Quotes About Language Translation

#1. 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

#2. To deny access to translation and interpreting services oppresses human rights and violates laws.

Nataly Kelly

#3. Mathematics to me is like a language I don't speak though I admire its literature in translation.

David Quammen

#4. 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

#5. Air power speaks a strategic language so new that translation into the hackneyed idiom of the past is impossible.

Alexander P. De Seversky

#6. The language of translation ought never to attract attention to itself.

John Hookham Frere

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. So many people consider their work a daily punishment. Whereas I love my work as a translator. Translation is a journey over a sea from one shore to the other. Sometimes I think of myself as a smuggler: I cross the frontier of language with my booty of words, ideas, images, and metaphors.

Amara Lakhous

#10. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

Alan W. Watts

#11. Translation software is not making translators obsolete. Has medical diagnostic software made doctors obsolete?

Nataly Kelly

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. All translation is a compromise - the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic.

Benjamin Jowett

#15. Many people just think they understand English, remember.

Emma Wagner

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

Leonard Cohen

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. Toska." He leaned forward, too. "It's a Russian word. It has no translation into any other language, but the closest I've heard is the ache. A longing. The sense that something is missing, and even if you're not sure what it is, you ache for it. Down to your bones.

Maggie Hall

#20. The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own.

Ned Rorem

#21. Every man who knows anything of languages, knows that it is impossible to translate from one language into another, not only without losing a great part of the original, but frequently of mistaking the sense.

Thomas Paine

#22. Poetry is a second translation of the soul's feeling; it must be rendered into thought, and thought must change its nebulous robe of semi-wording into definite language, before it reaches another heart. Music is a first translation of feeling, needing no second, but entering the heart direct.

Frances Ridley Havergal

#23. God's first language is Silence. Everything else is a translation.

Thomas Keating

#24. Overly literal translations, far from being faithful, actually distort meaning by obscuring sense.

Ken Liu

#25. All language is but a poor translation.

Franz Kafka

#26. True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.

Walter Benjamin

#27. Wind does not need translation. It speaks the language of men, of animals and birds, of rocks and trees and earth and sky and water. It does not eat or sleep, or take shelter from the weather. It is the weather.
And it lives.

Jessica Day George

#28. I have always maintained that translation is essentially the closest reading one can possibly give a text. The translator cannot ignore "lesser" words, but must consider every jot and tittle.

Gregory Rabassa

#29. But is good to meet fellow intellectual," he continued. "I celebrate occasion with small drink. Unfortunate, I am impossibility to move."
"Why?"
"Because I find myself in sitting position.

Tom Rachman

#30. Wise Bear said something in his own language, mouth twisting in disgust as if the words stained his tongue. He caught Vaelin's enquiring gaze and provided a terse translation, "Cat People.

Anthony Ryan

#31. Not everyone who knows how to write can be a writer. Not everyone who knows two languages can be a translator.

Nataly Kelly

#32. Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable.

David Mitchell

#33. Body language has no translation.

Ljupka Cvetanova

#34. The original language of Christianity is translation.

Lamin Sanneh

#35. Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

Marilyn Hacker

#36. Stillness is the language God speaks, and everything else is a bad translation.

Eckhart Tolle

#37. Childhood is played out in a foreign language and our memory of it is a Constance Garnett translation.

Rabih Alameddine

#38. I'm not a collector. I don't keep letters, or books, or souvenirs. But I do keep one copy of each translation of my books into a foreign language. Have you ever seen a murder story printed in Singhalese? Wow!

Rex Stout

#39. Translation from one language to another is like viewing a piece of tapestry on the wrong side where though the figures are distinguishable yet there are so many ends and threads that the beauty and exactness of the work is obscured.

Miguel De Cervantes

#40. 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

#41. Alexander von Humboldt's wide-ranging Views of Nature is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century natural history, at once science and art. Mark W. Person's stunning new translation makes the wonders of this classic accessible to the English-language world of the present.

Daniel Walker Howe

#42. Translation was never possible. Instead there was always only conquest, the influx of the language of hard nouns, the language of metal, the language of either/or, the one language that has eaten all the others.

Margaret Atwood

#43. The first rule of translation: make sure you know at least one of the bloody languages!

Faiz Ahmad Faiz

#44. It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.

Virginia Woolf

#45. 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

#46. I've been working a lot with identity and roots, being part of your roots. I went into this topic where I was trying to break the stereotype of Arabic language. The non-translation work, this is where I make the switch, where you don't need to translate.

EL Seed

#47. It's quite clear : an outsider can, on principle, only value foreign literature that translates well; the truly great artists of language and the fecund experimenters are inaccessible to him; are usually unknown to him in fact !

Arno Schmidt

#48. A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text.

Jonathan Galassi

#49. It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#50. A translation can never equal the original; it can approach it, and its quality can only be judged as to accuracy by how close it gets.

Gregory Rabassa

#51. 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

Jay McInerney

#52. A song is like a smile. If you meet people from another country, even if you don't speak the same language, you know what a smile means. A song works the same way. Music produces feelings that need no translation.

Clay Aiken

#53. I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much.

Haruki Murakami

#54. I read the Bible to myself; I'll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

Maya Angelou

#55. We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation.

Ernst Haas

#56. Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

Walter Benjamin

#57. Physical experience is the translation of phenomena into symbolic language, and the law is the creation of the wind or a symbol.

Fulton J. Sheen

#58. Silence is the language of faith. Action--be it church or charity, politics or poetry--is the translation.

Christian Wiman

#59. As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue.

Nataly Kelly

#60. A painting was a translation of the language of my heart.

Amy Tan

#61. Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

George Steiner

#62. I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation.

Christian Wiman

#63. Silence is God's first language; everything else is a poor translation.

Thomas Keating

#64. Translation is the art of failure.

Umberto Eco

#65. Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.

Andres Neuman

#66. It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.

Walter Benjamin

#67. In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops.

Nataly Kelly

#68. When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.

Etgar Keret

#69. Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.

Vernor Vinge

#70. Each language has its own take on the world. That's why a translation can never be absolutely exact, and therefore, when you enter another language and speak with its speakers, you become a slightly different person; you learn a different sort of world.

Kate Grenville

#71. Photography speaks a universal language that does not need translation, and with an immediacy that the written word lacks. It freezes a moment in time, leaving an indelible image.

Bianca Jagger

#72. A translator, caught in the space between two tongues. Such people tend to come a little bit unglued from the task of trying to convey meaning from one code to the other. The transfer is never safe, the meaning changes in the channel - becomes tinted, adulterated, absurd, stronger.

Elena Mauli Shapiro

#73. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one's own style and creatively adjust this to one's author.

Paul Goodman

#74. Poetry translation is like playing a piano sonata on a trombone.

Nataly Kelly

#75. Body language translation: hell yes, dipshit

Shay Rucker

#76. In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase 'hope and change,' to wit: 'big, fat government.'

P. J. O'Rourke

#77. A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#78. 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

#79. Translation presents not merely a paradigm but the utmost case of engaged literary interpretation

John Felstiner

#80. Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.

Milan Kundera

#81. Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal

John Berger

#82. Of the 193 recognized countries in the world, only politically isolated North Korea is considered monolingual.

Nataly Kelly

#83. There are only about 30,000 really important books in the world. I suppose about 5,000 of them were written in the English language, and 5,000 more have been translated. - Roger Mifflin

Christopher Morley

#84. Silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.

Rumi