Translations Quotes

“The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me’.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“All translations are made up" opined Vikram, "Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.”
― Brian Friel

“Things do not pass for what they are, but for what they seem. Most things are judged by their jackets.”
― Baltasar Gracián

“Overly literal translations, far from being faithful, actually distort meaning by obscuring sense.”
― Ken Liu, The Three-Body Problem

“it is better to have red a great work of another culture in translation than never to have read it at all.”
― Henry Gratton Doyle

“There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.”
― Edith Hamilton

“Never trust the translation or interpretation of something without first trusting its interpreter.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Así como un ave en su jaula.
Así como un bebedor entre el bullicio de la medianoche,
así he intentado ser libre, a mi manera.”
― Leonard Cohen

“ 'Translations,' Lateran said scornfully, examining the bruises along Kestrel's ribs. 'Like caressing your lover through a burlap sack. You get the gesture of the thing, but not the nuance, and it is overall an irritating experience.' ”
― L.S. Baird, Evensong's Heir

“I ended up taking a literature class, too, about the nineteenth-century novel and the city in Russia, England, and France. The professor often talked about the inadequacy of published translations, reading us passages from novels in French and Russian, to show how bad the translations were. I didn't understand anything he said in French or Russian, so I preferred the translations.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“the best of Cervantes is untranslatable, and this undeniable fact is in itself an incentive [for one and all] to learn Spanish.”
― Aubrey F.G. Bell

“The Bible is a collection of stories and myths based on hearsay transmitted from generation to generation and which were recorded by many (40 +) different authors during a period spanning possibly 1,600 or more years.   The ‘evidence’ then is only to be found in the Bible – no historical, scientific or authenticated archaeological evidence exists. If you check the internet for such evidence you will discover many websites by Christian ministries – all present the evidence only from the Bible. Most so-called archaeological evidence is based on supposition rather than fact.”
― Brian Baker, Nonsense From The Bible

“じゃあ、〈記号〉と〈象徴〉の違いを２００字以内で説明できる？
¿Podrías describir la diferencia entre "signo" y "símbolo" en menos de 200 caracteres?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Changing words isn't so hard. Recognizing a particular sound, swapping it for another - that was easy even for your ancestors. Reading what happens in your head and the heads of all the beings around you, now that is difficult. Finding equivalents in one culture for the basic concepts of another - that is really difficult. I say the word vegetable and the translator tells you something like 'edible moss'. So, yes, it's a miracle, but it's a dangerous miracle. It makes you think you understand beasts and you never do. When it comes down to it, you can't even understand your own species.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Inferior

“The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“I love these words that just can't be translated from language to language. They seem dignified, grounded, battling against the imperialism of reality.”
― Olivier Magny

“Had I known that coffee could taste so good, I would have gotten drunk on it every day.”
― Rabih Alameddine

“Translating from #cat is easy - you just ignore everything, then you decide what you want it to have said, thought, or wanted.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“That's the problem with translations," she added sadly. "You can never quite reproduce the flavor of the original.”
― Emily Croy Barker, The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

“I would suggest that what the translator has to give up is the temptation to translate history by making sense of it, that is, by using an apologetic or apocalyptic discourse. What the translator fails to do is to erase the body, to erase the murder of the original.”
― Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History

“There were no oceans on Oasis, no large bodies of water, and presumably no fish.
He wondered whether this would cause comprehension problems when it came to certain crucial fish-related Bible stories. There were so many of those: Jonah and the whale, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the Galilean disciples being fishermen, the whole ‘fishers of men’ analogy . . . the bit in Matthew 13 about the kingdom of heaven being like a net cast into the sea, gathering fish of every kind . . . Even in the opening chapter of Genesis, the first animals God made were sea creatures. How much of the Bible would he have to give up as untranslatable?”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“Of all forms of commentary on the divine Word, a translation is the most subtle.”
― Anthony Buzzard, Our Fathers Who Aren't in Heaven

“It feels like going home, same as always, and opening the door to find all these people there: someone who feels like an old friend even though we’ve never met, someone who means the world to me but I can never see again, somebody crying, somebody laughing, people from far away—and I’m there, too. We don’t talk about anything special, but we’re all there, just sharing time.”
― Mieko Kawakami

“If you simply copy and paste instant translations, you only end up with meaningless and contextless junk, which has no relation to the culture and the people.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Better to have no translation, than to have a translation without soul.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“To translate a text is to be conducted into its mysteries in a way that no mere act of reading—however conscientious or frequent—makes possible. At the very least, a translator is obliged to confront the words on the page not merely as meanings to be received, but as problems to be solved; and this demands an attentiveness to detail for which most of us never quite have the time.”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament