Translation Quotes Quotes

“We are told that in translation there is no such thing as equivalence. Many times the translator reaches a fork in the translating road where they must make a choice in the interpretation of a word. And each time they make one of these choices, they are taken further from the truth. But what we aren’t told is that this isn’t a shortcoming of translation; it’s a shortcoming of language itself. As soon as we try to put reality into words, we limit it. Words are not reality, they are the cause of reality, and thus reality is always more. Writers aren't alchemists who transmute words into the aurous essence of the human experience. No, they are glassmakers. They create a work of art that enables us to see inside to help us understand. And if they are really good, we can see our own reflections staring back at us.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“So my mind sinks in this immensity:
And foundering is sweet in such a sea".”
― Giacomo Leopardi, Canti

“Translation will open up entire realms of possibilities, unforeseen pathways that will newly guide and inspire the writer’s work, and possibly even transform it. For to translate is to look into a mirror and see someone other than oneself.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“dormir plutôt que vivre”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“To translate is to alter one’s linguistic coordinates, to grab on to what has slipped away, to cope with exile.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“In addition to the physical aspects of the work, I'm here to recreate my own personal story, my own narrative. For years—a lifetime, really—when I thought about my life, I saw it through the lens of other people, usually my parents, sometimes my sib-lings. If they told me I was this, that, or the other type of person, I usually took their words at face value, even when the descriptions sounded negative, even when I fought their pronouncements. But translation is all about making decisions, hundreds, even thousands of decisions. Maybe a new way exists to look at myself, at my life. At long last, I’ll take those same words and events to come up with different meanings, different interpretations, ones I've reached on my own, stripping away others' interpretations of who I am. (9)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“I lead a completely different life than people close to me probably expected.”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“The translator in me--always at work, even in English-wants to understand the intent of his words. This is where the meaning must lie, right? With the filters turned off, the translator's mind is unfettered by others' words, actions, or opinions, or even by their mere presence. (15)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“By this time, we had all slung so many words at each other. (62)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“I feel powerless to make decisions about what should or shouldn’t be thrown out down here. (88)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“In my case, I felt like I'd been drowning in a sea of words, words that, more often than not, bore no resemblance to their dictionary definitions. What was the point of communicating if, inevitably, a subtext bubbled up, one I had trouble making sense of in my naïveté, in my confusion? What was the point if a word's meaning had been distorted to fit secret agendas, flip-flopped for unknown ulterior motives, withheld for other reasons? Translating what anyone said had become impossible for me, my work with languages, my love of words failing me when it came to my own family. All my dictionaries proved useless in trying to decipher a lifetime of communication fraught with subtexts buried beneath more subtexts. (134)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Why did she keep these random items? How did they make the cut? Maybe she felt it had to be her decision what to keep, what to discard, just as it's my turn now, my decision as I go room to room, playing God with my parents' possessions. (148)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“When you're translating a document or a speech, if you don't have all the words, you don't have all the meaning. I'd only had my words thus far, my thoughts, not hers. That had given me an incomplete picture, one with pockets of omissions… (154)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“In my own way, maybe that's what I'm doing here, searching this home for anything that is evidence of my parents' love for me, for clues to the puzzle, translations of their behavior toward me. (156)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Translating. It’s exhausting (166).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“I'd been given a foreign text to decipher, but I couldn't even identify the language, much less the meaning behind the words; she was speaking in some code (229)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Words had a purpose. Language had a purpose; I’d wrongly assumed that my mother wouldn’t misuse it (229)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Translation involves more than the deciphering of words, words strung together in sentences, in paragraphs, in dialogue, in the years of a life. After all, a machine can do that if you feed all the data into it. Translation also involves making sense of what’s left unspoken, those ellipses, blank spaces, the dot-dot-dots when you have to guess what’s happening in the person’s mind, what the silent messages mean. It calls for the translation of surrounding events, the cultural context, as well as the translation of nonverbal communication. What was being said through that certain look, that ever-so-tiny smile, that flash of a grimace? That spark of anger? Those sarcastic comments? Those prolonged silences? What did it all mean? (249)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“The most difficult thing for me to translate to date, though, has been my own life (250).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“We no longer had a lingua franca after we moved there. We consisted of six people, our own little Tower of Babel… Six people speaking many different languages, none of them mutually intelligible. Six people bumping into each other in the dark, no longer able to understand each other, wounding one other in the process (257).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Admittedly, a number of the translations of my life, of what went on in Ivy Lodge, are loose at best, warranting multiple-choice answers, never ideal in the scientifically based world of translation. You're supposed to go from the source language (the language being translated) to the target language (the language being translated into). A translation is only good when the translator knows--or can surmise--the intention of the person being translated, understands with a fair amount of confidence the exact meaning of that source language. Maybe that's one problem with my attempts to translate my family. Maybe my parents remained unclear in their own minds what they wanted to say, what their words and behavior meant, what their underlying motivation was. In that case, it makes translation doubly difficult if the source of the words and events to be translated is lost in a sea of linguistic confusion. Translators need patterns to make sense out of foreign words, or it all becomes a hodgepodge of meaningless sounds and symbols. Chaos (256).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“- I verkligheten har vi bara ett val, ta chansen eller missa den.”
― Marc Levy

“la predisposición para los idiomas es tan misteriosa como la de ciertas personas para las matemáticas o la música, no tiene nada que ver con la inteligencia ni el conocimiento. Es algo aparte, un don que algunos poseen y otros no.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Travesuras de la niña mala