Translation Quotes

“He felt like the true translation of himself again.”

— Blake Crouch

“Sometimes words are just a crude translation of love.”

— Saleem Sharma

“Translation is the other side of a tapestry.”

— Leonardo Sciascia

In art as in life, some things need no translation.

— Paula Vogel

Translation is the art of failure.

— Umberto Eco

Time reveals all translation to be paraphrase.

— Richard Howard

Things can be translated, but they become different.

— Amos Oz

“It was not a translation, it was the substance.”

— M.K. Gandhi

Booking.com is one of the biggest translation companies in the world.

— Gillian Tans

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

Something gets lost when you translate. It's hard to keep straight. Perspective is every thing.

— Aimee Mann

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

— Thomas Keating

“...A painting was a translation of the language of my heart.”

— Amy Tan

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

— Leonardo Sciascia

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

— John Hookham Frere

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

— George Steiner

Translation is a disturbing craft because there is precious little certainty about what we are doing, which makes it so difficult in…

— Gregory Rabassa

I wanted as little formal linguistic theory as I could get by with. I wanted the basic linguistic training to do a…

— Daniel Everett

So much gets lost in the translation. Even if you sat there listening to it with a microscope, there's no way you're…

— Frank Zappa

I am not one of those translators who think that working closely with the writer will yield the best translation.

— Adam Morris

Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims…

— Gilbert Murray

An ear will never do you wrong, but I know writers who... most of the language they use is just extracted language…

— Junot Diaz

The best translations cannot convey to us the strength and exquisite delicacy of thought in its native garb, and he to whom…

— Edwin Booth

“Translating from #cat is easy - you just ignore everything, then you decide what you want it to have said, thought, or…

— Will Advise

The existence of another, competing translation is a good thing, in general, and only immediately discouraging to one person - the translator…

— Lydia Davis

“In translation of poetry; there exists a possibility of components like imagination, art of wordplay, skill of constructing internal rhythm and expand…

— Suman Pokhrel

“Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not…

— Walter Benjamin

Some of my colleagues are surprised by how little personal interaction I've had with "my" authors, but I don't translate to go…

— Andre Naffis-Sahely

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of…

— David Nicholls

The oldest cliché in the world is about "what's lost in translation," but you don't very often read much intelligent about what's…

— Sam Hamill

I'm interested in the murky areas where there are no clear answers - or sometimes multiple answers. It's here that I try…

— Taryn Simon

The practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different: we speak different tongues, and see…

— David Bellos

“I’ve learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is…

— Michael Cunningham

“The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary,…

— Thomas Paine

“Many terribly quiet customers exist but none more terribly quiet than Man his footsteps pass so perilously soft across the sea in…

— Sophocles Carson Anne

“My goal is to act as a faithful interpreter, preserving as much of the original's nuances of meaning as possible without embellishment…

— Ken Liu

“So much of translating, Gil once told me, takes place in an imaginary space where the writer and the translator come together.…

— Meg Rosoff

“The boundaries between us had been breached for good, we gave a new meaning t the notion that man and wife were…

— Lorna Sage

When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind…

— Randall Jarrell