Quotessence
Home / Topics / Translation Quotes

Translation Quotes

Browse 200 quotes about Translation.

Translation Quotes

“Translation involves more than the deciphering of words, words strung together in sentences, in paragraphs, in dialogue, in the years of a life. After all, a machine can do that if you feed all the data into it. Translation also involves making sense of what’s left unspoken, those ellipses, blank spaces, the dot-dot-dots when you have to guess what’s happening in the person’s mind, what the silent messages mean. It calls for the translation of surrounding events, the cultural context, as well as the translation of nonverbal communication. What was being said through that certain look, that ever-so-tiny smile, that flash of a grimace? That spark of anger? Those sarcastic comments? Those prolonged silences? What did it all mean? (249)”

GriefGrief And LossFamily RelationshipsInheritanceGrief QuotesMemoir WritingTranslationGrief And Loss QuotesFamily ConflictTranslation Quotes
Book:Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
Create image

“We no longer had a lingua franca after we moved there. We consisted of six people, our own little Tower of Babel… Six people speaking many different languages, none of them mutually intelligible. Six people bumping into each other in the dark, no longer able to understand each other, wounding one other in the process (257).”

GriefMemoirGrief And LossFamily RelationshipsInheritanceGrief QuotesTranslationGrief And Loss QuotesFamily ConflictTranslation Quotes
Book:Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
Create image

“Admittedly, a number of the translations of my life, of what went on in Ivy Lodge, are loose at best, warranting multiple-choice answers, never ideal in the scientifically based world of translation. You're supposed to go from the source language (the language being translated) to the target language (the language being translated into). A translation is only good when the translator knows--or can surmise--the intention of the person being translated, understands with a fair amount of confidence the exact meaning of that source language. Maybe that's one problem with my attempts to translate my family. Maybe my parents remained unclear in their own minds what they wanted to say, what their words and behavior meant, what their underlying motivation was. In that case, it makes translation doubly difficult if the source of the words and events to be translated is lost in a sea of linguistic confusion. Translators need patterns to make sense out of foreign words, or it all becomes a hodgepodge of meaningless sounds and symbols. Chaos (256).”

GriefGrief And LossFamily RelationshipsInheritanceGrief QuotesMemoir WritingTranslationGrief And Loss QuotesFamily ConflictTranslation Quotes
Book:Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
Create image

“In addition to the physical aspects of the work, I'm here to recreate my own personal story, my own narrative. For years—a lifetime, really—when I thought about my life, I saw it through the lens of other people, usually my parents, sometimes my sib-lings. If they told me I was this, that, or the other type of person, I usually took their words at face value, even when the descriptions sounded negative, even when I fought their pronouncements. But translation is all about making decisions, hundreds, even thousands of decisions. Maybe a new way exists to look at myself, at my life. At long last, I’ll take those same words and events to come up with different meanings, different interpretations, ones I've reached on my own, stripping away others' interpretations of who I am. (9)”

GriefMemoirGrief And LossFamily RelationshipsInheritanceGrief QuotesTranslationGrief And Loss QuotesTranslation Quotes
Book:Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
Create image

“The translator in me--always at work, even in English-wants to understand the intent of his words. This is where the meaning must lie, right? With the filters turned off, the translator's mind is unfettered by others' words, actions, or opinions, or even by their mere presence. (15)”

GriefMemoirGrief And LossFamily RelationshipsInheritanceGrief QuotesTranslationGrief And Loss QuotesTranslation Quotes
Book:Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
Create image

“In my case, I felt like I'd been drowning in a sea of words, words that, more often than not, bore no resemblance to their dictionary definitions. What was the point of communicating if, inevitably, a subtext bubbled up, one I had trouble making sense of in my naïveté, in my confusion? What was the point if a word's meaning had been distorted to fit secret agendas, flip-flopped for unknown ulterior motives, withheld for other reasons? Translating what anyone said had become impossible for me, my work with languages, my love of words failing me when it came to my own family. All my dictionaries proved useless in trying to decipher a lifetime of communication fraught with subtexts buried beneath more subtexts. (134)”

GriefMemoirGrief And LossFamily RelationshipsInheritanceGrief QuotesTranslationGrief And Loss QuotesFamily ConflictTranslation Quotes
Book:Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
Create image

“Why did she keep these random items? How did they make the cut? Maybe she felt it had to be her decision what to keep, what to discard, just as it's my turn now, my decision as I go room to room, playing God with my parents' possessions. (148)”

GriefMemoirGrief And LossFamily RelationshipsInheritanceGrief QuotesTranslationGrief And Loss QuotesFamily ConflictTranslation Quotes
Book:Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
Create image

“When you're translating a document or a speech, if you don't have all the words, you don't have all the meaning. I'd only had my words thus far, my thoughts, not hers. That had given me an incomplete picture, one with pockets of omissions… (154)”

GriefMemoirGrief And LossFamily RelationshipsInheritanceGrief QuotesTranslationGrief And Loss QuotesFamily ConflictTranslation Quotes
Book:Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
Create image

“Translators build the bridges. The chasm between languages is a deep ravine of silence. So what can we do but trust that the translators' bridges are sturdy, will carry the weight of meaning from one side of the ravine to the other? But all these bridges are faulty. Hitches and chinks because one language cannot cross over to another language unaltered and unflawed.”

LanguageUnderstandingCommunicationMetaphorBridgesImperfectionTranslationCultural Connection
Book:Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung
Create image

“The theme of translation has a long history in psychoanalysis. It retains significance as a term that represents three related ideas: a language change, a movement across a psychic boundary, and the transference of an object relationship. Freud's terms Übertragung [transference, transmission] and Ubersetzung [translation] carry all of these connotations, for they both mean bringing something across, or carrying something over. The etymology of the related word 'metaphor' derives from a literal Greek version of the Latin of transference (both meaning 'carrying beyond or across'). Similarly, we can include the related term 'interpretation,' which certainly describes a transfer of meaning or a translation of one set of terms into another. Again the Greek word metaphrase unites these two meanings, and a metaphrastis is a translator. In a similar vein, the Yiddish expression fartaysthn means to translate and to explain (Bloom, 2008).”

MetaphorPsychoanalysisTranslationTranslating
Author:Lewis Kirshner
Create image

“The corresponding metaphor, synecdoche, or metonymy, in another language will often be justly chargeable with obscurity and impropriety, perhaps even with absurdity. … {metonymy - sail vs vellum - for ship} … These tropes therefore are of a mixed nature. At the same time that they bear a reference to the primitive signification, they derive from their customary application to the figurative sense, that is, in other words, from the use of the language, somewhat of the nature of proper terms.”

LanguageMetaphorTranslation
Book:The Philosophy of Rhetoric
Create image

“At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper. At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts. The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional.”

ThoughtsFlowScience FictionPatternsFragileSystemTranslationNeurons
Book:The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
Create image

“It was under English trees that I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I pictured it perfect and inviolate on the secret summit of a mountain; I pictured its outlines blurred by rice paddies, or underwater; I pictured it as infinite—a labyrinth not of octagonal pavillions and paths that turn back upon themselves, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms....I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite.”

TimeBeautySolitudeTranslationEntropy
Book:El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan
Create image

“Among all books, those of reasoning seem the most susceptible of good translations. Reason and morality belong to all countries. The genius of language, this bane of translators, is less noticeable in books where only ideas have to be conveyed, and where style is not the first merit, whereas works of imagination can be rarely transmitted from one person to another, for, in order to translate a good poet, you would have to be as good a one as he.”

WritingReasonLanguageBooksMoralityTranslation
Book:Reason, Illusion, and Passion: Philosophical Works
Create image

“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 the translation of poetry there exists a possibility of the components like imagination, art of wordplay, skill of constructing internal rhythm and expansion of knowledge of the poet getting affected by the constraint and different methods employed by the translator.”

PoetryLanguagePoemComprehensionReadersTranslationNepaliQuote By Nepali WritersNepali PoetPoet S Mind
Book:भारत शाश्वत आवाज [Bharat Shashwat Aawaz]
Create image

“In the translation of poetry, there exists a possibility of the components like imagination, art of wordplay, skill of constructing internal rhythm and expansion of knowledge of the poet getting affected by the constraint and different methods employed by the translator.”

PoetryLanguagePoemComprehensionReadersTranslationNepaliQuote By Nepali WritersNepali PoetPoet S Mind
Book:भारत शाश्वत आवाज [Bharat Shashwat Aawaz]
Create image

“कविता कविबाट निस्किएर पाठकमा प्रवेश गरेपछि पाठकको चेतनावृत्तमा समाहित हुन्छ । एउटा पाठकले कवितालाई आफ्नो चेतनाभन्दा बाहिर फैल्याएर ग्रहण गर्न सक्दैन, बरू खुम्च्याएर गर्न सक्छ । यसो हुने हुनाले प्रत्येक कविता हरेक पाठकमा पुग्दा कुनै न कुनै रूपमा फेरिएर पुग्ने सम्भावना सँधै रहिरहेको हुन्छ । यो ‘फेरिनु’ प्रकारान्तरले अनूदित हुनु नै हो । त्यसैले कविताको प्रत्येक बुझाइ एउटा अनुवाद हो ।”

PoetryPoemComprehensionAssimilationReadersTranslationNepaliQuote By Nepali WritersNepali PoetPoet S Mind
Book:भारत शाश्वत आवाज [Bharat Shashwat Aawaz]
Create image

“पाठकले कवितालाई आफ्नो चेतनाभन्दा बाहिर फैल्याएर ग्रहण गर्न सक्दैन, बरू खुम्च्याएर गर्न सक्छ ।”

PoetryPoemComprehensionAssimilationReadersTranslationNepaliQuote By Nepali WritersNepali PoetPoet S Mind
Book:भारत शाश्वत आवाज [Bharat Shashwat Aawaz]
Create image

“कविता अर्को भाषामा अनूदित हुनु अघि मूलभाषामै अनुवादकको चेतनाको आकारभित्र खुम्चिने वा फैलिने भइसकेको हुन्छ, अर्को भाषामा अनूदित हुँदा त्यो फेरि अनुवादकको लक्षित भाषाको चेतनावृत्तभित्र अझ खुम्चिने वा अझ फैलिने गर्दछ ।”

PoetryLanguagePoemComprehensionReadersTranslationQuote By Nepali WritersNepali PoetNepali QuotesPoet S Mind
Book:भारत शाश्वत आवाज [Bharat Shashwat Aawaz]
Create image

“कविताको अनुवादमा कविको कल्पनाशक्ति, शब्दकौशल, साङ्गीतिक चेत, ज्ञानको आकार आदि अवयवहरू अनुवादकको सीमितता वा वैशिष्ट्यबाट प्रभावित हुने सम्भावना रहन्छ ।”

PoetryLanguagePoemComprehensionReadersTranslationNepaliQuote By Nepali WritersNepali PoetPoet S Mind
Book:भारत शाश्वत आवाज [Bharat Shashwat Aawaz]
Create image

“कविता अर्को भाषामा अनूदित हुनु अघि मूलभाषामै अनुवादकको चेतनाको आकारभित्र खुम्चिने वा फैलिने भइसकेको हुन्छ, अर्को भाषामा अनूदित हुँदा त्यो फेरि अनुवादकको लक्षित भाषाको चेतनावृत्तभित्र अझ खुम्चिने वा अझ फैलिने गर्दछ । त्यसले गर्दा कविताको अनुवादमा कविको कल्पनाशक्ति, शब्द कौशल, साङ्गीतिक चेत, ज्ञानको आकार आदि अवयवहरू अनुवादकको सीमितता वा वैशिष्ट्यबाट प्रभावित हुने सम्भावना रहन्छ ।”

PoetryLanguagePoemComprehensionReadersTranslationNepaliQuote By Nepali WritersNepali PoetPoet S Mind
Book:भारत शाश्वत आवाज [Bharat Shashwat Aawaz]
Create image

“According to The History of the Body, edited by Corbin, Courtine, and Vigarello, the "criminalization of the gaze" that took hold around the dawn of the twentieth century had led to the decline of the freak show, which was subsequently replaced in popularity by the Monsters of Hollywood. Now, with costumes serving as an ethical cushion, people could enjoy ogling deformity without guilt or reserve.”

DisabilitySocial IssuesDisabledJapanese LiteratureTranslationJapanese CultureDisability Rights
Book:Hunchback
Create image

“Language is Highway to A Culture (Diary of A Polyglot Neuroscientist, S.2392) Languages are not ornaments, languages are organs, channeling spirit from the heart. Language is highway to a culture, language requires a vessel, not translator. Soon earbuds will feature instant translation, which will render crosscultural conversation seamless, but at the same time, lifeless, hollow and cold. Until we develop the brain technology to communicate meaning telepathically without talking, no amount of translation can carry the warmth, nuances and sentiment of a lived language. As added perk, speaking more than one language delays age-related cognitive decline. Therefore no matter how you look at it, one broken second language is far more valuable than all the mass-produced subtitles.”

LanguageLinguisticsTranslationLanguage LearningPolyglotLanguage BarrierMultilingualismBilingualLanguage Studies
Book:Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat
Create image