Best Translation Lines

212 Translation quotes by 184 unique authors

Translation is the art of failure. — Umberto Eco
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… — Havelock Ellis
The US and the European Union needs to help in the translation of the demand for democracy into a political will. — Recep Tayyip Erdogan
By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow. — Brian Ferneyhough
I'd love to become like Bill Murray, who was so funny on 'Saturday Night Live' and has gone on to do some of the landmark… — Will Ferrell
I want my words to survive translation. — Kazuo Ishiguro
I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being… — Kazuo Ishiguro
I don't know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people's websites in different languages so you can see… — Tim Berners-Lee
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit. — Jonathan Lethem
If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream. — Rene Magritte
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and… — Robert Morgan
A firm, for instance, that does business in many countries of the world is driven to spend an enormous amount of time, labour, and money… — Edward Sapir
What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence. — George Steiner
I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in… — Pharrell Williams
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
Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.) — Blaise Pascal
All language is but a poor translation. — Franz Kafka
silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation. — Rumi
I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with… — Sylvia Plath
Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to… — Salman Rushdie
Nothing endures except change; nothing is constant except death. Every heartbeat wounds us, and life would be an eternal bleeding to death, were it not… — Ludwig Borne
Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person.… — Epictetus
...trust in Creation which is made fresh daily and doesn’t suffer in translation. This God does not work in especially mysterious ways. The sun here… — Barbara Kingsolver
How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal… — Tracy Kidder

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