Difficulty Quote by Arthur Schopenhauer

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

— Elfriede Jelinek

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

— Anthony Burgess

A translation can never equal the original; it can approach it, and its quality can only be judged as to accuracy by how close…

— Gregory Rabassa

It's one of the hardest things to translate anything that's not standard.

— Ann Goldstein

When we translate, we always to some extent betray the text we are translating. That is why translation is so hard and thankless. All…

— Jay L. Garfield

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

— Benjamin Jowett

In its happiest efforts, translation is but approximation, and its efforts are not often happy. A translation may be good as translation, but it…

— George Henry Lewes

I have always maintained that translation is essentially the closest reading one can possibly give a text. The translator cannot ignore "lesser" words, but…

— Gregory Rabassa

“Virtually anything can be translated—“X cannot be translated” usually means nothing more exciting than “We have a word, X, that you need three or…

— Robert Lane Greene

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

— Paul Auster

All language is but a poor translation.

— Franz Kafka

“But Spanish and English aren't different languages, only extreme dialects of Latin. It's almost possible to translate word for word. Translation from a language…

— Natasha Pulley