David Bellos > Quotes

“The difference between a translation and an original is not of the same order as the difference between powdered and steamed coffee.”
― David Bellos

“To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.”
― David Bellos

“It is translation, more than speech itself, which provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought.
We should do more of it.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“in Israel it is said that God himself would not get promotion in any science department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Why not? Because he has only one publication—​and it was not written in English.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“I express not the word for the word but the sense for the sense.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Any utterance of more than trivial length has no one translation; all utterances have innumerably many acceptable translations”
― David Bellos

“No opinions would be worth holding except by those who read works in the original.”
― David Bellos

“Translation is another name for the human condition.”
― David Bellos

“But a world in which all intercultural communication was carried out in a single idiom would not diminish the variety of human tongues. It would just make native speakers of the international medium less sophisticated users of language than all others, since they alone would have only one language to think with.”
― David Bellos

“Would we have ever asked what it is that a translator ‘carries across’ the ‘language barrier’ if he or she were called a ‘turner’, ‘tongue-man’, or ‘exchanger’? Probably not.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Translation is the opposite of empire”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“A desire to believe (despite all evidence to the contrary) that words are at bottom the names of things is what makes the translator’s mission seem so impossible.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“There are many different ways of teaching languages. The Ottomans rounded up youngsters in conquered lands and brought them back as slaves to be trained as dil oglan, or “language boys,” in Istanbul. Modern direct methods are gentler but rely on the same understanding of how languages are best learned—through total immersion in a bain linguistique, a kind of baptism of the brain.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Translation is meaning.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“The words of law often look like words of the language you speak, but when they are legal terms, they are not.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“any utterance of more than trivial length has no one translation; all utterances have innumerably many acceptable translations.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Pero la historia de una palabra no dice mucho sobre su significado real. [...] Las etimologías oscurecen verdades esenciales sobre la forma en que utilizamos la lengua y, entre ellas, verdades sobre la traducción.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“The expression “literal meaning,” taken literally, is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, and a nonsense.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Few inhabitants of the subcontinent have ever been monoglot; citizens of India have traditionally spoken three, four, or five tongues.1”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Vous pouvez soutenir que la traduction littéraire est facile, puisqu'en dernière analyse, on peut y faire ce qu'on veut. Ou vous pouvez affirmer que la traduction littéraire est impossible, puisque quoi que l'on fasse, on s'expose à des objections sérieuses. La traduction littéraire se distingue de toutes les autres espèces de traduction. Elle rend à ses lecteurs un genre de service tout à fait particulier. Humblement, qu'ils le veuillent ou non, mais inéluctablement, elle leur enseigne à chaque fois ce qu'est la traduction.”
― David Bellos

“Avec Babel, on se trompe d'histoire. Selon toute vraisemblance, l'utilité première de la parole humaine fut d'affirmer la différence, non l'identité.”
― David Bellos

“Domesticating translation styles that eradicate the Frenchness of Gallic thugs have been attacked by some critics for committing “ethnocentric violence”.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“On the other hand, linguistic borrowing between cultures in contact with one another is a fundamental fact of intercultural communication - and that is the very field of translation.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“One big truth about translation that is often kept under wraps is that many societies did just fine by doing without.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“It can be done only by guessing what the context and genre of the utterance are.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“The natural way to represent the foreignness of foreign utterances is to leave them in the original, in whole or in part.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Most of the time, the symptomatic meaning of an utterance is just too obvious to be noticed.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“In today’s world, translators into “small” languages also often see their task as defending or else improving their own tongues - or both at the same time.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“The survivor language, English, is not necessarily the best suited to the job; it’s just that nothing has yet happened to knock it out.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Translation-​based language teaching is no longer in fashion, but its ghost still inhabits a number of misconceptions about what translation is or should be.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything