Translation Quotes

True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

For the version of this CD released in Japan, a translation of the English lyrics is included, but there are lots of places where meanings are lost in the process of translation.

Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle.

I love the song 'El Rey.' And for years, I never knew what the song was totally about. It was something new for me. I'd never sung a song in Spanish before. Then I got the translation and saw what a really cool song it was.

Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.

And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.

By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.

And after I started working for the Bureau, most of my translation duties included translations of documents and investigations that actually started way before 9/11.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.

The US and the European Union needs to help in the translation of the demand for democracy into a political will.

A firm, for instance, that does business in many countries of the world is driven to spend an enormous amount of time, labour, and money in providing for translation services.

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.

Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation.

For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?

I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in translation.

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.

I don't know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people's websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries.

Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you.

The Japanese version comes with a translation, but that's different from the lyrics, so people could look things up and find a translation of their own if they're interested.

The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.