Lost in translation Quote by Salman Rushdie

Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately,…

— Salman Rushdie

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

Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing… It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act…

— Harry Mathews

Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live:…

— Anne Michaels

Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing…

— Lawrence Venuti

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

— Joseph Brodsky

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Gregory Rabassa

Translation is a form of passive aggression. In doing it, a writer chooses to forgo original authorship so as to play havoc with a…

— Lawrence Venuti

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

— Anthony Burgess

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

General editors' preface The growth of translation studies as a separate discipline is a success story of the 1980s. The subject has developed in…

— Lawrence Venuti