Top 47 Quotes About Translators
#1. Translators need a lot of skills besides fluency in at least two languages; translators need to be excellent writers in their native language and need to be interested in and skilled at terminology research using both paper dictionaries and the Internet.
Corinne McKay
#2. My most interesting correspondence is with my translators. I marvel at their sensitivity over certain passages that just anyone, even if he knows German well, would not appreciate.
Heinrich Boll
#4. He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything they need to know.
Hilary Mantel
#5. The translators of the Bible were masters of an English style much fitter for that work than any we see in our present writings; the which is owing to the simplicity that runs through the whole.
Jonathan Swift
#6. Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they're no good.
Etgar Keret
#7. Above all, translators must be native speakers. It's not because they speak the language better
I understand that sometimes a foreigner can learn a language better than native speakers. It has more to do with having an intimate knowledge of the society for which the book is being translated.
Sergei Lukyanenko
#8. A common misconception held that midi-chlorians were Force-carrying particles, when in fact they functioned more as translators, interlocutors of the will of the Force.
James Luceno
#9. 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
#10. It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.
Virginia Woolf
#11. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice.
John Donne
#12. Translation software is not making translators obsolete. Has medical diagnostic software made doctors obsolete?
Nataly Kelly
#13. 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
#14. Translators can be considered as busy matchmakers who praise as extremely desirable a half-veiled beauty. They arouse an irresistible yearning for the original.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#15. 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
#16. Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality.
Edith Sitwell
#17. Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.
Yo-Yo Ma
#18. Translators are the shadow heroes of literature.
Paul Auster
#19. Some attempts at translating from one language into another one can be pretty funny if the translators don't know what they're doing.
Lori Peckham
#20. I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.
Michael Cunningham
#21. The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it.
Jonathan Coe
#22. 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
#23. The credulity of the church is decreasing, and the most marvelous miracles are not either 'explained,' or allowed to take refuge behind the mistakes of the translators, or hide in the drapery of allegory.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#24. The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again. I'm completely in awe of this skill, since I happen to be both bilingual and a writer, but nevertheless a lousy translator.
Alma Guillermoprieto
#25. No one has claim to originality in literature; all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing archetypes.
James E. Irby
#26. The sciences of only one nation, the Greeks, have come down to us, because they were translated through Al-Ma'mun's efforts. He was successful in this direction because he had many translators at his disposal and spent much money in this connection.
Ibn Khaldun
#27. I teach Korean translation at the British Centre for Literary Translation summer school, so I see an emerging generation too, who are around my age. I'm hoping to find time to mentor, and to help emerging translators to a first contract through Tilted Axis.
Deborah Smith
#28. Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere.
Terry Teachout
#29. Glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory. There is no way around this. Translators are celebrated when they translate celebrated books.
Tim Parks
#30. Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.
Milan Kundera
#31. Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.
Jose Saramago
#32. 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
#33. Scientists in different disciplines don't speak the same language. They publish in different journals. It's like the United Nations: You come together, but no one speaks the same language, so you need some translators.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#34. I have a tendency to trust translators, mainly because nobody does it for the money.
Juan Gabriel
#35. ...literary translators are the interpreters of human values - and the true peacemakers.
Margaret Obank
#36. The difficulties besetting the translators of the LXX were very great. It was almost impossible to reproduce the native inimitableness of a Semitic language in an Aryan tongue. They had to adopt new constructions, some lexical and syntactical forms which were foreign to the older Greek.
John Courtenay James
#37. He'd shot and beaten people because he couldn't talk to them.Violence was the only language nobody could understand. There were no translators.
James Meek
#38. I worked with two young women translators. One died and the other received a death threat from the Taliban.
Eliza Griswold
#39. We need to be skilled into knowing God and His Word, then act as excellent translators of these things to the people in our churches.
Vicky Beeching
#42. Those who can't, and can't teach, translate.
(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)
Mort W. Lumsden
#43. Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as is possible, and moves the reader towards him: or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
#44. A translator is to be like his author; it is not his business to excel him.
Samuel Johnson
#45. A satisfactory translation is not always possible, but a good translator is never satisfied with it. It can usually be improved. (Newmark)
Peter Newmark
