Adaptation Quote by David Mitchell

I believe every translation is a process in which something is lost in the original precisely so that something is gained in the new…

— Agustin Fernandez Mallo

Things can be translated, but they become different.

— Amos Oz

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

— Lydia Davis

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

Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.

— Joseph Brodsky

I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation.

— Christian Wiman

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

For me, every translation is a new book, with the translator inevitably broadening the meaning of the original book in any translation.

— Agustin Fernandez Mallo

Translation from one language to another is like viewing a piece of tapestry on the wrong side where though the figures are distinguishable yet…

— Miguel de Cervantes

“The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally…

— Salman Rushdie

“An ideal translation should, I believe, reproduce the effect of the original, but I have found that the best any translator can even hope…

— Harold G. Henderson

Most of us do not, in fact, read another language, and so when we read a translation, we have no way of knowing what…

— Ken Liu