Translation Of Quotes

#1. There is a new venue for theory, necessarily impure, where it emerges in and as the very event of cultural translation. This is not the displacement of theory by historicism, nor a simple historicization of theory that exposes the contingent limits of its more generalizable claims.

Judith Butler

#2. And on the subject of naming animals, can I just say how happy I was to discover that the word yeti, literally translated, apparently means "that thing over there."
("Quick, brave Himalayan Guide - what's that thing over there?"
"Yeti."
"I see.")

Neil Gaiman

#3. For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?

Cyril Connolly

#4. At the end of the day, even the magic of machine translation is like Facebook, a way of taking free contributions from people and regurgitating them as bait for advertisers or others who hope to take advantage of being close to a top server.

Jaron Lanier

#5. The language of translation ought never to attract attention to itself.

John Hookham Frere

#6. The Haitians, who knew something about suffering and survival, had a beautiful phrase ... The Translation is not perfect, but the nut of it was: 'The season of pain is never over until the sky begins to cry.

Rick Bragg

#7. Never trust the translation or interpretation of something without first trusting its interpreter.

Suzy Kassem

#8. The King! I thought him enough of a philosopher to realize that there is no such thing as murder in politics. You know as well as I do, my dear boy, that in politics there are no people, only ideas; no feelings, only interests. In politics, you don't kill a man, you remove an obstacle, that's all.

Alexandre Dumas

#9. Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle.

Gilbert Murray

#10. I think, therefore I am. My fingers that caress these rose and frangipani petals are a result of my thoughts. I feel content, tender. I feel entranced, ecstatic and besotted by the fragrance of the flowers and this is because of my thoughts.

Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

#11. I do a lot of recipe creation. Translation: cooking tempting dishes that must be eaten.

Ruth Glick

#12. I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original.

William Cowper

#13. Where names of people or places would mean little to a contemporary reader, I figured "translation errors" could create interesting new meanings.

Hal Duncan

#14. THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY is ostensibly an autobiography but in truth it is much more than that. In this remarkably fine new translation, Anthea Bell perfectly captures Stefan Zweig's glorious evocation of a lost world, Vienna's golden age, in which he grew up and flourished.

Ronald Harwood

#15. When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)

Joseph Campbell

#16. The world cannot be translated;
It can only be dreamed of and touched.

Dejan Stojanovic

#17. A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors' reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting - these are all part of the translation.

David Nicholls

#18. 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

#19. Rnesh karr slithis, I hissed back, which was Draconic for eat your own tail, the dragon version of go screw yourself. No extra translation needed.

Julie Kagawa

#20. Less doth yearning trouble him who knoweth many songs, or with his hands can touch the harp: his possession is his gift of glee which God gave him.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#21. In Washington, the translation of E Pluribus Unum has been lost. The belief that we are one nation - united in purpose - caring about and for one another is no longer the practice.

Madeleine M. Kunin

#22. Only in thoughtful dialogue with what it says can this fragment of thinking be translated. However, thinking is poetizing, and indeed
more than one kind of poetizing, more than poetry and song.

Martin Heidegger

#23. There is the intent of the writer and the interpretation by the artist. What the writer intended and what the artist interprets is not a 1-to-1 translation. It's a crossing of ideas that generates the stories that you see in print.

Jim Lee

#24. Sometimes words are just a crude translation of love.

Saleem Sharma

#25. Unfortunately, unless the job description included a translation of the prologue of The Canterbury Tales, I was dreadfully under-qualified.

Rachel Vincent

#26. I feel sometimes that I'm in a constant state of being lost in translation, and I guess that why I write songs.

Laura Marling

#27. 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

#28. Human writing reflects that of the universe; it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.

Octavio Paz

#29. That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen ... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because ... the sound of the rain needs no translation.

Alan Watts

#30. Every man who knows anything of languages, knows that it is impossible to translate from one language into another, not only without losing a great part of the original, but frequently of mistaking the sense.

Thomas Paine

#31. The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#32. ...literary translators are the interpreters of human values - and the true peacemakers.

Margaret Obank

#33. You look like a Greek God sent down by the immortal Zeus from Mount Olympus to taunt the rest of us inferior beings with your astonishing beauty, I said, which somehow in translation came out as "you look fine, why?

John Boyne

#34. Mongkol, poor Mongkol, shedding tears.

Thinking of his smiling, comical face, and his dreams of sending his son to university, I could only lower my head in silence.

And the night continued, cold and dark, the wind frozen beyond the mountains.

You Jin

#35. Translation, it read: But you will not even need to fight. Take your positions; then stand still and watch the LORD's victory. He is with you, O people of Judah and Jerusalem. Do not be afraid or discouraged. Go out against them tomorrow, for the LORD is with you!

Stacy Hawkins Adams

#36. Fashion anticipates, and elegance is a state of mind ... a mirror of the time in which we live, a translation of the future, and should never be static.

Oleg Cassini

#37. Pak Karman hugged his wife's gravestone tightly. "You left without saying farewell!" The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light.

Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

#38. 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

#39. Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.

Marcel Duchamp

#40. I read with interest Max Muller's book, India - What Can It Teach Us? and the translation of the Upanishads published by the Theosophical Society. All this enhanced my regard for Hinduism, and its beauties began to grow upon me. It did not, however, prejudice me against other religions.

Mahatma Gandhi

#41. 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

#42. There is little taste for 'high culture' especially in Evangelicalism, where the tendency has long been toward translation - making things accessible to the largest number of people.

James Davison Hunter

#43. If art is the poetic interpretation of nature, photography is the exact translation; it is exactitude in art or the complement of art. (1854)

Charles Negre

#44. The director works as an interpretive artist, but he's still an artist, so you also have to give him room to create and to put his vision of the play or his translation or interpretation of the material on the stage.

August Wilson

#45. No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words.

Herbert Spencer

#46. We find our voice, we lose our voice, we retrieve it, honor it, and hopefully, learn how to share it with others and stand in the center of our power. Translation is a theme. Fear and courage are a theme.

Terry Tempest Williams

#47. I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.

Harold Bloom

#48. Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.

Michael Cunningham

#49. (True,) the white hole said. (My name is Khairelikoblepharehglukumeilichephreidosd'enagouni-) and at the same time he went flickering through a pattern of colors that was evidently the visual translation.

Diane Duane

#50. 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

#51. Whatever your Bible translation is, it stands on the shoulders of one man - William Tyndale.

Steven J. Lawson

#52. I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.

Robert Frost

#53. I'm not a collector. I don't keep letters, or books, or souvenirs. But I do keep one copy of each translation of my books into a foreign language. Have you ever seen a murder story printed in Singhalese? Wow!

Rex Stout

#54. In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing. You have to attempt what they did in that language - say, in Arabic - and try to accomplish a version of that in English, and you're constantly serving two masters.

Elliott Colla

#55. Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

Siri Hustvedt

#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. When he is dissected after his death," a disrespectful interpreter said of a foreign dignitary, "a million predicates will be found in his stomach: those he swallowed in the past decades without saying them.

Kato Lomb

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. Zona spat a stream of Spanish that overwhelmed translation, a long and liquid curse.

William Gibson

#65. If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.

Rene Magritte

#66. 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

#67. Truth lives in the spaces between words. It defies translation.

Ashok K. Banker

#68. For him, the kampung was a place to live and work that was based on a steadfast and intimate relationship between man and nature. The village was a true reflection of life in the tropics.

Isa Kamari

#69. 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

#70. Music is the voice of all sorrow, all joy. It needs no translation.

Helen Exley

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. A painting was a translation of the language of my heart.

Amy Tan

#76. I have many, many editions of the books, and they are all rather different. In the end, the one I used was the most recent French translation. French suits the tales well, and it's a beautiful translation. The Italian one is good as well ... English has fallen short.

Marina Warner

#77. 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

#78. The Japanese version comes with a translation, but that's different from the lyrics, so people could look things up and find a translation of their own if they're interested.

Utada Hikaru

#79. 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

#80. It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.

Alberto Manguel

#81. However, this translation is, in the words of Dr. Giles, "excessively bad." He goes further in this criticism: "It is not merely a question of downright blunders, from which none can hope to be wholly exempt.

Sun Tzu

#82. The difference between a translation and an original is not of the same order as the difference between powdered and steamed coffee.

David Bellos

#83. 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

#84. Teaching translation is more of an editing job. You act as editor. But you can have fun with it.

Gregory Rabassa

#85. They're going to burn this complete collection of MacDonald's children's book There's a new translation out in paperback but I've always dreamed of eating the entire twelve-volume set in hardcover I refuse to watch something so delicious get turned to charcoal right in front of me

Mizuki Nomura

#86. In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase 'hope and change,' to wit: 'big, fat government.'

P. J. O'Rourke

#87. I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation.

Etgar Keret

#88. 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

#89. Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal

John Berger

#90. Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing ... It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.

Harry Mathews

#91. You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry.

Carl Sagan

#92. The Bible is still the only dirty book I've ever read, at least in its current incarnation as a weapon of the homophobes. Bible scholarship keeps trying to catch up, proving that all the hatred of gay is just stupid translation, though the snake-oil preachers don't want to hear it.

Paul Monette

#93. [T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of.

Paul Auster

#94. There are only about 30,000 really important books in the world. I suppose about 5,000 of them were written in the English language, and 5,000 more have been translated. - Roger Mifflin

Christopher Morley

#95. [Alternate translation:] The Divine Spirit found a sublime outlet in that wonder of analysis, that portent of the ideal world, that amphibian between being and not-being, which we call the imaginary root of negative unity.

Gottfried Leibniz

#96. Silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.

Rumi

#97. I was one of those girls that were repeatedly told, "You have such a pretty face." (I suspected that was said to every fat girl.) Translation: If I weren't so fat, I'd be pretty. Gratzi!

Misti D. Mosteller

#98. When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.

Tea Obreht

#99. Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

Robert Morgan

#100. Boys," Lindsay agreed, nodding. "What doesn't get lost in translation?"
"Things with the letter X in front of them," Rachel posited. "Like X-Box. And X-rated movies.

Nenia Campbell