Top 68 The Translator Quotes
#1. One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.
Anita Diament
#2. To have the translator be a figure in the book's presentation seems like a big thing, especially for a book that's really popular.
Ann Goldstein
#3. The choices that bedevil the writer bedevil the translator ten times over.
Margaret Atwood
#4. The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!
Manuel Puig
#6. ( ... ) the translator of prose is the slave of the author and the translator of poetry is his rival.
Andrei Makine
#7. As the writer, you can choose the word that seems best in terms of meaning, nuance, sound, etc. As the translator you are unlikely to find a word in your language that exactly matches, so that you are always making a decision about which meaning or nuance to choose, or emphasize, over the others.
Ann Goldstein
#8. In some sense the text and the translator are locked in struggle - 'I attacked that sentence, it resisted me, I attacked another, it eluded me' - a struggle in which, curiously, when the translator wins, the text wins too ...
Lydia Davis
#9. 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
#10. However, there is one great temptation and that is that you can forget that the aim of the writer was to reject all other worlds and to construct one of his own and that the aim of the translator is to re-embody himself into the world of the various writers.
Ventseslav Konstantinov
#12. The translator, a lonely sort of acrobat, becomes confused in a labyrinth of paradox, or climbs a pyramid of dependent clauses and has to invent a way down from it in his own language.
Lydia Davis
#13. The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all other essentials have already been provided, so he can just sit down and write his ass off. (p. 8)
Gregory Rabassa
#14. In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.
Fanny Howe
#15. The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred.
Cynthia Ozick
#16. So what you're saying [...] is that the translator has a lot of decisions to make. That there are multiple meanings to be found in any word, in any sentence. In any situation.
Stephanie Perkins
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Now it's the age for the translator. It's the age for the bridge builder. It's the age for Velcro. It's the age for Lego. It's the age for combining what we already have into what we need.
Van Jones
#20. What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.
Robert Fitzgerald
#21. 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
#22. Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.
Italo Calvino
#23. 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
#24. Please, never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.
Alexander Pushkin
#25. Glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory. There is no way around this. Translators are celebrated when they translate celebrated books.
Tim Parks
#26. I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.
W.G. Sebald
#28. The existence of another, competing translation is a good thing, in general, and only immediately discouraging to one person - the translator who, after one, two, or three years of more or less careful work, sees another, and perhaps superior, version appear as if overnight.
Lydia Davis
#29. which had previously provided the translator safe haven. Pretending
Thomas Cahill
#31. Freud's translator accidentally omitted 'fashion' in the psychoanalytic list of primary instinctual drives; along with the drive to sexuality there is the drive to wear odd garments that may cut off circulation, occlude vision, make toes grow sideways, cause riots.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#32. It's important to get a translator who will ask the questions in a sensitive and thoughtful way. Knowing the ethnicity issues, the tribal issues in some places ... who your translator is can mean a lot.
Peter Menzel
#33. To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.
W. H. Auden
#34. I ran this through my "girl talk" translator and said, "I could eat him, if either of you'd like. Seems like it might be the easiest thing to do."
-Bram to Nora & Pamela
Lia Habel
#35. I have two friends named Matt. They're both scouts in the cavalry. They both served in the same section of Iraq. They both worked with the same Iraqi translator. And yet, if you talk to them, their stories couldn't be more different, because one was there in 2006. One was there in 2008.
Phil Klay
#36. 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
#37. Commemoration of Pandita Mary Ramabai, Translator of the Scriptures, 1922 A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of tomorrow's dangers, a straw under my knees, a noise in my ear, a light in my eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayers.
John Donne
#38. The only problem was that I couldn't communicate with Dario. He speaks Italian and I don't. We had a translator the whole time. I just felt that something was lost with the go between. He was a delightful man, but I wish we could have spoken the same language.
Kim Hunter
#39. What is more important for the world right now than preserving ways of living in balance with the earth?
Daoud Hari
#40. To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.
Marcel Proust
#41. A good editor fixes. A superb editor fixes without ruining the original message of your book as a superb translator does as well.
B.A. Gabrielle
#42. If a translation doesn't have obvious writing problems, it may seem quite all right at first glance. We readers, after all, quickly adapt to the style of a translator, stop noticing it, and get caught up in the story.
Lydia Davis
#43. Because of my schooling, my fate would always be a little different from my friends.
Daoud Hari
#44. My mom is a translator for the school district in Delaware. She'd hear these different stories from working with families there. Those stories stuck with me.
Cristina Henriquez
#45. 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
#46. Passion for books is the most important thing in being an editor/translator. Work with love.
Listiana Srisanti
#47. And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.
Cornelia Funke
#48. Robin Buss is a writer and translator who contributes regularly to The Times Educational Supplement, The Times Literary Supplement and other papers.
Alexandre Dumas
#49. When I was 16 years old, I assembled a 2.3 million electron volt beta particle accelerator. I went to Westinghouse, I got 400 pounds of translator steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I assembled a 6-kilowatt, 2.3 million electron accelerator in the garage.
Michio Kaku
#50. I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.
Lydia Davis
#51. An actor's life is the shadow of a cloud, the echo of a sound, the memory of a dream, nothing come of nothing. The finest actor does not create, he is but a translator of another man's work.
Fanny Kemble
#52. If I make a speech, I need a translator. But music does not need a translation. People understand me through the sound. That I think is very important. This is just one planet, like one family.
Mstislav Rostropovich
#53. 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
#54. How true,' returned the measured, featureless voice. 'I would chuckle in amused agreement, but the laughter switches of my translator have been malfunctioning for the past six hours. You understand.'
'Certainly,' I said. And somehow felt much more comfortable.
Samuel R. Delany
#55. My father, a Russian translator, wanted to distinguish me by calling me Misha, the Russian diminutive of his name, Michael. My name and work as a writer specialising in the Balkans has created a myth that I have Slavic connections, but actually I am British.
Misha Glenny
#56. Whenever I write a paragraph in English, I first check it with the Google Translator, and most often it says no language detected.
M.F. Moonzajer
#57. As a physician and as a pilot, I think it lets me be a pretty good translator having one foot in the medical world and one foot in the flying world. Sometimes when the medical guys come in and speak medical stuff to the pilots, the pilots really don't know what they're saying.
David M. Brown
#58. 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
#59. My mom's a translator, my dad's a woodworker; that's the world I grew up in, that's the world I'm most comfortable in. The whole idea of Hollywood or any of that other stuff that unfortunately goes along with film, that wasn't part of my upbringing, thankfully.
Tatiana Maslany
#60. No matter how great the book is, Its translator will never be famous as the author!Better Write!
Me
#61. My best friend Madison keeps a list on her phone of all of the different English slang that I say, so she has kind of like a translator so she can understand without having to ask me, "What on Earth are you talking about when you say 'nackered'?"
Emma Watson
#62. So the poor translator must not just go back and forth between two languages, but if he is worthy of his calling must shift between two selves, with all the perils of this induced schizophrenia.
Gregory Rabassa
#63. Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.
Ali Smith
#64. Zembla is a site devoted to the life and works of author, translator, and lepidopterist.
Vladimir Nabokov
#65. We're like two dogs in battle on their own;
They fought all day but neither got the bone,
There came a kite above them, nothing loth,
And while they fought he took it from them both."
From Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale
Geoffrey Chaucer
#66. It is natural for a translator to be prejudiced in favour of his adopted work. More impartial readers may not be so much struck with the beauties of this piece as I was. Yet I am not blind to my author's defects.
Horace Walpole
#67. The head is in charge of thinking; the heart is in charge of feeling; and the spirit realizes the creative, infinitely thriving power of life while imagination acts as translator and synthesizer.
Deborah Sandella
#68. The CIA will only hire people with impeccable credentials to be a translator. 'Impeccable credentials' means you've never lived outside the United States.
Michael Bloomberg
