Quotations on translation, translation quotes
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
— Ezra Pound, 1885-1972, American Poet, Critic
A sensual and intemperate youth translates into an old worn-out body.
— Marcus T. Cicero, c. 106-43 BC, Great Roman Orator, Politician
A translation can never equal the original; it can approach it, and its quality can only be judged as to accuracy by how close it gets.
— Gregory Rabassa
A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.
— John Millington Synge
A translator is essentially a reader and we all read differently, except that a translator's reading remains in unchanging print
— Gregory Rabassa
A work is not ready for or worthy of translation unless it harbors this difference within itself in some available fashion, whether it be because it originally gestures toward some other language, or because it gathers within itself in some privileged manner those possibilities of being different from itself or foreign to itself which every living language possesses.
— Maurice Blanchot
All translation is a compromise - the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic.
— Benjamin Jowett
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
As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.
— Boris Pasternak, 1890-1960, Russian Poet, Novelist, Translator
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
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.
— Havelock Ellis, 1859-1939, British Psychologist
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
Europe owes its civilization to translators.
— Kelly Louis Western
For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
— Dante, Alighieri) (1265-1321, Italian Philosopher, Poet
God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice.
— John Donne, 1572-1632, British Metaphysical Poet
Humour is the first gift to perish in a foreign language.
— Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941, British Novelist, Essayist
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, 1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist
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
It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.
— Voltaire, 1694-1778, French Historian, Writer
It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?
— Voltaire
It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.
— Virginia Woolf
Laughter translates into any language.
— Graffiti
Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.
— Warren Bennis, 1925-, American Psychologist, Management Educator, and Consultant
Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.
— John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, Thirty-fifth President of the USA
Many critics, no defenders,
translators have but two regrets:
when we hit, no one remembers,
when we miss, no one forgets.
— Anonymous
Mathematicians are like Frenchman: whatever you say to them they translate Into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different.
— Source Unknown
Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation.
— Sir John Denham, 1615-1668, British Poet, Dramatist
Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments, Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.
— Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881, Scottish Philosopher, Author
Poetry is what is lost in translation / Poetry is what gets lost in translation
— Robert Frost, 1875-1963, American Poet
Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
— Leonard Cohen, 1934-, Canadian-born American Musician, Songwriter, Singer
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.
— J. W. Goethe
The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.
— Leonardo Sciascia
The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.
— Leonardo Sciascia,
The best translators have been those writers who have composed original works of the same species.
— Woodhouselee
The guru, if he is gifted, reads the story as any bilingual person might. He does not translate-he understands.
— Sheldon Kopp, 1929-, American Psychologist
The most prolific period of pessimism comes at twenty-one or thereabouts, when the first attempt is made to translate dreams into reality.
— Heywood Broun, 1888-1939, American Journalist, Novelist
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
— Jorge Luis Borges, 1899-1986, Argentinean Author
The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one's own style and creatively adjust this to one's author.
— Paul Goodman
The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.
— Hans Georg Gadamer
The translator is the secret master of the difference of languages, a difference he is not out to abolish, but rather one he puts to use as he brings violent or subtle changes to bear on his own language, thus awakening within it the presence of that which is at origin different in the original.
— Maurice Blanchot
The translator's task is much harder than that of the original author.
— Theodore Savory
To talk about translation is rather like talking about the glass in front of a picture when it is the picture itself that engrosses our attention
— J. Lehmann
Translation is a disturbing craft because there is precious little certainty about what we are doing, which makes it so difficult in this age of fervent belief and ideology, this age or greed and screed.
— Gregory Rabassa
Translation is a process that involves looking for similarities between languages and cultures – particularly similar messages and formal techniques – but it does so only because it is constantly confronting dissimilarities. It can never and should never aim to remove these dissimilarities entirely. A translated text should be the site where a different culture emerges, where a reader gets a glimpse of cultural order, and resistancy, a translation strategy based on an aesthetic of discontinuity, can best preserve that difference, that otherness, by reminding the reader of the gains and losses in the translation process and the unbridgeable gaps between cultures.
— Lawrence Venuti
Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
— Marilyn Hacker
Translation is at best an echo.
— George Borrow
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
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
— Anthony Burgess
Translation is the art of failure.
— Umberto Eco
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, 1930-, American Novelist
Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.
— Marilyn Hacker
Translation presents not merely a paradigm but the utmost case of engaged literary interpretation
— John Felstiner
Translation quality assessment proceeds according to the lordly, completely unexplained, whimsy of “It doesn’t sound right”.
— Peter Fawcett
Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.
— Jorge Luis Borges
Translations are one of the vital necessities of our time.
— F.C. Lucas
Translations increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties.
— Voltaire
Traduttore traditore (Translator, traitor)
— Italian Proverb
Translators have to prove to themselves as to others that they are in control of what they do; that they do not just translate well because they have a “flair” for translation, but rather because, like other professionals, they have made a conscious effort to understand various aspects of their work.
— Mona Baker
Translators live off the differences between languages, all the while working toward eliminating them.
— Edmond Cary
Translators: sellers of old mended shoes and boots, between cobblers and shoemakers.
— Francis Grose
True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.
— Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Ultraliberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order.
— Spiro T. Agnew, 1918-1996, American Vice President
What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.
— Jonathan Miller, 1934-, British Actor, Director
When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.
— John Donne, 1572-1632, British Metaphysical Poet
Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.
— Voltaire, 1694-1778, French Historian, Writer