Quotes About Translations

#1. A shared characteristic in each of these translations is that ea is an active state of being. Like breathing, ea cannot be achieved or possessed; it requires constant action day after day, generation after generation. Unlike

Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua

#2. Even when she was alive, Esther Kreitman's novels, short stories and translations received far less attention than the work of her famous brothers, I. J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Clive Sinclair

#3. 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.

Craig Ferguson

#4. Books are merely translations of our emotions into words that allow us to connect on an almost blood transfusion level.

Ksenia Anske

#5. Nowadays we are fond of literal translations ... That would have seemed a crime to translators in ages past ... They wanted to prove that the vernacular was as capable of a great poem as the original.

Jorge Luis Borges

#6. It is man and not the Bible that needs correcting. Greater and more careful scholarship has shown that apparent contradictions were caused by incorrect translations, rather than divine inconsistencies.

Billy Graham

#7. All translations are made up" opined Vikram, "Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something

G. Willow Wilson

#8. 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

#9. If one could read fluently, confidently, in every known language, one would have no need of translators or translations; one could read Homer on Mondays, Akhmatova on Tuesdays, Swahili poets on Wednesdays, and so on.

Abraham Verghese

#10. 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.

Tom Stoppard

#11. Good translations are one of the vital necessities of our time.

Lucas Leiva

#12. The best translations cannot convey to us the strength and exquisite delicacy of thought in its native garb, and he to whom such books are shut flounders about in outer darkness.

Edwin Booth

#13. I would recognise myself in each of his translations and he would feel betrayed and annoyed whenever I didn't write something the way he would have. A part of me died with him, a part of him lives with me.

Eduardo Galeano

#14. Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commrnce from that point on.

Georges Bataille

#15. 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

#16. Mala hierba nunca muere. (Translations: Weeds never die. Bad grass never dies.)

Anonymous

#17. What's wonderful is to read the different translations - some done in 1600 and some in 1900 - of the same passage. It's fascinating to watch the same tale repeated in such a different way by two different centuries.

Martin Cruz Smith

#18. In early 2010, we launched our first localized version of 'WhatsApp' for iPhone. It included Spanish and German language translations, to name a couple.

Brian Acton

#19. 'Translations,' Lateran said scornfully, examining the bruises along Kestrel's ribs. 'Like caressing your lover through a burlap sack. You get the gesture of the thing, but not the nuance, and it is overall an irritating experience.'

L.S. Baird

#20. I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#21. Translation is so important. The new American translations of the Bible sound like a Judith Krantz novel.

Rabih Alameddine

#22. Many pictures turn out to be limp translations of the known world instead of vital objects which create an intrinsic world of their own. There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.

Robert Heinecken

#23. I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.

John Lennon

#24. Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something. The Arabs are the only ones who've figured this out. They have the sense to call non-Arabic versions of the Criterion interpretations, not translations.

G. Willow Wilson

#25. 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.

Fredrik Bajer

#26. All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original.

Henri Bergson

#27. Nothing is what you imagine. Her mind hovered above this simple and alarming thought. The variables were too great, the particularities too distinct, life a flood of translations from the shadow-edged yearnings of the heart to the immutable aspects of the physical world.

Elizabeth Strout

#28. I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.

Lydia Davis

#29. And after I started working for the Bureau, most of my translation duties included translations of documents and investigations that actually started way before 9/11.

Sibel Edmonds

#30. . . . the mind always has logic; it might not be obvious logic, but the mind has its reasons for connecting two seemingly unlike notions. -Carol Muske, Translations: Idea to Image

Robin Behn

#31. It was real Cheyenne. I would get the translations the night before, but it was very difficult because it was not like any other language you would be familiar with.

Joe Lando

#32. Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

Voltaire

#33. I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

Paul Auster

#34. That's the problem with translations," she added sadly. "You can never quite reproduce the flavor of the original.

Emily Croy Barker

#35. Regarding R. H. Blyth: For translations, the best books are still those by R. H. Blyth ...

Reginald Horace Blyth

#36. Other translations may engage the mind, but the King James Version is the Bible of the heart.

David Norton

#37. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.

Henry David Thoreau

#38. I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#39. I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.

Charles Stross

#40. I often visit Maria Tatar's 'The Grimm Reader' for a cold dose of courage. Her translations come from the Brothers Grimm, whose now-famous collection of 'Kinder- und Hausmarchen' ('Children's and Household Tales') was first published in 1812. The book was not intended for young readers.

Kate Bernheimer

#41. Translations increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties.

Voltaire

#42. The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.

Gore Vidal

#43. Stephen D'Evelyn, a scholar working primarily on Hildegard's Symphonia, was a teaching assistant in my 2005 course on "Hildegard and the Gospels" and a valuable discussion partner for the translations we looked at in class.

Beverly Mayne Kienzle

#44. The best translations are always the ones in the language the author can't read.

Jorge Amado

#45. There are nine different words in Maya for the color blue...but just three Spanish translations, leaving six butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving beyond doubt that when a language dies, six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth.

Earl Shorris

#46. Wherever modern translations of marked excellence were already in existence efforts were made to secure them for the Library, but in a number of instances copyright could not be obtained.

James Loeb

#47. I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money.

Manuel Puig

#48. A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

Ezra Pound

#49. Gaiaguys are free to think for themselves, and since their translations of our texts - even if these are of a preliminary nature - are sought for by many people, we see no reason for withdrawing our permission.

Billy Meier

#50. Opens up a whole new view of Beckett. The strong mutual attraction between Beckett and Cunard may help explain the leftist political views he expressed both in these superb and long-neglected translations for Negro and elsewhere in his work.

Barney Rosset

#51. Ah, Houellebecq. I've only read him in English translations so I'm sure I'm not getting the full greatness of his work, but golly, he writes better sex scenes than anyone else alive.

Chuck Palahniuk

#52. I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.

Jonathan Galassi

#53. Does anyone really think that America today is lacking preachers, books, Bible translations, and neat doctrinal statements? What we really lack is the passion to call upon the Lord until he opens the heavens and shows himself powerful.

Jim Cymbala

#54. As strange as this may sound, I very seldom read fiction. Because my novels require so much research, almost everything I read is non - fiction - histories, biographies, translations of ancient texts..

Dan Brown

#55. The Christian "doctrines" are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection

C.S. Lewis

#56. Of course we may have any number of translations of a given text - the more the better, really.

Lydia Davis

#57. Does it not seem strange that the generation with the most advanced technology and the easiest-to-read Bible translations is the weakest generation of Christians in the history of our country? Church attendance has never been lower, and the Christian influence in our culture never weaker.

A.W. Tozer

#58. The best value translations of the Poetic Edda are by Hollander from Texas Uni Press, or by Larrington of Oxford Uni Press.

Sweyn Plowright

#59. Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn't occur to people - or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original.

Lydia Davis

#60. I read the different translations of the Bible they had and really just dove into it, almost so I could prove it all right.

Christian Hosoi

#61. There aren't really rules for painting, but there's certain facts and fictions about painting. Part of what I do is document another surface and sort of translate it. They're like translations, and then part of it is fiction, which is invention.

Vija Celmins

#62. I thought that strange syntax was the language of story books. I didn't realize those were poor translations ... English from Edwardian times.

Sandra Cisneros

#63. An odd thing about perception is that when we identify some new thing with one or more of our five senses, it is not really, immutably real
it is a passing will o' the wisp, an artifact of the senses and the translations of the brain until we get used to it and we give it a home in our hearts

Nigel Hey

#64. Any utterance of more than trivial length has no one translation; all utterances have innumerably many acceptable translations

David Bellos

#65. Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.

Jorge Luis Borges

#66. When a people has no translations and is unable to promote its culture, it does not exist.

Bakhtyar Ali

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

Ken Liu

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

Simone Muench

#69. He was keen to use English as well as French in daily conversation, writing letters in English and commissioning translations of French and Latin books.

Ian Mortimer

#70. There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.

Walter Benjamin

#71. Things do not pass for what they are, but for what they seem. Most things are judged by their jackets.

Baltasar Gracian

#72. Poetry cannot be translation

Samuel Johnson

#73. Time reveals all translation to be paraphrase.

Richard Howard

#74. The translation called good has original value as a work of art.

Benedetto Croce

#75. It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

Brian Friel

#76. In art as in life, some things need no translation.

Paula Vogel

#77. I don't know what exactly the translation is but when we do consume something now, something else has to give at some point.

Dan Ariely

#78. Had I known that coffee could taste so good, I would have gotten drunk on it every day.

Rabih Alameddine

#79. Poetry is what is gained in translation.

Joseph Brodsky

#80. Every act of communication is an act of translation.

Gregory Rabassa

#81. The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me'.

Christopher Hitchens

#82. A satisfactory translation is not always possible, but a good translator is never satisfied with it. It can usually be improved. (Newmark)

Peter Newmark

#83. There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.

Edith Hamilton

#84. Pictures rule, but words define, explain, express, direct, and hold together our thoughts and what we know.

Don Watson

#85. I would suggest that what the translator has to give up is the temptation to translate history by making sense of it, that is, by using an apologetic or apocalyptic discourse. What the translator fails to do is to erase the body, to erase the murder of the original.

Shoshana Felman

#86. 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

#87. Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

Susan Sontag

#88. 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