Translation Quotes

Translation is the art of failure.

I would love mainland Chinese to read my book. There is a Chinese translation which I worked on myself, published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many copies have gone into China but it is still banned.

Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.

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

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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