Translations Quotes

The magic gets lost in translation.

— Richard Roeper

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

— Paula Vogel

Time reveals all translation to be paraphrase.

— Richard Howard

Yo soy carne muerta. Translation: I am dead meat.

— Kiersten White

The sound of the rain needs no translation.

— Anonymous

Structure is translation software for your imagination.

— James Scott Bell

All language is but a poor translation.

— Franz Kafka

Poetry is that which is lost in translation.

— Laurence J. Peter

Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.

— Vernor Vinge

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

— Benjamin Jowett

Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.

— Ferdinand de Saussure

All explicit knowledge is translated knowledge, and all translation is imperfect.

— Patrick Rothfuss

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

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

— Thomas Keating

You know, they say in France that translation is like a woman: she is either beautiful or faithful.

— Marjane Satrapi

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

— Leonardo Sciascia

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

— Gregory Rabassa

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

Government exists to create and preserve conditions in which people can translate their ideas into practical reality. In the best of times,…

— Gerald R. Ford

If art is the poetic interpretation of nature, photography is the exact translation; it is exactitude in art or the complement of…

— Charles Negre

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

I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end…

— Pharrell Williams

We translated the script together with them. And during the process of translation, they rewrote the scripts. They put a lot into…

— Ciro Guerra

In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What…

— Eugene Delacroix

Doubtless many can recall certain books which have greatly influenced their lives, and in my own case one stands out especially-a translation…

— Douglas Houghton Campbell

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

I remember having a discussion with [Kaz] about his translation of the word shunyata as "boundlessness," instead of the more traditional "emptiness."…

— Joan Halifax

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

He [Mencken] was an autodidact, with all the misplaced confidence and all the astonishing gaps that characterize that breed. Not many of…

— John Derbyshire

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

— David Nicholls

If men were able to be convinced that art is a precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and…

— Marshall McLuhan

Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a…

— Mary Catherine Bateson

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

— David Bellos

If a little less time was devoted to the translation of letters by Julius Caesar describing Britain 2000 years ago and a…

— Ronald Sydney Nyholm

...trust in Creation which is made fresh daily and doesn’t suffer in translation. This God does not work in especially mysterious ways.…

— Barbara Kingsolver

With Ibrahim al-Koni, what I figured out was - and you'll see this in his novels - if your time is limited,…

— Elliott Colla

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic…

— Tana French

Any time having international interviews is a language barrier, you don't know how much you need to simplify what you're saying for…

— John Flansburgh