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Translation Quotes

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Translation Quotes

“Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up to the portholes. But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day, and she would listen to every sound, spring to her feet, feel surprised that it had not come; then at sunset, always more sorrowful, she would wish the next day were already there.”

SoulWaitingSadDepressionSimileTranslationMadame BovaryLydia Davis
Book:madame bovary
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“Let not the rash marble risk garrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence, in many words recalling name, renown, events, birthplace. All those glass jewels are best left in the dark. Let not the marble say what men do not. The essentials of the dead man's life-- the trembling hope, the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight-- will abide forever. Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continue when it is the lives of others that will make that happen, as you yourself are the mirror and image of those who did not live as long as you and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth.”

LifeSelfPhilosophyDeathMortalityTranslationInscription On Any Tomb
Book:Selected poems
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“One word absent from a sentence, or misinterpreted incorrectly, can change the entire meaning of a sentence. One word can change the meaning of everything. Before you believe anything about God or anybody, ask yourself how well do you trust the transmitter, translator or interpreter. And if you have never met them, then how do you know if the knowledge you acquired is even right? One hundred and twenty-five years following every major event in history, all remaining witnesses will have died. How well do you trust the man who has stored his version of a story? And how can you put that much faith into someone you don't know?”

BelieveGodFactsStoriesTruthTimeReligionSpeakLanguageFictionKnowledgeHistoryMediaEventsInformationCommunicationEvolutionNewsDiedAgingPassingWitnessMeaningTrueStoryTranslateHistoricAbsentFactWordEverythingTransmitTranslationFalseNews MediaSentenceInterpretWitnessesTranslatorStored
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“The one area in which some women can claim a degree of parity is in literature. The educated ladies of Elizabethan England are making their biggest impression through translations, for noble and gentry families choose to educate their daughters in languages and music above all other things. The daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke are foremost among these. The formidable Anne, who marries Sir Nicholas Bacon, publishes a translation from the Latin of no less a work than John Jewel’s Apologie of the Church of England in 1564. Her sister, Mildred, the wife of Sir William Cecil, can speak Greek as fluently as English and translates several works. Another of Sir Anthony’s daughters, Elizabeth, Lady Russell, publishes her translation from the French of A Way of Reconciliation touching the true nature and substance of the body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament; and a fourth daughter, Katherine, is renowned for her ability to translate from the Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Other families also produce female scholars. Mary Bassett, granddaughter of Sir Thomas More, is well-versed in the classics and translates works by Eusebius, Socrates and several other ancient writers, not to mention a book by her grandfather. Jane, Lady Lumley, publishes a translation of Euripides. Margaret Tyler publishes The Mirror of Princely deeds and Knighthood (1578), translated from the Spanish. And so on. The educated ladies of Elizabethan England are far freer to reveal the fruits of their intellect than their mothers and grandmothers.”

WomenEmpowermentTranslation
Book:The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England
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“The externals of English are being acquired by speakers wholly alien to the historical fabric, to the inventory of felt moral, cultural existence embedded in the language. The landscapes of experience, the fields of idiomatic, symbolic, communal reference which give to the language its specific gravity, are distorted in transfer or lost altogether”

LanguageLiesEnglishTranslation
Book:After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
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“If accuracy, fidelity, and the strictest attention to the letter of the text, be supposed to constitute the qualities of an excellent version, this of all versions, must, in general, be accounted the most excellent. Every sentence, every word, every syllable, and every letter and point, seems to have been weighed with the nicest exactitude; and expressed, either in the text, or margin, with the greatest precision”

WritingBibleProseEnglish LanguageEnglishTranslationEnglish LiteratureKing James Bible
Author:Father Alexander Geddes
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“These scholars were not pulling the language of the scriptures into the English they knew and used at home. The words of the King James Bible are just as much English pushed towards the condition of a foreign language as a foreign language translated into English. It was, in their words, more important to make English godly than to make the words of God into the sort of prose that any Englishmen would have written, and that secretarial relationship to the original languages of the scriptures shaped the translation. Of course, individual English words and phrases are held up to and examined to the point of a knife.”

GodReligionLanguageBibleWordsEnglishTranslationFallibility
Book:God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible
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“The Arabic Qur'an and authoritative Christian translations of the Bible into a limited number of languages contributed profoundly to the universalisation of a single ethnic religious—linguistic community in the Muslim case and to the distinction between major written languages and dialectic vernaculars in the Christian case. While the Islamic socio-political impact was thus in principle almost entirely anti-ethnic and anti-national, the Christian impact was more complex. Its willingness to translate brought with it, undoubtedly, a reduction in the number of ethnicities and vernaculars, but then a confirmation of the individual identity of those that remained: Christianity in fact helped turn ethnicities into nations.”

LanguageNationsChristianityBibleIslamEthnicityTranslationVernacularQur AnNationhood
Book:The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism
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“To be sure, all translation is interpretation. ... Be that as it may, functional-equivalence translations, which presume that ambiguity, multivalence, and contradiction are by definition not part of the Bible, take far more creative and interpretive license than formal ones in eradicating those features. In so doing, they too often try to make the Bible into something it's not.”

BibleTranslationOverreaching
Book:The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book
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“I try to tell them that all words are plastic. Word images begin to distort in the instant of utterance. Ideas imbedded in a language require that particular language for expression. This is the very essence of the meaning within the word exotic. See how it begins to distort? Translation squirms in the presence of the exotic. The Galach which I speak here imposes itself. It is an outside frame of reference, a particular system. Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change.”

LanguageChangeMeaningConservatismTranslationSystems
Book:God Emperor of Dune
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“In days long past, Jarod said he’d write a sentence about my love, translated in Russian, and that sentence, like my love, is clearly not for sale, unlike his virginity, or this book, which I’m both offering at ten times the market value, so hurry up and buy now, before it goes down.”

LoveWritingLongBookPastClearJokesValueSentencesOfferingDayPromotionNothingSalesVirginityDaysTranslationHurryingMarketHurrySentenceDoubleSaleClearlyTranslatedTranslatorGoing DownInternal Jokes
Book:Nothing is here...
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“Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly. Does that thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit warmer and more human? We live for such miracles.”

MindUniverseConsciousnessThoughtsMiracleTranslation
Book:The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
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“We are told that in translation there is no such thing as equivalence. Many times the translator reaches a fork in the translating road where they must make a choice in the interpretation of a word. And each time they make one of these choices, they are taken further from the truth. But what we aren’t told is that this isn’t a shortcoming of translation; it’s a shortcoming of language itself. As soon as we try to put reality into words, we limit it. Words are not reality, they are the cause of reality, and thus reality is always more. Writers aren't alchemists who transmute words into the aurous essence of the human experience. No, they are glassmakers. They create a work of art that enables us to see inside to help us understand. And if they are really good, we can see our own reflections staring back at us.”

WritingArtRealityTruthReadingSpeakLanguageEqualReflectionGoldWordsLimitationExplanationChoiceWritersInterpretationHelpPoetsReadHuman ExperienceArtistsWriteChooseAuthorsUnderstandWriting QuotesKamandKojouriKamand KojouriSimplifyTalkMirrorArtworkRoadLinguisticsTranslationInterpreterLimitRevealParaphraseGlassWriter QuotesComprehendChoseExplainToldInterpretTranslation QuotesTranslatingShortcomingTranslatorAlchemistsEquivalentForkPortrayTransmuteEquivalenceInterpretation QuotesAurousGlassmakerRestate
Author:Kamand Kojouri
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“Thank you,’ I answered, unsure of the proper American response to her gracious enthusiasm. In the Arab world, gratitude is a language unto itself. “May Allah bless the hands that give me this gift”; “Beauty is in the eyes that find me pretty”; “May Allah never deny your prayer”; and so on, an infinite string of prayerful appreciation. Coming from such a culture, I have always found a mere “thank you” an insufficient expression that makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful.” (169).”

LanguageExpressionGratitudeGiftComplimentThank YouAmericanTranslationArabic
Book:Mornings in Jenin
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“Before getting translated, a poem already gets shrunk or expanded within the ‘sphere of intellect’ of the translator in the original language, and it again gets shrunk or expanded within the ‘sphere of intellect’ of the translator in the target language. Thus, in translation of poetry; there exists a possibility of components like imagination, art of wordplay, skill of constructing internal rhythm and expand of knowledge of the poet getting affected by the constraint and differentia of the translator.”

PoetryPoemTranslationSphere Of Iint
Author:Suman Pokhrel
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“Poetry emerging from a poet enters into the reader only when it comes within the readers’ 'sphere of intellect. A reader cannot take poetry by expanding it beyond his/her consciousness, rather can take by shrinking it within. Thus, there exists a chance of every poem getting changed while reaching every reader. This ‘getting changed’ is a form of ‘getting translated’, in a way. So, every assimilation of any poem is a translation.”

PoetryPoetReaderCreative WritingAssimilationTranslationTranslatorUnderstanding PoetrySphere Of IntellectTranscreation
Book:भारत शाश्वत आवाज [Bharat Shashwat Aawaz]
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“If you know all the languages of the world and you don't know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, that is enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue or the languages of your culture, and add all the other languges to it, that is empowerment. In reality it is impossible for any person to know all the languages in their own country, let alone the world. This is where the art of translation comes in.”

CultureEmpowermentTranslationEnslavementLanguagesMother Tongue
Book:The Language of Languages
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“Det var det der holdt mig vågen om natten," sagde Walter. "Den her opsplitning af landet. For det er det samme problem overalt. Det er ligesådan med internettet eller kabel-tv - der er aldrig noget centrum, der er ingen fælles enighed, der er bare en billion forskellige distraherende støjkilder. Vi kan aldrig sætte os og føre en vedvarende samtale, det er bare billigt skrammel og en lorteudvikling, det hele. Alt det ægte, alt det autentiske, alt det ærlige dør ud. Intellektuelt og kulturelt bliver vi kastet omkring som tilfældige billiardkugler og reagerer på den seneste tilfældige stimulans.”

FreedomTranslationDanishFrihedOversættelse
Book:Freedom
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“Don't fret my dear. If art is translation of the ephemeral into observable form, then always remember that it is the translationn that is the craft. The craft is that which can always be improved. But the ephemeral is that which only you have been able to observe, and that which only you have chosen to translate, and so in a way, the ephemeral is you, and it is already beautiful.”

LifeArtHumorLife LessonsBeautyBeautiful LifeEphemeralTranslationBeauty In Nature
Book:Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too
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“It is in the imperative, inescapable, overwhelming demand that the victim be blamed and that you blame yourself with her. It is in the imperative, inescapable, overwhelming demand to exonerate the murdered at all costs. One does not learn to be silent: one is forced to shut up. One is forcibly silenced.”

IndependenceYoung AdultViolence Against WomenTranslationCollege LifeFemicideFemicidioLibros En Ingles
Book:Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice
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“At the Unity High School in the heart of Khartoum, a place pulsing with ease and luxury, I graduated with a Cambridge certificate. Though far from stupid, studying was simply not my passion at the time. I harboured no desire to become a doctor, a lawyer, or a chemist; my only wants were a home, a man who does not lie, a room in the shade of a tree, and a child to carry my name. However, upon drawing closer to examine everything at close range, I realised that I do not belong here. I have no place in a world that perfects the art of smiling to one's face, only to strike with stabs in the back the moment one turns away.”

NovelHistorical FictionColonialismTranslationSudan
Author:Mohamed Al-Mustafa Musa
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“They will try to ascribe a purpose to my death, as though it were a punishment, but don’t you do so, in order that I continue to live in all the shadows of your longing. I will always be in your sleep and your wakefulness. I will be with you praying, propitiating and yearning for you, in sadness, in sorrow, in dismay and in the most profound happiness.”

LossGriefFictionNovelMourningTranslationEpigram BooksSglitWidowerSg LitAlfian Sa AtLatiffMohamed Latiff MohamedThe Widower
Book:The Widower
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“In the city, human beings celebrated and enjoyed material conditions and comforts, but were caught in the labyrinths and knots of spiritual shallowness and psychological confusion. In the city human beings wrestled with the demands of survival and profit but fled from life’s imperatives of honesty and moderation. In the city man was afraid to confront his own face.”

NovelCitySingaporeEnglishTranslationMalayAlfian Sa AtCultural MedallionIsa Kamari
Book:The Tower
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“Pak Suleh recalled the atmosphere on his island of Pulau Sebidang, which had been ruled by his ancestors for more than a hundred years. Now it had been passed to foreign hands—whichever nation from whatever foreign world which had been claiming the island was theirs—such that he and his ancestors who had lived on that island for generation after generation had been chased away to live in these birdhouses. They had now inherited these congested breathing diseases. Why was it that he could no longer enjoy the wind which blows from the sea, which is very much one of God’s incomparable benevolences? He could no longer savour the swaying coconut trees, ketapang trees, beringin trees and other trees which whistled and murmured when caressed by the winds as their dried leaves fell onto the sand, mixed with red and white flowers scattered all over the pristine white beach, resembling the moving clouds on a wide piece of white paper. I have lost everything, thought Pak Suleh deep in his heart.”

NovelSingaporeEnglishTranslationMalayRelocationCultural MedallionPenghulu
Book:Penghulu
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