Top 100 Quotes About Translation
#1. Ben's ex was a Victoria's Secret supermodel. Translation: Fuck my life.
Kendall Ryan
#2. Repetition plus translation plus generalization results, with the correct calculation, in clarification. If there is such a thing as 'progress in religion', it can only manifest itself as increasing explicitness.
Peter Sloterdijk
#3. Whatever you do, trample down abuses, and love those who love you. Different translation: Whatever you do, crush the infamous thing superstition, and love those who love you.
Voltaire
#4. A painting was a translation of the language of my heart.
Amy Tan
#5. 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
#6. No translation can possibly be perfect. Every production and every performance is a different path up the mountain, and nobody ever makes it all the way to the summit.
Terry Teachout
#7. Bye, Skimmer. Thanks for breakfast."
"You're welcome." Translation: Choke on it, bitch.
Kim Harrison
#8. God Child is a free and inspirational translation of Adam. Adam means 'human', not 'man'. The Hebrew for 'man' is 'aish'. In English man can mean both man and human, which may have caused the confusion in the first place. If Adam isn't the first male Homo sapiens, who or what is he?
Stefan Emunds
#9. As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue.
Nataly Kelly
#10. Fear is a scheme that the devil uses to great effect. From my personal study, the words "do not be afraid" or "fear thee not" (depending on the Bible translation) appear over one hundred times in the Bible! The message from God is quite clear: we need not be afraid!
Pedro Okoro
#11. Liberty does not consist in mere declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action.
Woodrow Wilson
#12. 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
#13. Silence is the language of faith. Action--be it church or charity, politics or poetry--is the translation.
Christian Wiman
#14. 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
#15. Farsi Couplet:
Ba khak darat rau ast maara,
Gar surmah bechashm dar neaayad.
English Translation:
The dust of your doorstep is just the right thing to apply,
If Surmah (kohl powder) does not show its beauty in the eye!
Amir Khusrau
#16. Sestrilla, hafelina
Jue amourasestrilla
Awou jue selaviena
En patre jue
Translation:
Beloved one, little cat
I love you for all time
In this time
And all others
Christine Feehan
#18. Why don't these translation books just include general phrases that could be applied in a variety of situations like, "Say nothing unless it's in English"?
Joe Cawley
#19. Film has lost something in the translation to high tech. It's become so super-real. It's with digital this and stereo that, and everything's like a CD.
Nicolas Cage
#20. I tend to be kind of literal about translation. I think it's important to present the writer as closely as possible.
Ann Goldstein
#21. The US and the European Union needs to help in the translation of the demand for democracy into a political will.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
#22. 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
#23. There is an old Latin quotation in regard to the poet which says 'Poeta nascitur non fit' the translation of which is - the poet is born, not made.
Joseph Devlin
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation.
Ernst Haas
#27. Like translation itself, Asymptote is a fluid web reaching out to all sides, bringing texts and readers together, through the most improbable and marvelous of connections.
Jonathan Littell
#28. 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
#29. Horace, who had been trying to find out the meaning of Kurokuma for some time now, was pleased to hear the translation.
"Black bear," he repeated. "It's undoubtedly because I'm so terrible in battle."
"I'd guess so," Will put in. "I've seen you in battle and you're definitely terrible.
John Flanagan
#30. I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.
Karen Joy Fowler
#31. Christopher Lynch has made the best and the first careful translation of Machiavelli's Art of War. With useful notes, an excellent introduction, an interpretive essay, glossary, and index, it is a treasure for readers of military history and Renaissance thought as well as for lovers of Machiavelli.
Harvey Mansfield
#32. 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
#33. Translation, an archaic way of silencing, marginalizing or disowning other people's originality, must come to an end.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
#34. Essential truths gained by loss in translation. The essence of beauty not perfection, but the doomed aspiration.
Brian McGreevy
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
Walter Benjamin
#38. Farsi Couplet:
Naala-e zanjeer-e Majnun arghanoon-e aashiqanast
Zauq-e aan andaza-e gosh-e ulul-albaab neest
English Translation:
The creaking of the chain of Majnun is the orchestra of the lovers,
To appreciate its music is quite beyond the ears of the wise.
Amir Khusrau
#39. 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
#40. When you hear developers say, 'We don't have time to do it right.' Translation: 'We have plenty of time to do it wrong.
Nathaniel Palmer
#41. In my life are many windows
and many graves.
Sometimes they exchange
roles:
then a window is closed forever,
then by way of a gravestone
I can see
very far.
(Hebrew-to-English translation by Rabbi Steven Sager)
Yehuda Amichai
#42. 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
#43. The Venus Project is a translation of all religions: The end of war, the end of poverty, the brotherhood of humanity. If that isn't spiritual, like I've said before, I don't know what is.
Jacque Fresco
#44. Those were the good old days when educated Americans read foreign literature in translation, even works written in non-Western languages.
Minae Mizumura
#45. Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#46. Yes, translation is by definition an inadequate substitute for being able to read a masterpiece in the original.
Terry Teachout
#47. It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#48. Translation can never do more than the approximate,so we shall, at least, be gloriously inaccurate.
Karen Healey
#49. Lente, lente currite, noctis equi. Translation: Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night.
Ovid
#50. Often touching ... Monumental Propaganda is a novel that slashes and rips ... In his translation, Andrew Bromfield deftly shifts his tone and tools as required, remaining true to Voinovich's Vonnegut-like playfulness and appreciation of the absurb.
Ken Kalfus
#51. 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
#52. The Yorubas have a saying, here, my translation in English
a poor fool is a bigger fool rich. In other words, money only allows and enables you to be more of who you are. My bigger translation? You don't jump essence, you jump environs!
Dew Platt
#54. There's something, I think, that gets lost when we write something - something gets lost in the translation. So I speak everything out, and it's more important how it sounds. And applying that to more formal aspects of writing.
James Frey
#56. 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
#57. Farsi Couplet:
Agar firdaus bar roo-e zameen ast,
Hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast.
English Translation:
If there is a paradise on earth,
It is this, it is this, it is this
Amir Khusrau
#58. The first rule of translation: make sure you know at least one of the bloody languages!
Faiz Ahmad Faiz
#59. The translation of joy into willingness to work seems to depend to a large degree on how much meaning we can attribute to our own labor.
Dan Ariely
#60. Movement is the translation of life, and if art depicts life, movement should come into art, since we are only aware of living because it moves.
Arshile Gorky
#62. I know I've married the right person when words turn you on as much as they do me. I read deeper into that, as I should. Translation: I could only ever be with you, Rose.
Krista Ritchie
#63. Who thus translated the Chickasaw title meaning "The Man"; which translation Ikkemotubbe, himself a man of wit and imagination as well as a shrewd judge of character, including his own, carried it one step further and anglicised it to "Doom.
William Faulkner
#64. I would feel pretty embarrassed if I was doing what I do and I wasn't at least attempting the eloquent translation of the human experience in some way.
El-P
#65. Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation.
John Denham
#66. All writers, musicians, artists, choreographers/dancers, etc., work with the stuff of their experiences. It's the translation of it, the conversion of it, the shaping of it that makes for the drama.
Toni Cade Bambara
#67. If you possess a library and a garden, you have everything you need. (translation from the French) Si vous possedez une bibliotheque et un jardin, vous avez tout ce qu'il vous faut.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#68. Do not look so surprised, my dear," he said with a grin. "I might be a useless aristocrat, but I'm not a complete simpleton. I can certainly carry on a conversation about which word is the best English translation for what I wish to do to your mouth just now.
Manda Collins
#69. TRULY, "thoughts are things," and powerful things at that, when they are mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence, and a BURNING DESIRE for their translation into riches, or other material objects. A
Napoleon Hill
#70. Translation is not a matter of words only; it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
Anthony Burgess
#71. 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
#72. And if you weren't a fool, a common fool, a perfect fool, if you were an original instead of a translation ...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#73. Translation: She was perishing with nosiness.
Alan Bradley
#74. If you are forced to describe things for someone else, it sharpens your senses. And also your sense of how hard it is to make the translation from the vibrant, multi-faceted world to a sentence that distils it.
Judith Thurman
#75. of experience at the Privy Council Office who was hired to be an editor of the French translation but ended up being a primary editor of the entire report. I headed
Kevin Page
#76. Remember, brunch is only served once a week - on the weekends. Buzzword here, 'Brunch Menu'. Translation? 'Old, nasty odds and ends, and 12 dollars for two eggs with a free Bloody Mary'.
Anthony Bourdain
#79. Zona spat a stream of Spanish that overwhelmed translation, a long and liquid curse.
William Gibson
#80. Music is the voice of all sorrow, all joy. It needs no translation.
Helen Exley
#81. I'm a believer in the benefits of translation. It's a necessity and a privilege - it would be awful to be limited to reading authors who's work was composed in the languages I happen to have learned.
Daniel Alarcon
#82. Not to admire, is all the art I know To make men happy, or to keep them so. Thus Horace wrote we all know long ago; And thus Pope quotes the precept to re-teach From his translation; but had none admired, Would Pope have sung, or Horace been inspired?
Lord Byron
#83. Translation: This will help you keep your shit together. "A
R.R. Virdi
#84. Truth lives in the spaces between words. It defies translation.
Ashok K. Banker
#85. which was named after the English translation of Nihon Goraku Bussan, "Service Games" - hence SEGA Enterprises.
Blake J. Harris
#86. She understood the specific kind of appreciation that comes to a person witnessing a thing of beauty alone, how the spectacle seems to sit whole inside the soul, undiminished by conversation, by any attempt at translation or persuasion.
Elizabeth Berg
#88. The French translation of 'a black hole has no hair' is so obscene that French publishers resisted it vigorously, to no avail.
Kip S. Thorne
#89. I've started researching online journals for the project. Thanks for decoding Dr. Heller's notes before sending them to me. If you'd have forwarded them to me without a translation, I'd be searching for a tall building/overpass/water tower from which to yell goodbye cruel world.
Tammara Webber
#91. If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.
Rene Magritte
#92. I suspect that most playgoers don't understand how inexact a science literary translation is. Even the simplest of lines may lend itself to multiple renderings.
Terry Teachout
#93. Remember that writing is translation, and the opus to be translated is yourself.
E.B. White
#94. "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
#95. It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.
Virginia Woolf
#96. Mmph! Mmph. Translation: The Emperor will have your heads for this.
Chuck Wendig
#97. The joy of painting lies precisely in the challenge of memory and the challenge of translation from the lived experience to the two-dimensional or three-dimensional symbol.
Paul Kane
#98. 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
#99. I think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original.
Christian Wiman
#100. So much gets lost in the translation. Even if you sat there listening to it with a microscope, there's no way you're gonna find out what it means.
Frank Zappa
