Translations Quotes

• Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.

  Etgar Keret

  Funny, Ninja, Translate

  Speech at the Edinburgh International Book Festival,

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• Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

  Anthony Burgess

  Design, Culture, Matter

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• Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.

  Yevgeny Yevtushenko

  Beautiful, Faithful, Ifs

  25 Copy quote

• Through the act of translation we break out of linguistic confinement and reach many other communities.

  Ngugi wa Thiong'o

  Community, Break Out, Confinement

  Source: www.alternet.org

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• Translation is the art of failure.

  Umberto Eco

  Art

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• Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  World, May, Concern

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• 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

  Information, Language, Hallmark

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

  Rene Magritte

  Dream, Art, Waking Life

  84 Copy quote

• The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.

  Leonardo Sciascia

  Sides, Language, Said

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• Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

  Susan Sontag

  Literature, World, Circulatory System

  Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.226, Macmillan

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• Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.

  Leonard Cohen

  Prayer, Children, Men

  Leonard Cohen (2011). “Beautiful Losers”, p.78, Vintage

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• 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

  Real, Book, Language

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude”, p.103, Harvard University Press

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• God's first language is Silence. Everything else is a translation.

  Thomas Keating

  Silence, Firsts, Language

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• Translation from one language to another is like viewing a piece of tapestry on the wrong side where though the figures are distinguishable yet there are so many ends and threads that the beauty and exactness of the work is obscured.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Pieces, Sides, Language

  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1822). “The History of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha,5”, p.221

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• I believe every translation is a process in which something is lost in the original precisely so that something is gained in the new text.

  Agustin Fernandez Mallo

  Believe, I Believe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Art, Generosity, Giving

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1903). “Ponkapog papers, A sea turn, and other papers”

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• All translation is a compromise - the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic.

  Benjamin Jowett

  Effort, Language, Compromise

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• The original is unfaithful to the translation.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Originality, Unfaithful, Translate

  Sobre el "Vathek"de William Beckford (1943) in Obras Completas (1974) p. 730

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• Translation is at best an echo.

  George Henry Borrow

  Echoes, Language

  George Henry Borrow (1851). “Lavengro: The Scholar--the Gypsy--the Priest”, p.151

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• 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

  Inspirational, God, Spiritual

  88 Copy quote

• It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?

  Voltaire

  Impossible, Language, Translate

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• The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it.

  Ellsworth Kelly

  Art, Vision, World

  Madeleine Grynsztejn, Ellsworth Kelly, Julian Myers, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002). “Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco”, p.9, Univ of California Press

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• When you play a character, you bring yourself into the character. You get a chance to shine and show your translation for the character and her state of mind.

  Gal Gadot

  Character, Play, Shining

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• 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

  Ideas, People, Unfaithful

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• Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Kind, Fantastic

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