Translators Quotes

56 quotes by 51 authors

The CIA will only hire people with impeccable credentials to be a translator. 'Impeccable credentials' means you've never lived outside the United States. — Michael Bloomberg
As a physician and as a pilot, I think it lets me be a pretty good translator having one foot in the medical world and… — David M. Brown
There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something… — Edith Hamilton
A translator is essentially a reader and we all read differently, except that a translator's reading remains in unchanging print — Gregory Rabassa
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… — Gregory Rabassa
It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent. — Virginia Woolf
Because powerful images are fixed in the mind more readily than words, the photographer needs no interpreter. A photograph means the same thing all over… — Arthur Rothstein
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… — Mona Baker
Commemoration of Pandita Mary Ramabai, Translator of the Scriptures, 1922 A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of tomorrow's dangers, a straw under my knees,… — John Donne
Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the… — Anne Michaels
Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread — Guillermo Cabrera Infante
The fabliau, then, is a short story that is a tall story. It combines a burly blurting of dirty words with a reveling in humiliations… — Christopher Ricks
The sciences of only one nation, the Greeks, have come down to us, because they were translated through Al-Ma'mun's efforts. He was successful in this… — Ibn Khaldun
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… — Friedrich Schleiermacher
The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out… — Alma Guillermoprieto
All mankind is one volume. When one man dies, a chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language. And… — John Donne
Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to… — Edith Sitwell
It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person's fate. Translators use "plot" to render the ancient Greek word mythos… — James Hillman
A poet is the translator of the silent language of nature to the world. — Rufus Wilmot Griswold
The most basic barrier was language itself, very few Americans in Iraq whether soldiers or diplomats or news paper reporters could speak more than a… — Dexter Filkins

Who Wrote These Translators Quotes

51 authors contributed a total of 56 Translators Quotes, led by these top contributors: