Words matter. These are the best Translation Quotes from famous people such as Story Musgrave, Chinmayi, Peter Milligan, Rory McCann, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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 started a company in 2005 for language services called Blue Elephant. We handle translation and interpretation services in over 120 languages.
I’ve always been interested in the Greek tragedies. A few years back, I re-read a translation of the ‘The Oresteia,’ and that stayed with me, and slowly this idea of using some of those old legends and plays to tell a new story about modern urban life began to form.
The thing that I just discovered, which fascinates me really – my name, McCann, the translation isn’t ‘Son of Ann’… It comes from ‘Canis’ – as in ‘canine’ – as in ‘dog!’ My name – Rory McCann – means Rory Hound, Rory Wolfhound.
During the decade following the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, the problem of translation – namely, how genetic information is used to synthesize proteins – was a central topic in molecular biology.
Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn’t realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.
The English book world is relatively closed to translation, so only a small amount of foreign language work can come in.
Even when she was alive, Esther Kreitman’s novels, short stories and translations received far less attention than the work of her famous brothers, I. J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I’ve learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.
By the age of nine, I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them.
‘The Sound of Things Falling’ may be a page turner, but it’s also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vasquez’s prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean’s idiomatic English version. All the novel’s characters are well imagined, original and rounded.
To me, the process of art is very much a process of translation, of borrowing.
Sometimes it can be difficult when you’re talking to a journo after the game, saying, ‘Yeah mate, I was on the burst.’ And then the translator is trying to translate that into Japanese, and apparently there is no actual translation.
I have some English words on the first album, but any time I try to do it, you miss something. You think it’s just a simple translation from French to English, but it’s so different as far as the understanding.
In Washington, the translation of E Pluribus Unum has been lost. The belief that we are one nation – united in purpose – caring about and for one another is no longer the practice.
Booking.com is one of the biggest translation companies in the world.
I’ve always loved cuneiform; I’ve always loved the way it looks. I love that it’s the world’s oldest script. And the creative potential of bad translation or misunderstanding or something has always been at the core of the idea of ‘Dirty Projectors.’ So the cuneiform is pretty playful – basically, just a joke.
Machine translation of signs, text, and speech brings down language barriers and facilitates ever more cross-cultural meetings of like minds.
What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.
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.
Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
Scarlett Johansson has a smile she tries to suppress in every movie she makes. She’s been trying to keep a straight face since she appeared with Bill Murray 11 years ago in her breakthrough, ‘Lost in Translation.’
Sometimes I look up a recipe for chicken and tomatoes and end up cooking pork. The inspiration gets lost in translation.
A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian – yet we understand Chekhov and the others.
The translation of social media buzz does not really happen. Films do well through word of mouth.
I’m trying to find the balance and do, like, ‘Spanglish’ music or some songs in Spanish and others in English or do a translation.
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.
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
I feel French is very close to Urdu. Both languages are beautiful. Sadly, their beauty is lost in translation.
I want to go to a country where I don’t speak the language. I want to be lost in translation.
When a translation is very good, it is fascinating to see how the book changes and yet stays the same. I think ‘Out Stealing Horses’ sounds more American for Americans than it does in Norway, and still, it is all there, everything that I wrote. It’s amazing.
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.
Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.
Though I have seldom done anything to my own satisfaction, I am better satisfied with the translation of the New Testament than I ever expected to be. The language is, I believe, simple, plain, intelligible; and I have endeavored, I hope successfully, to make every sentence a faithful representation of the original.
I have read Omar Khayyam’s ‘Rubaiyat’ in translation and marvelled at the emotions and its universal appeal and dreamt of authoring such a work in Telugu. ‘Pyaasa’ is the result.
Translation is at best an echo.
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.
As a child, I would say that I wanted to become a dancer to honour music. For me, dancing is the physical translation of the audio recording.
I do a lot of recipe creation. Translation: cooking tempting dishes that must be eaten.
Though most of my titles are translated into about 7 to 8 languages, I feel that translations, to some extent, can lose the flavour of the colloquial words used otherwise in the regional narrative.
Translation is not original creation – that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.
When you grow up in the church, the only translation in that insular world that people understand is preaching. You’re supposed to be a minister. So I was going down that path, and then I saw the Tonys.
I had to struggle with the language. I can understand Hindi now, but I still can’t communicate. And things get lost in translation; I feel rejected all the time.
Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world.
People are usually so disappointed with book-to-movie translations.
The best translations are always the ones in the language the author can’t read.
Of course we may have any number of translations of a given text – the more the better, really.
Walter Benjamin used to think that languages expand their register thanks to translation, because translation forces ways of using words and structures that were alien to the original speaker of the target language.
I’ve personally reached the point where the sound of MP3s are so uncompelling, because so much is lost in translation.
Translation is the art of failure.
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.
The director Sofia Coppola’s new comic melodrama, ‘Lost in Translation,’ thoroughly and touchingly connects the dots between three standards of yearning in movies: David Lean’s ‘Brief Encounter,’ Richard Linklater’s ‘Before Sunrise’ and Wong Kar-wai’s ‘In the Mood for Love.’
By the 1880s, English translations of both the French and the Russian editions were available, and Americans began to read ‘War and Peace.’
I love working with the actors eye-to-eye. I think something gets lost in translation, not only through a monitor, but when you leave the area where the actual scene is taking place.
