Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Translators. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Translators Quotes And Sayings by 93 Authors including Margaret Obank,Ned Rorem,Terry Teachout,Hilary Mantel,Eliot Weinberger for you to enjoy and share.

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...literary translators are the interpreters of human values - and the true peacemakers.
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The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own.
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Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere.
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I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person.
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Translation is not appropriation, as is sometimes claimed; it is a form of listening that then changes how you speak.
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The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
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Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing ... It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.
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The world cannot be translated;
It can only be dreamed of and touched.
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All translations are made up" opined Vikram, "Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something
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You can't translate something
that was never in a language
in the first place.
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Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.
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Translation is the art of failure.
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THE GREEK INTERPRETER
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A translator, caught in the space between two tongues. Such people tend to come a little bit unglued from the task of trying to convey meaning from one code to the other. The transfer is never safe, the meaning changes in the channel - becomes tinted, adulterated, absurd, stronger.
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I'm pretty good with languages.
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When we translate, we always to some extent betray the text we are translating. That is why translation is so hard and thankless. All you can do is to fail in the least egregious way possible.
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You know, they say in France that translation is like a woman: she is either beautiful or faithful.
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It is only logical for the translator to become a part of the world of the author.
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A satisfactory translation is not always possible, but a good translator is never satisfied with it. It can usually be improved. (Newmark)
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Sometimes translation stops you understanding.
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I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.
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All translating seems to me to be simply an attempt to accomplish an impossible task.
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As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue.
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You do know what's coming up when you're translating. I suppose the concentration, then, is on finding a formulation which is speakable and in character - and economical as well, actually.
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There is no such thing as a perfect, ideal, or 'correct' translation. A translator is always trying to extend his knowledge and improve his means of expression; he is always pursuing facts and words.
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Translation presents not merely a paradigm but the utmost case of engaged literary interpretation
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So many people consider their work a daily punishment. Whereas I love my work as a translator. Translation is a journey over a sea from one shore to the other. Sometimes I think of myself as a smuggler: I cross the frontier of language with my booty of words, ideas, images, and metaphors.
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There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.
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Some attempts at translating from one language into another one can be pretty funny if the translators don't know what they're doing.
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I will always be a translation.
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A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors' reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting - these are all part of the translation.
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Translation is at best an echo.
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It's daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.
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The problem is that it is difficult to translate.
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Interpreting at its core is taking in one language and putting out the other.
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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.
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Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning.
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Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.
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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread.
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As the writer, you can choose the word that seems best in terms of meaning, nuance, sound, etc. As the translator you are unlikely to find a word in your language that exactly matches, so that you are always making a decision about which meaning or nuance to choose, or emphasize, over the others.
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What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.
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When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
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Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.
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A real translation is transparent.
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Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.
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When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation.
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Above all, translators must be native speakers. It's not because they speak the language better
I understand that sometimes a foreigner can learn a language better than native speakers. It has more to do with having an intimate knowledge of the society for which the book is being translated.
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Translators need a lot of skills besides fluency in at least two languages; translators need to be excellent writers in their native language and need to be interested in and skilled at terminology research using both paper dictionaries and the Internet.
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The choices that bedevil the writer bedevil the translator ten times over.
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It's one of the hardest things to translate anything that's not standard.
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Poetry is what is gained in translation.
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We are all mediators, translators.
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At the end of the day, even the magic of machine translation is like Facebook, a way of taking free contributions from people and regurgitating them as bait for advertisers or others who hope to take advantage of being close to a top server.
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I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
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When we express our thought in words, the medium is not found easily. There must be a process of translation, which is often inexact, and then we fall into error. But
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Please, never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.
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Translation is a form of passive aggression. In doing it, a writer chooses to forgo original authorship so as to play havoc with a foreign original in a process of imitation, zigzagging between the foreign and receiving languages but in the last analysis cancelling the first in favor of the second.
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Give your mind a chance to travel through foreign languages.
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The translator constantly learns new things about himself.
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Translation: I'm an idiot.
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All language is but a poor translation.
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Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.
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The best translations are always the ones in the language the author can't read.
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Translation was never possible. Instead there was always only conquest, the influx of the language of hard nouns, the language of metal, the language of either/or, the one language that has eaten all the others.
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You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry.
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If one could read fluently, confidently, in every known language, one would have no need of translators or translations; one could read Homer on Mondays, Akhmatova on Tuesdays, Swahili poets on Wednesdays, and so on.
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( ... ) the translator of prose is the slave of the author and the translator of poetry is his rival.
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Entire sections of them simply cannot be translated - the characters are legible and well-known, but when put together they do not say anything that leaves an imprint on the modern mind."
"Like instructions for programming a VCR.
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Translation, an archaic way of silencing, marginalizing or disowning other people's originality, must come to an end.
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I have always maintained that translation is essentially the closest reading one can possibly give a text. The translator cannot ignore "lesser" words, but must consider every jot and tittle.
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No translation can possibly be perfect. Every production and every performance is a different path up the mountain, and nobody ever makes it all the way to the summit.
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Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.
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God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice.
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Where names of people or places would mean little to a contemporary reader, I figured "translation errors" could create interesting new meanings.
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It is my huge pleasure that my novels are translated into languages that are read among small numbers of people.
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Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.
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Structure is translation software for your imagination.
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An interpreter must give his blood to the work interpreted.
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But I can't translate it the right way, that's why I always use so many languages around you, because there're some things that simply can't translate, that are beautiful when you read them the original way.
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(Claude and Marcel LeFever were speaking in French. This simultaneous English translation is being beamed to the reader via literary satellite.)
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The guru, if he is gifted, reads the story as any bilingual person might. He does not translate-he understands.
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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.
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All explicit knowledge is translated knowledge, and all translation is imperfect.
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A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
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Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing them into our own preferred ideas and gestalts...
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Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our world. If schools of journalism knew their business, they would graduate no one who could not render the Greek poets.
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I learned from my father to translate: everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it's really saying.
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Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials.
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INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.
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Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.
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Time reveals all translation to be paraphrase.
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The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read.
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If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one's own writings in translation.
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My love translated sounds like a dead language.
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In language clarity is everything.
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People banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, but a code it is, to which linguists are currently devoting articles.
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I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.
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Some word - from before this translation
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There are some days when no matter what I say it feels like I'm far away in another country & whoever is doing the translating has had far too much to drink.