Quotes About Translating

#1. Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

Balthus

#2. He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#3. You do know what's coming up when you're translating. I suppose the concentration, then, is on finding a formulation which is speakable and in character - and economical as well, actually.

Tom Stoppard

#4. It is my greatest wish to enable our people to live with nothing to envy at the earliest possible date, and it is my greatest pleasure to work energetically, sharing my joys and sorrows with our people, on the road of translating my wish into reality.

Kim Jong Il

#5. People are voting for Conservatives in greater numbers, but it's not translating into Conservative seats.

Allan Gregg

#6. The president's economic plan doesn't do enough to create new jobs and that has to be a national priority. While there are some signs the economy is improving, it is not translating into jobs.

Jay Rockefeller

#7. I do love translating; it is the pure pleasure of writing without the misery of inventing.

Nancy Mitford

#8. Your power is a function of velocity, that is to say, your power is a function of the rate at which you translate intention into reality. Most of us disempower ourselves by finding a way to slow, impede, or make more complex than necessary the process of translating intention into reality.

Werner Erhard

#9. People will come up to me at shows and tell me that a song touched them in a completely different way than I wrote it. That's fun. Fans translating it in their own way.

Tori Kelly

#10. I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

Paul Auster

#11. I am not a therapy person, but I understand what therapy does. It's a way of translating dark thoughts into something manageable.

Elizabeth McCracken

#12. By translating their inner turmoil or understanding into art, artists challenge the accepted notions of reality and create new ones.

Wes Nisker

#13. For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of the death of the believer; not a matter of translating the world but of transforming the world; not a matter of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death. The self is not made content; the self is made toast.

Ken Wilber

#14. I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person.

Hilary Mantel

#15. I must try to be charitable, Caroline thought: probably she doesn't mean to sound as if she is continually translating from Latin.

Jude Morgan

#16. You'd never be able to convince someone to give you money to do a bilingual story where you're not translating half of it - you'd drive people crazy. But in comics, you can do whatever your heart desires.

Brian K. Vaughan

#17. Fridrik sat many a night by a smoking lamp, translating into Danish descriptions of the latest methods of keeping us poor humans alive, while on pallets around him lay the corpses, beyond any aid, despite the encouraging news of advances in electrical cures.

Sjon

#18. What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion.

H.L. Mencken

#19. 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

#20. Not to say that corporations are perfect today, but even grand corporations like Dupont have made immense progress in translating some of their past environmentally damaging practices into new profit opportunities.

Maurice Strong

#21. There are dozens of ways of failing to make money. It is one thing to fail to make money because your single talent happens to be a flair amounting to genius for translating the plays of Aristophanes. It is quite another thing to fail to make money because you are black, or a child, or a woman.

Margaret Halsey

#22. I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

Iris Murdoch

#23. There are some days when no matter what I say it feels like I'm far away in another country & whoever is doing the translating has had far too much to drink.

Brian Andreas

#24. It's not about the pace, it's about the direction we've set. The pace is of course a function of many factors, including the magnitude of the supply shock. But what's probably more important is the probability of the supply shock translating into sustainable embedded inflation.

Marek Belka

#25. No higher duty, or more solemn responsibility, rests upon this Court than that of translating into living law and maintaining this constitutional shield deliberately planned and inscribed for the benefit of every human being subject to our Constitution-of whatever race, creed or persuasion.

Hugo Black

#26. Translating is a respectable, valuable, creative and worthwhile use of a human brain.

David Bellos

#27. Description begins with visualization of what it is you want the reader to experience. It ends with you translating what you see in your mind into words on the page.

Stephen King

#28. V'lane: Are you busy tomorrow MacKayla ?
Barrons: She's working on old texts with me.
V'lane: Ah. Old texts. A banner day at the bookstore.
Barrons: We're translating Kama Sutra ... with interactive aids.

Karen Marie Moning

#29. I haven't done any translating for decades now. It's something I did when I was young.

Paul Auster

#30. I need to be alone. After a full day of talking, smiling, listening, showing, nodding, translating, I want to be alone. I want simply to come home, close the door, and sit in silence, gathering up the bits of myself that have come loose. I want to think, or not think. I want to rest.

Jamie Zeppa

#31. There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

Robert Fitzgerald

#32. I think that there is a sort of spiritual power that is translating into our bodies as we perform. Performers give, and giving is so important. It can heal. That is my experience, anyway.

Yoko Ono

#33. ...only the dreamers of a dream are capable of translating their dreams into worthy practical endeavors that are devoid of haunting errors. After all, they are the ones who carefully observed the link between their dreams and reality; they are the ones who worked consciously to blend them into one.

Janvier Chouteu-Chando

#34. But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

John Fowles

#35. It's translating for you. It's a Babel fish. Look it up in the book if you like.

Douglas Adams

#36. I realized I liked being in the studio and working on translating the ideas into recordings.

Ariel Rechtshaid

#37. I mainly wanted non-english writing poets, because I loved the idea that I was translating translations.

Simone Muench

#38. The greatest pleasure in translating is precisely this feeling of spiritual closeness and spiritual merging with the translated author. Moreover this spiritual relation is different with every writer.

Ventseslav Konstantinov

#39. In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.

Harold Bloom

#40. If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire.

Marshall McLuhan

#41. I almost never do drawings, because I have found over the years that doing something in one medium and translating into another doesn't work. I like to conceive a painting in real scale and in color.

Nelson Shanks

#42. One of the attractions of translating 'Heroes' is that it's not the kind of play that I write. If it had been, I probably wouldn't have wanted to translate it. There are no one-liners. It's much more a truthful comedy than a play of dazzling wit.

Tom Stoppard

#43. I write on a visual canvas, 'seeing' a scene in my thoughts before translating it into language, so I'm a visual junkie.

Marianne Wiggins

#44. Comics know that time plus pain equals humor and that we can redeem even awful moments from the past by translating them into a shared experience.

Gina Barreca

#45. thoughts which go out from one's mind, also imbed themselves deeply in one's subconscious mind, where they serve as a magnet, pattern, or blueprint by which the subconscious mind is influenced while translating them into their physical equivalent.

Napoleon Hill

#46. There is so much information in one Hebrew word that translators are hard pressed to decide how much information should be cut. Since the first official translation (the Septuagint), Jewish translators advocated translating Hebrew (for outsiders) at the 'story' level.
pg viii

Michael Ben Zehabe

#47. The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.

Hans Hofmann

#48. inscription, which reads in part, HINC CINERES TANTI HOMINIS RESURRECTIONEM MORTUORUM EXPECTANT RIP. Arthur heard Claire reading the dedication aloud then translating, "From the ashes of so great a man look for the resurrection of the dead. Rest in peace.

Glenn Cooper

#49. I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.

Marilyn Hacker

#50. I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.

Lydia Davis

#51. Learning to listen to your 'will' and what it loves - and then translating what you hear into a practical formula for action - is the only path to authenticity.

Garry Fitchett

#52. Danger Mouse is now working on a bunch of other records, translating his ideas about remixing into all sorts of other projects.

Damon Albarn

#53. Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.

Terry Tempest Williams

#54. I have voices in my head
I'm a slave to imaginary people
I feel what they feel
I experience what they experience
I live in their world
And I'm devoted to translating their stories
I'm not crazy, I'm a writer

Charisse Spiers

#55. Pope Francis has stressed humility and austerity - a far cry, according to many, from the predecessor's bling and Ferragamo shoes - those were pretty entertaining. And he's translating all of that into a policy agenda.

Ronan Farrow

#56. Thinking is translating 'prosaic-ideas' without accessories" since ideas (in brain) do not follow any metrical composition.

Md. Ziaul Haque

#57. Music possesses much richer means of expression and it is a more subtle medium for translating the 1000 shifting moments of the feelings of the soul.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

#58. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space ...

Mario Vargas-Llosa

#59. Translating any insights I have for strangers' lives into positive action in my own has proved a challenge. While I've learned a lot about what everyone else is thinking, I fail miserably to use such knowledge in my private relationships.

Mariella Frostrup

#60. Most animals are like the unfortunate Gregor Samsa after metamorphosis. They are Kafka-creatures, organisms with rich thoughts and emotions but no system for translating what they think into something that they can express to others.

Marc Hauser

#61. Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly.

Norman Davies

#62. The businessman turns out to have a lot of zanshin. Translating this concept into English is like translating "fuckface" into Nipponese, but it might translate into "emotional intensity" in football lingo.

Neal Stephenson

#63. The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.

Mitch Kapor

#64. I joined a organisation called Wycliffe Bible Translators that had the objective of translating the Bible into all the languages of the world, and to do that you had to study linguistics, and so that was my initial exposure to linguistics.

Daniel Everett

#65. One of the things jazz has always excelled at is translating the reality of the times through its musical prism.

Pat Metheny

#66. When people are not aiming for anything in particular or when they cannot monitor their performance, there is little basis for translating perceived efficacy into appropriate magnitudes of effort

Albert Bandura

#67. I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.

Henry Flynt

#68. Even though I'm usually not conscious of it, I think drawing has always served a sort of therapeutic purpose in my life. There's something about the process of translating the messy chaos of real life into a clean, simple drawing that's always been comforting to me.

Adrian Tomine

#69. Knowing what to do is not usually the problem; the elusive goal becomes translating intentions into action and resolutions into results.

Dan Millman

#70. I'm always in awe of people who are artists in their fields - people who understand that simply by taking ideas and translating them into reality, they've created value in the world.

Kevin Systrom

#71. You should write a book," Ron told Hermione as he cut up his potatoes, "translating mad things girls do so boys can understand them.

J.K. Rowling

#72. Cinema isn't just a good medium for translating graphic novels. It's specifically a good medium for superheroes. On a fundamental, emotional level, superheroes, whether in print or on film, serve the same function for their audience as Golden Age movie stars did for theirs: they create glamour.

Virginia Postrel

#73. Clairvoyants can see flashes of colour, constantly changing, in the aura that surrounds every person: each thought, each feeling, thus translating itself in the astral world, visible to the astral sight.

Annie Besant

#74. I have no idea why one of our most original filmmakers would want to spend two years of his life translating someone else's movie from Spanish into English. And it wasn't such a good film in Spanish, either.

Joel Siegel

#75. Luther, he ruined the bible by translating it into their own language.

Umberto Eco

#76. I've found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new things: that is things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new.

P.D. Ouspensky

#77. The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

#78. I've seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That's the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.

Ben Brantley

#79. I am despised by an army of undiscerning academic highbrows, and ridiculed by semi-educated and vengeful "China-experts" whose era of translating Chinese into Western categories has now come to an end. The public is ready for non-European vocabularies.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#80. The key decision for a statesman is whether to commit his nation or not. There is no middle course. Once a great nation commits itself, it must prevail. It will acquire no kudos for translating its inner doubts into hesitation.

Henry A. Kissinger

#81. In my own research when I'm working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I'm doing if I'm solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I'm constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind's-eye picture.

Brian Greene

#82. 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

#83. It's such a diversion to be constantly thinking of better ways I can teach people math that my hunger is for that really, for new ways of translating the beauty of it.

Danica McKellar

#84. When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

Don DeLillo

#85. Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials.

Helen Frankenthaler

#86. And if I am asked today to advise a young writer who has not yet made up his mind what way to go, I would try to persuade him to devote himself first to the work of someone greater, interpreting or translating him.

Stefan Zweig

#87. I feel clobbered by the impossibility of translating into words as much of this enormous world we live in with its subtly complex and sprawling Periodic Table of emotions. To quote Freddie Mercury, I want it all.

David Mitchell

#88. We can finally start translating the book," Cate said. "At least, I think we can."

"A rousing call, not dissimilar from the band of brothers speech in Henry V." [reply from Noah]

Nina Post

#89. Thought experiment is in any case a necessary precondition for physical experiment. Every experimenter and inventor must have the planned arrangement in his head before translating it into fact.

Ernst Mach

#90. Sounds rose from the earth. New sounds: cobwebs of exhalations, pauses of the heart, the monastic work of the worms translating flesh to soil, the slow crawl of rock. There was another kind of industry, somewhere beneath her. Another kind of machine.

Nathan Ballingrud

#91. When we translate, we always to some extent betray the text we are translating. That is why translation is so hard and thankless. All you can do is to fail in the least egregious way possible.

Jay L. Garfield

#92. Translating is writing.

Marguerite Yourcenar

#93. In the trees the night wind stirs, bringing the leaves to life, endowing them with speech; the electric lights illuminate the green branches from the under side, translating them into a new language.

E.B. White

#94. There exists a single complete copy, is written in Annaren, the principal language spoken in Annar. In translating

Alison Croggon

#95. Translating this to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets sang beautifully how roses fade and petals fall. The moment is brief they sang; the moment is over; one long night is then to be slept by all.

Virginia Woolf

#96. I was up playing violin at seven and translating that information to play guitar, piano at eight.

Ronnie Milsap

#97. I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

Paul Auster

#98. My dear God, I am impressed with how much I have to be thankful for in a material sense; and in a spiritual sense I have the opportunity of being even more fortunate. But it seems apparent to me that I am not translating this opportunity into fact.

Flannery O'Connor

#99. In the broad sense design means thinking about what the function or purpose of things or processes are, and translating that into action.

Howard Rheingold

#100. Cards on a wall is a way of practicing transparency, valuing and respecting the input of each team member. The project manager has the task of translating the cards into whatever format is expected by the rest of the organization.

Kent Beck