Top 30 Translator Quotes

My phone is my favorite travel gadget because it has my translator.

I think of myself as a translator. I just change the dry, unfeeling language of data into a visual language that allows for feeling.

Now, every organization has to have a translator for the Hispanics on the teams, and that helps a lot.

When I was 16 years old, I assembled a 2.3 million electron volt beta particle accelerator. I went to Westinghouse, I got 400 pounds of translator steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I assembled a 6-kilowatt, 2.3 million electron accelerator in the garage.

I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing – I’m always searching for multiple ways to say things.

The existence of another, competing translation is a good thing, in general, and only immediately discouraging to one person – the translator who, after one, two, or three years of more or less careful work, sees another, and perhaps superior, version appear as if overnight.

If a translation doesn’t have obvious writing problems, it may seem quite all right at first glance. We readers, after all, quickly adapt to the style of a translator, stop noticing it, and get caught up in the story.

When I act as a translator, I am really doing a performance for my fellow Anglophone readers in the West.

My mom is a translator for the school district in Delaware. She’d hear these different stories from working with families there. Those stories stuck with me.

I always read the translator’s draft all the way through – a very laborious business.

Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.

The only problem was that I couldn’t communicate with Dario. He speaks Italian and I don’t. We had a translator the whole time. I just felt that something was lost with the go between. He was a delightful man, but I wish we could have spoken the same language.

I’m a good communicator, and I’m a good translator. I can talk to engineers; I can talk to people for whom technology is not remotely interesting or even maybe scary – things like that.

I see my role as a translator, telling the story that’s in the book using the more visual language of film.

I have two friends named Matt. They’re both scouts in the cavalry. They both served in the same section of Iraq. They both worked with the same Iraqi translator. And yet, if you talk to them, their stories couldn’t be more different, because one was there in 2006. One was there in 2008.

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.

My mom’s a translator, my dad’s a woodworker; that’s the world I grew up in, that’s the world I’m most comfortable in. The whole idea of Hollywood or any of that other stuff that unfortunately goes along with film, that wasn’t part of my upbringing, thankfully.

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.

It was nice to be in my own country, where I didn’t need a translator or a driver. Where I didn’t need to figure out cultural references or what hijab I needed to wear to cover my hair.

The CIA will only hire people with impeccable credentials to be a translator. ‘Impeccable credentials’ means you’ve never lived outside the United States.

The barrier of communication is terrible if you don’t speak the language. You cannot reach a player with a translator.

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 remember what it was like when my parents couldn’t help me with my homework because they couldn’t speak the language, or being a translator for my parents. I did that a lot.

If I make a speech, I need a translator. But music does not need a translation. People understand me through the sound. That I think is very important. This is just one planet, like one family.

As a physician and as a pilot, I think it lets me be a pretty good translator having one foot in the medical world and one foot in the flying world. Sometimes when the medical guys come in and speak medical stuff to the pilots, the pilots really don’t know what they’re saying.

You know it was really hard to do a set, or even to do interviews in English, because in Europe, we always had a translator with us.

I never used a translator, never thought that the journalists might not understand.

In ‘Hope Never Dies’, the fictional Obama and Biden go up against drug traffickers, outlaw bikers, and other seedy opponents. They’re forced to use skills they didn’t know they had. Or, to put it another way, unlike Jordan Peele’s Obama, this Obama doesn’t need an anger translator.

I was my mother’s translator until I was probably 12 years old, and I remember how people looked at her.

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator’s voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.