Translation Quotes

Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.

~ Andrés Neuman

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

Death is only a translation of life into another language.

~ Francis Marion Crawford

We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather up what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless 'thing' and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the 'thing' which is waiting to be articulated.

~ John Berger

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

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

Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.

~ Edith Grossman

Many people just think they understand English, remember.

~ Emma Wagner

Life is a tiring business indeed.Soy sauce runs out. Milk runs out. Dishwashing detergent runs out. Lancôme lipsticks—I thought I had stockpiled several years' worth—run out. Dust underneath the dining table becomes dust balls. Newspapers and magazines pile up, and so does laundry. E-mail and junk mail keep coming. When occasion demands, I make myself presentable and I present myself. I listen to my sister's same old complaints on the phone. I withdraw money for my elderly mother, whose tongue works fine but whose body is a mess. I contact her caseworker. And now I have reached a stage in life when my own health is prone to betray me.

~ Minae Mizumura

Thank you,’ I answered, unsure of the proper American response to her gracious enthusiasm. In the Arab world, gratitude is a language unto itself. “May Allah bless the hands that give me this gift”; “Beauty is in the eyes that find me pretty”; “May Allah never deny your prayer”; and so on, an infinite string of prayerful appreciation. Coming from such a culture, I have always found a mere “thank you” an insufficient expression that makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful.” (169).

~ Susan Abulhawa

Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase. However, this argument can be turned around without losing any of its validity: all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such it constitutes a unique text.

~ Octavio Paz

Not everyone who knows how to write can be a writer. Not everyone who knows two languages can be a translator.

~ Nataly Kelly

As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue.

~ Nataly Kelly

Poetry translation is like playing a piano sonata on a trombone.

~ Nataly Kelly

In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops.

~ Nataly Kelly

Translation software is not making translators obsolete. Has medical diagnostic software made doctors obsolete?

~ Nataly Kelly

Of the 193 recognized countries in the world, only politically isolated North Korea is considered monolingual.

~ Nataly Kelly

To deny access to translation and interpreting services oppresses human rights and violates laws.

~ Nataly Kelly

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

~ Bakhtyar Ali

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

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

Sometimes words are just a crude translation of love.

~ Saleem Sharma

To be sure, all translation is interpretation. ... Be that as it may, functional-equivalence translations, which presume that ambiguity, multivalence, and contradiction are by definition not part of the Bible, take far more creative and interpretive license than formal ones in eradicating those features. In so doing, they too often try to make the Bible into something it's not.

~ Timothy Beal

Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.

~ William Zinsser

Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.

~ Ken Liu

In the city, human beings celebrated and enjoyed material conditions and comforts, but were caught in the labyrinths and knots of spiritual shallowness and psychological confusion. In the city human beings wrestled with the demands of survival and profit but fled from life’s imperatives of honesty and moderation. In the city man was afraid to confront his own face.

~ Isa Kamari

Pak Suleh recalled the atmosphere on his island of Pulau Sebidang, which had been ruled by his ancestors for more than a hundred years. Now it had been passed to foreign hands—whichever nation from whatever foreign world which had been claiming the island was theirs—such that he and his ancestors who had lived on that island for generation after generation had been chased away to live in these birdhouses. They had now inherited these congested breathing diseases.Why was it that he could no longer enjoy the wind which blows from the sea, which is very much one of God’s incomparable benevolences? He could no longer savour the swaying coconut trees, ketapang trees, beringin trees and other trees which whistled and murmured when caressed by the winds as their dried leaves fell onto the sand, mixed with red and white flowers scattered all over the pristine white beach, resembling the moving clouds on a wide piece of white paper.I have lost everything, thought Pak Suleh deep in his heart.

~ Suratman Markasan

That which is not comprehended by the mind but by which the mind comprehends—know that...

~ Prabhavananda

I cannot say that I know Brahman fully.Nor can I say that I know him not....Nor do I know that I know him not.

~ Prabhavananda

We know there are colours in the spectrum untranslatable to our eyes; sounds beyond the range of our hearing; sensations beyond the tolerance of taste or touch. What else is there that we might be missing? Could it be that we, ourselves, only ever really experience the mere gist of our own lives? (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

~ Mort W. Lumsden

Animosity does not eradicate animosity. Only by loving kindness is animosity dissolved. This law is ancient and eternal. (attributed to Buddha)

~ Ananda Maitreya

I am writing this on a computer that I can’t imagine living without. This is an alarming thought, the extent to which I have organised my life around a metal box full of wires (and, via the Internet, to many other metal boxes full of wires). Someone told me most of the Internet is stored in a warehouse somewhere in North Carolina. I don’t know enough about technology to gauge if this is true, but it made me realise how little I actually understand about the world I inhabit. The world of Dr Wong’s childhood was significantly smaller than mine, but he understood every square inch of it.

~ Jeremy Tiang

Similarly, Haynes (1998, viii) notes that many professional translators, and their organizations, remain remarkably uninformed with regards to the progress made in translation technology. He goes on to observe that many are so largely unenthusiastic about it - with attitudes lying somewhere between skeptical and scathing - their very ignorance seeming to contribute to their fear that their jobs will be threatened by this technology.

~ Lynne Bowker

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

Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.

~ Günter Grass

The sensation of the ocean bearing my weight was the most carefree lightness I’d ever experienced. When we were halfway across the strait, the sound of an engine approached from a distance—it was probably the police coast guard. We quickly ducked under the surface of the water, exposing only the tips of our trunks so we could breathe.

~ Xi Ni Er

I’d thought there’d be no winter in the desert, but winter arrived anyway—silently, suddenly.

~ You Jin

That you should not be here when something we've both wanted happens is no new thing for me. Today too, as always, you're not here.

~ Sachin Kundalkar

Everything has been planned. The ascent will be completed in two days’ time. He will climb another one hundred floors today. Another hundred the next day. He does not want to take the lift. The rush of life causes people to drown in the temporary. He wishes to dip into eternity before he leaves.

~ Isa Kamari

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