe
#71. Daemon spoke in his language. The lyrical quality of his words made no sense to me.
"What did you say?" I asked.
"There's really no translation for it," he said, "but the closest human words would be, you are beautiful to me.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#72. I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original.
William Cowper
#73. Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.
Paul Gauguin
#74. Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.
Marilyn Hacker
#75. Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our world. If schools of journalism knew their business, they would graduate no one who could not render the Greek poets.
Richard M. Weaver
#76. Recently SCHISMATRIX became my first novel to come out in Finland. Perhaps there's a quality in a good translation that can't be captured with the original.
Bruce Sterling
#77. THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY is ostensibly an autobiography but in truth it is much more than that. In this remarkably fine new translation, Anthea Bell perfectly captures Stefan Zweig's glorious evocation of a lost world, Vienna's golden age, in which he grew up and flourished.
Ronald Harwood
#78. I love these words that just can't be translated from language to language. They seem dignified, grounded, battling against the imperialism of reality.
Olivier Magny
#79. What I called jottings would not be a rendering of the text, not so to speak a translation with another symbolism. The text would not be stored up in the jottings. And why should it be stored up in our nervous system?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#80. They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.
Marcel Proust
#81. A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors' reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting - these are all part of the translation.
David Nicholls
#82. (Claude and Marcel LeFever were speaking in French. This simultaneous English translation is being beamed to the reader via literary satellite.)
Tom Robbins
#83. Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
Leonard Cohen
#84. When you grow up in the church, the only translation in that insular world that people understand is preaching. You're supposed to be a minister. So I was going down that path, and then I saw the Tonys.
Billy Porter
#85. When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I'd memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium.
Ben Lerner
#86. Dreaming and hoping won't produce a piece of work; only writing, rewriting and rewriting (if necessary)- a devoted translation of thoughts and dreams into words on paper will result in a story.
Roberta Gellis
#87. As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
William H Gass
#88. Faction is the greatest evil and the most common danger. "Faction" is the conventional English translation of the Greek stasis, one of the most remarkable words to be found in any language.
Moses Finley
#89. [There is less precision in the Chinese than I have thought it well to introduce into my translation, and the commentaries on the passage are by no means explicit. But, having regard to the context, we can hardly doubt that Sun Tzu is holding up I Chih and Lu Ya as illustrious
Sun Tzu
#90. What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.
Jonathan Miller
#91. In Washington, the translation of E Pluribus Unum has been lost. The belief that we are one nation - united in purpose - caring about and for one another is no longer the practice.
Madeleine M. Kunin
#92. Only in thoughtful dialogue with what it says can this fragment of thinking be translated. However, thinking is poetizing, and indeed
more than one kind of poetizing, more than poetry and song.
Martin Heidegger
#93. Johann Nikolaus Forkel, author of the monograph of which the following pages afford a translation, was born at Meeder, a small village in Saxe-Coburg, on February 22, 1749, seventeen months before the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose first biographer he became.
Johann Nikolaus Forkel
#94. There is the intent of the writer and the interpretation by the artist. What the writer intended and what the artist interprets is not a 1-to-1 translation. It's a crossing of ideas that generates the stories that you see in print.
Jim Lee
#95. In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature.
Abdourahman A. Waberi
#96. The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition ... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room ... The whole point of dancing is the dance.
Alan Watts
#97. The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own.
Ned Rorem
#98. 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.
Lydia Davis
#99. 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.
Lydia Davis
#100. Translation is a disturbing craft because there is precious little certainty about what we are doing, which makes it so difficult in this age of fervent belief and ideology, this age or greed and screed.
Gregory Rabassa
