Language translation quotes:

Send

The best translations are always the ones in the language the author can't read. -- Jorge Amado
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence. -- George Steiner
Home to me is the world because my books have been translated into more than 30 languages. -- Nawal El Saadawi
When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language. -- John Donne
I feel French is very close to Urdu. Both languages are beautiful. Sadly, their beauty is lost in translation. -- Amisha Patel
The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages. -- Jacques Derrida
I thought that strange syntax was the language of story books. I didn't realize those were poor translations... English from Edwardian times. -- Sandra Cisneros
One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages. -- Naguib Mahfouz
I write on a visual canvas, 'seeing' a scene in my thoughts before translating it into language, so I'm a visual junkie. -- Marianne Wiggins
Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered. -- Leonard Cohen
--
You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid. -- Tom Stoppard
As thy days, so shall thy strength be which, in modern language, may be translated as thy thoughts so shall thy life be. -- Emmet Fox
The ballet needs to tell its own story in such a way it can be received without having to be translated into language. -- Twyla Tharp
The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book. -- Yann Martel
I try not to invent; I try simply to translate the weird language of the natural world. And I'm not into absolute ownership of things. -- Alice Oswald
Facebook can be an accumulation of different intelligences. Ask a question, translated into many languages and somebody, somewhere in the world, will have an answer. -- Yuri Milner
I guess anime helped me understand the Japanese culture a little better and makes me want to honor certain language nuances that don't always translate to English. -- Laura Bailey
Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable. -- David Mitchell
The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I'll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is. -- Maya Angelou
Body language has no translation." -- Ljupka Cvetanova
All language is but a poor translation. -- Franz Kafka
The original language of Christianity is translation. -- Lamin Sanneh
God's first language is Silence. Everything else is a translation. -- Thomas Keating
silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation. -- Rumi
The language of translation ought never to attract attention to itself. -- John Hookham Frere
The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own. -- Ned Rorem
Music does not need language of words for it has movements of dance to do its translation. -- Shah Asad Rizvi
Mathematics to me is like a language I donâ??t speak though I admire its literature in translation. -- David Quammen
Music does not need the language of words for it has movements of dance to do its translation. -- Shah Asad Rizvi
We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation. -- Ernst Haas
Air power speaks a strategic language so new that translation into the hackneyed idiom of the past is impossible. -- Alexander P. de Seversky
A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one. -- Arthur Schopenhauer
I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation. -- Christian Wiman
When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation. -- Etgar Keret
The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success. -- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Photography speaks a universal language that does not need translation, and with an immediacy that the written word lacks. It freezes a moment in time, leaving an indelible image. -- Bianca Jagger

Send