Interpreter Quotes

The magistrates are the ministers for the laws, the judges their interpreters, the rest of us are servants of the law, that we all may be free. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

An actor is at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents. ~ Alec Guinness

Ten doors are opened if one door be shut: the finger is the interpreter of the dumb man's tongue. ~ Saib Tabrizi

The infallibility and inerrancy of biblical teaching does not, however, guarantee the infallibility and inerrancy of any interpretation or interpreter of that teaching; nor does the recognition of its qualities as the Word of God in any way prejudge the issue as to what Scripture does, in fact, assert. This can be determined only by careful Bible study. ~ J.I. Packer

The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

In Russia, as I sat there day after day wearing headphones, listening to the interpreter struggle to make our words relevant, I wondered if we could establish meaningful rapport with a nation that had never seen raisins dance in dark glasses on TV ... never had a garage sale. ~ Erma Bombeck

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters. ~ Gustave Flaubert

I'm not a traditional sonero, at least not in the way they want me to be, I'm an interpreter, and I reach people in a different level. ~ Marc Anthony

I am an interpreter of interpretations ~ James Delingpole

Now as God revealed his Word and spoke, or preached, by the mouth of the fathers and Prophets, and at last by his own Son, then by the Apostles and evangelists, whose tongues were but as the pens of scribes writing rapidly, God thus employing men to speak to men; so to propose, apply, and declare this his Word, he employs his visible spouse as his mouthpiece and the interpreter of his intentions. It is God then who rules over Christian belief, but with two instruments, in a double way: (1) by his Word as by a formal rule and (2) by his Church as by the hand of the measurer and rule-user. Let us put it thus: God is the painter, our faith the picture, the colors are the Word of God, the brush is the Church. Here then are two ordinary and infallible rules of our belief: the Word of God, which is the fundamental and formal rule; the Church of God, which is the rule of application and explanation. ~ Francis De Sales

An interpreter must give his blood to the work interpreted. ~ Claudio Arrau

One blames politicians, not for inconsistency but for obstinacy. They are the interpreters, not the masters, of our fate. It is their job, in fact, to register the fact accompli. ~ John Maynard Keynes

I'm the interpreter. I'm the one who takes your words and brings them to life. I was trained to sing and dance and laugh, and that's what I want to do. ~ Aaliyah

You, the artistic renderer interpreter, must decide what U think about these coniptions. ~ Irucka Ajani Embry

So Christian went on his way, saying: Here have I seen things rare and profitable; Things pleasant, dreadful; things to make me stable In what I have begun to take in hand: Then let me think on them, and understand Wherefore they showed me where; and let me be Thankful, O good Interpreter, to thee. ~ John Bunyan

Art is Nature made by Man / To Man the interpreter of God. ~ Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of Lytton

In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter. ~ Stanley Kunitz

I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter. ~ Mark Twain

Don't be an interpreter of reality, be a visionary. Don't think about it, see it! ~ Osho

I did my first movie, 'The Mambo Kings,' in America without speaking the language. I learned the lines phonetically. I had an interpreter actually just to understand directions from my director. ~ Antonio Banderas

I'm a songwriter. My voice just serves what I'm writing about. So to let all that go, I mean, bring the sensibilities of it actually to the song choices, but to just be the interpreter was incredibly liberating, really fun. ~ Rosanne Cash

As an oracle to the goddess, the female outcast speaks as prophetess of times to come, interpreter of dreams of an unrevealed future. Outcasts are at home in the world of magic and infinite change. Their individual personalities merge with that of legend. Becoming vehicles of immortality, they self create their own myths, weave a spell over poets and artists and spread a belief in transcendence that heralds the future. ~ Florence Farr

Reason is not time only interpreter of life. The fountain of action is in time feelings. ~ Henry Theodore Tuckerman

A regular council was held with the Indians, who had come in on their ponies, and speeches were made on both sides through an interpreter, quite in the described mode,
the Indians, as usual, having the advantage in point of truth and earnestness, and therefore of eloquence. The most prominent chief was named Little Crow. They were quite dissatisfied with the white man's treatment of them, and probably have reason to be so. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The modern drama, operating through the double channel of dramatist and interpreter, affecting as it does both mind and heart,is the strongest force in developing social discontent, swelling the powerful tide of unrest that sweeps onward and over the dam of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition. ~ Emma Goldman

Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved. ~ Baruch Spinoza

Lefever describes his financing plan with modesty:
"'Our detailed budget is realistic, but does not take into account the inflation that may occur before September 1983. The one place it could cut or reduce is item 7, the simultaneous interpreter services, if these services could be provided gratis by the U.S. government.'"
"In other words, the only way to make a saving on a U.S.-subsidized project is to take money out of another U.S.-subsidized column. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The actual point in question, throughout the centuries of Christian persecution, has never been faith in God, but faith in the Bible as the word of God, and in the Church (this Church or that) as the interpreter of that word. ~ Joseph Campbell

I shall destroy capitalism! Do you hear! I shall destroy every single capitalist! And I shall start with you, you dog, if you don't help us with the bomb!'
Allan noted that the had managed to be both a rat and a dog in the course of a minute or so. And that Stalin was being rather inconsistent, because now he wanted to use Allan's services after all.
But Allan wasn't going to sit there and listen to this abuse any longer. He had come to Moscow to help them out, not to be shouted at. Stalin would have to manage on his own.
'I've been thinking,' said Allan.
'What,' said Stalin angrily.
'Why don't you shave off that moustache?'
With that the dinner was over, because the interpreter fainted. ~ Jonas Jonasson

I don't have favourites, I think, when you play, you have to be like a prostitute, you have to love the piece you are playing. Even if you don't like it, you have to play it as if you would like it. Then you are a good interpreter. ~ Ruggiero Ricci

A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from Rosamund's fingers, and so indeed it was, since souls live on in perpetual echoes, and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter. ~ George Eliot

I'm an interpreter of music. ~ Sarah Brightman

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it
are no longer the same interpreters. ~ George Eliot

The enjoyments of elegant life you early chose to abandon, preferring to wander for many successive years over the rudest portions of Europe and Asia-regions new to Science-in the hope, happily realized, of winning new truths.
By a rare union of favourable circumstances, and of personal qualifications equally rare, you have thus been enabled to become the recognized Interpreter and Historian (not without illustrious aid) of the Silurian Period. ~ John Jeremiah Bigsby

The artist is an interpreter of Nature. People learn to love Nature through pictures. To the artist, nothing is in vain; nothing beneath his notice. If he is great enough, he will exalt every subject which he treats. ~ William Morris Hunt

Dr. Mark Crisplin, a Portland, Oregon, ER doctor, reviewed the original EEG readings of a number of patients claimed by the scientists as being flatlined or "dead" and discovered that this was not at all the case. "What they showed was slowing, attenuation, and other changes, but only a minority of patients had a flat line, and it [dying] took longer than 10 seconds. The curious thing was that even a little blood flow in some patients was enough to keep EEGs normal." In fact, most cardiac patients were given CPR, which by definition delivers some oxygen to the brain (that's the whole point of doing it). Crisplin concluded: "By the definitions presented in the Lancet paper, nobody experienced clinical death. No doctor would ever declare a patient in the middle of a code 99 dead, much less brain dead. Having your heart stop for 2 to 10 minutes and being promptly resuscitated doesn't make you 'clinically dead.' It only means your heart isn't beating and you may not be conscious."31 Again, since our normal experience is of stimuli coming into the brain from the outside, when one part of the brain abnormally generates these illusions, another part of the brain - quite possibly the left-hemisphere interpreter described by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga - interprets them as external events. Hence, the abnormal is interpreted as supernormal or paranormal. ~ Michael Shermer

The ego is definitely an advancement, but it can be compared to the bark of the tree in many ways. The bark of the tree is flexible, extremely vibrant, and grows with the growth beneath. It is a tree's contact with the outer world, the tree's interpreter, and to some degree the tree's companion. So should man's ego be. When man's ego turns instead into a shell, when instead of interpreting outside conditions it reacts too violently against them, then it hardens, becomes an imprisoning form that begins to snuff out important data, and to keep enlarging information from the inner self. The purpose of the ego is protective. It is also a device to enable the inner self to inhabit the physical plane. It is in other words a camouflage. It is the ~ Jane Roberts

There is a great similarity between legal evidence and historical evidence. The only difference lies in the fact that in legal evidence it is the judge who determines whether the account of a witness is acceptable or not... The historian is prosecuting attorney and defense attorney and the judge all rolled into one, and he is the narrator and the interpreter. ~ Teodoro A. Agoncillo

[The poet] must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place. ~ Samuel Johnson

I lost so much energy in taxis, planes, hotels, phone calls and interpreters. Now, with the help from my little successes, I do everything in the same place with everyone around me. That's how a good job gets done. ~ Michel Ocelot

Adding to our understanding of why the brain seems undisturbed by disconnections was not only the notion that it was, in a sense, sending half its decisions into the realm of the unconscious; it was also the discovery of the "interpreter." This special left brain system kept note of all the behaviors that resulted from the many mental systems. It appeared to be the surveillance camera on our behavior, which, of course, was the evidence that a mental or cognitive act had occurred. The interpreter not only took note; it tried to make "sense" out of the behavior by keeping a running narrative going on about why a string of behaviors was occurring. It is a precious device and most likely uniquely human. It is working in us all the time as we try to explain why we like something or have a particular opinion, or rationalize something we have done. It is the interpreter device that takes the inputs from the massively modularized and automatic brain of ours and creates order from chaos. It comes up with the "makes sense" explanation that leads us to believe in a certain form of essentialism, that is, that we are a unified conscious agent. Nice try, interpreter! ~ Michael S. Gazzaniga

The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions ... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother ... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument. ~ Henry James

Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart. ~ Helen Keller

The new "ambiguity" means, in a way adjudged favorable to literary, poetic, intellectually and psychologically well-devised and praiseworthily executed linguistic performance, uncertainty of meaning, or difficulty for the interpreter in identifying just what the meaning in question is: it means the old meanings of ambiguity with a difference. It means uncertainty of meaning (of a word or combination of words) purposefully incorporated in a literary composition for the attainment of the utmost possible variety of meaning-play compressible within the verbal limits of the composition. ~ Laura Riding

The dead cannot speak. But hitherto unknown information has emerged from the confidential archives of the Syrian presidency and foreign ministry, published in a new book by Bouthaina Shaaban, who spent ten years as Hafez's interpreter and is still an adviser to his son Bashar. ~ Robert Fisk

The tongue of man is powerful enough to render the ideas which the human intellect conceives; but in the realm of true and deep sentiments it is but a weak interpreter. These are inexpressible, like the endless glory of the Omnipotent. ~ Lajos Kossuth

My interpreter Sayuri is folding a piece of notebook paper. She is at step 21, where the crane's body is inflated. The directions show a tiny puff besides an arrow pointing at the bird. It makes sense if you already know what to do. Otherwise, it's wonderfully surreal: Put a cloud inside a bird. ~ Mary Roach

To understand something sufficiently well to be able to program it for a computer does not mean to understand it to its ultimate depth. There can be no such ultimate understanding in practical affairs. Programming is rather a test of understanding. In this respect it is like writing; often when we think we understand something and attempt to write about it, our very act of composition reveals our lack of understanding even to ourselves. Our pen writes the word 'because' and suddenly stops. We thought we understood the 'why' of something, but discover that we don't. We begin a sentence with 'obviously,' and then see that what we meant to write is not obvious at all. Sometimes we connect two clauses with the word 'therefore,' only to then see that our chain of reasoning is defective. Programming is like that. It is, after all, writing, too. But in ordinary writing we sometimes obscure our lack of understanding, our failures in logic, by unwittingly appealing to the immense flexibility of a natural language and to its inherent ambiguity... An interpreter of of programming-language-texts, a computer, is immune to the seductive influence of mere eloquence... A computer is a merciless critic. ~ Joseph Weizenbaum

That way of inspiration
is always open,
and open to everyone;
it acts as go-between, interpreter,
it explains symbols of the past
in to-day's imagery. ~ Hilda Doolittle

Experiments on split-brain patients reveal how readily the left brain interpreter can make up stories and beliefs. In one experiment, for example, when the word walk was presented only to the right side of a patient's brain, he got up and started walking. When he was asked why he did this, the left brain (where language is stored and where the word walk was not presented) quickly created a reason for the action: I wanted to go get a Coke. ~ Michael Gazzaniga

Never trust the translation or interpretation of something without first trusting its interpreter. ~ Suzy Kassem

Real worth requires no interpreter: its everyday deeds form its emblem. ~ Nicolas Chamfort

We know the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Unfortunately, it happens all too seldom that you really disappear behind a work, that you are no longer audible as an interpreter. ~ Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

With 'Interpreter,' I didn't know it was ever going to be a book, that they were going to be published. I was writing them in a vacuum for the most part. They were my apprentice work. Then the stories happened to become a book. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye. ~ Charlotte Bronte

In Australia, a deaf person attending an interview must take their own interpreter at their own expense, or ask the employer to provide one. Believe me, nothing says 'I'm the best person for this job' quite like asking an employer to pay to interview you. ~ Stella Young

You see the genius that Whitney Houston has as an interpreter of material, and you realize why genius can be applied to only a few interpretive performers. She finds meaning and depth and soulfulness in a song that often the writer and composer never really knew was there. ~ Clive Davis

Professors of Greek forget or are unaware that Thomas Aquinas, who did not know Greek, was a better interpreter of Aristotle than any of them have proved to be, not only because he was smarter but because he took Aristotle more seriously. ~ Allan Bloom

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation ... for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place. ~ Edward W. Said

Biden likes to be candid in such settings. In 1979, on one of his first trips to the Soviet Union, he listened to an argument from his Soviet counterpart, and replied, "Where I come from, we have a saying: You can't shit a shitter." Bill Bradley, then a fellow-senator on the delegation, later asked the American interpreter how he had translated Biden's comment into Russian. "Not literally," the interpreter said. ~ Anonymous

The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions. To make a new version of the not-entirely-false model, imagine the first interpreter as a foreign correspondent, reporting from the world. The world in this case means everything out- or inside our bodies, including serotonin levels in the brain. The second interpreter is a news analyst, who writes op-ed pieces. They read each other's work. One needs data, the other needs an overview; they influence each other. They get dialogues going.

INTERPRETER ONE: Pain in the left foot, back of heel.
INTERPRETER TWO: I believe that's because the shoe is too tight.
INTERPRETER ONE: Checked that. Took off the shoe. Foot still hurts.
INTERPRETER TWO: Did you look at it?
INTERPRETER ONE: Looking. It's red.
INTERPRETER TWO: No blood?
INTERPRETER ONE: Nope.
INTERPRETER TWO: Forget about it.
INTERPRETER ONE: Okay.

Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.

An exemplary piece of confusion.

INTERPRETER ONE: There's a tiger in the corner.
INTERPRETER TWO: No, that's not a tiger- that's a bureau.
INTERPRETER ONE: It's a tiger, it's a tiger!
INTERPRETER TWO: Don't be ridiculous. Let's go look at it.

Then all the dendrites and neurons and serotonin levels and interpreters collect themselves and trot over to the corner.
If you are not crazy, the second inte ~ Susanna Kaysen

Read Hearn, the most eloquent and truthful interpreter of the Japanese mind, and you see the working of that mind to be an example of the working of Bushido. ~ Inazo Nitobe

I get nervous calling myself an artist. I feel I'm more like an interpreter or a violinist, you know. ~ Meryl Streep

I remember once, I read in a horoscope, because I'm an Aries, I read this terrible thing, which really affected me, which said, "You will never be original. You will always be an interpreter." (Laughs) I thought, "Oh my God." You know, I had to live with that on my back for [all my life]. ~ Andy Serkis

The state reserves the right to be the sole interpreter of the needs of society. ~ Benito Mussolini

Miraculous interpreter of squirmy gut feelings, ~ Ransom Riggs

Jacob, inspector of shadows, miraculous interpreter of squirmy gut feelings, seer and slayer of real and actual monsters - ~ Ransom Riggs

I am an interpreter of music rather than a composer of it. ~ Sarah Brightman

Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses. ~ Thomas Kuhn

My hosts have spread the spectrum: students, farm and construction workers, salesmen and truck drivers, teaches and writers... I've stayed in homes with backyard swimming pools and homes with backyard toilets, ridden with people who needed gas money and others who bought me meals, some who would put the fear of God into me, who whose country-twand talk almost called for an interpreter... but one thing had they in common: the willingness to help a stranger on the road or a weary friend at their door ~ Irv Thomas

Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

We both felt that the chief virtue of an interpreter consists in clarity combined with brevity. And ~ John Calvin

Upshaw - Apsaroke, 1905. Curtis's friend and interpreter Alexander Upshaw, "perfectly educated and absolutely uncivilized," as Curtis said of him, had trouble shuttling between two worlds. He chose to pose in the clothes of his ancestors. ~ Timothy Egan

To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery. ~ George MacDonald

One is just an interpreter of what the playwright thinks, and therefore the greater the playwright, the more satisfying it is to act in the plays. ~ Vivien Leigh

It's a very immersive and intense form of travel to walk around with an interpreter and stop random people on the street and ask them about their lives. ~ Brandon Stanton

The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death ~ Joseph Conrad

[Raphael's] great superiority is due to the instinctive sense which, in him, seems to desire to shatter form. Form is, in his figures, what it is in ourselves, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, an exhaustless source of poetic inspiration. Every figure is a world in itself, a portrait of which the original appeared in a sublime vision, in a flood of light, pointed to by an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which showed what the sources of expression had been in the whole past life of the subject. ~ Honore De Balzac

Your ego is an avid interpreter. It is so quick to interpret events as 'bad' or 'good,' 'wrong' or 'right.' It never fails to see 'the little picture. ~ Robert Holden

My father was an interpreter for all the Latin American pilots at the naval base. He was very well educated. My mother was a hairdresser who sang every day. ~ Pepe Serna

When he is dissected after his death," a disrespectful interpreter said of a foreign dignitary, "a million predicates will be found in his stomach: those he swallowed in the past decades without saying them. ~ Kato Lomb

The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago. ~ Karen Thompson Walker

The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter. ~ Marcel Proust

Before them stood a small, erect man who fixed them with a withering gaze, Marshal Ferdinand Foch. After cool introductions, Foch opened the proceedings with a question that left the Germans agape. "Ask these gentlemen what they want," he said to his interpreter. When the Germans had recovered, Erzberger answered that they understood they had been sent to discuss armistice terms. Foch stunned them again: "Tell these gentlemen that I have no proposals to make. ~ Joseph E. Persico

The FMSF achieved prominence partly as a response to increased possibilities for women to institute criminal or civil proceedings that relate to historical abuse, and women do not often take their abusers to court. The foundation's framing of abuse serves an ulterior strategic purpose of constructing a narrative position that isolates the incest survivor in an adversarial setting of interpreter distrust and challenged. ~ Sue Campbell

I think of myself first as a singer, meaning an interpreter. Then I think of myself as a writer. It is an outlet I have to have. I get very hard to live with without something happening to write about. ~ Oliver

Finally I started really opening up as a songwriter and an interpreter and taking songs from all kind of genres and stripping them down to just lyrics and the story inside the lyrics, and trying to make them really mine. ~ Lizz Wright

If you're too close to events, you lose perspective. It is not easy to be fair with the facts and keep your own convictions out of the picture. It is almost impossible to be both a participant in the events and their observer, witness, interpreter. ~ Micha Bar-Am

I feel an itch, a creeping itch, for drink as we walk through Forest Gate. We can't find a pub. The Interpreter keeps pointing out the odd shop with a dirty England flag. 'This is Muslim land, man, there are no pubs here because there are no English. But if you wanna go into one of those gross last of the English pubs we can. ~ Ben Judah

In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine authority of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had been in like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill - the method of allegorical interpretation. This mighty 'two-handed engine at the door' of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, 'poetically' or, 'in a spiritual sense,' the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter desires they should mean. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

According to a hadith, the tongue is the "interpreter of the heart." Hypocrisy is wretched because the hypocrite says with his tongue what is not in his heart. He wrongs his tongue and oppresses his heart. But if the heart is sound, the condition of the tongue follows suit. We are commanded to be upright in our speech, which is a gauge of the heart's state. According to a prophetic tradition, each morning, when the limbs and organs awaken in the spiritual world, they shudder and say to the tongue, "Fear God concerning us! For if you are upright, then we are upright; and if you deviate, we too deviate." Engaging in the regular remembrance of God (dhikr) safeguards the tongue and replaces idle talk with words and phrases that raise one in honor. The tongue is essential in developing courtesy with God, which is the whole point of existence. ~ Hamza Yusuf

Dreams are faithful interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them. ~ Michel De Montaigne

A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous. ~ Alexander Hamilton

There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters. ~ Natalie Clifford Barney

But interpretation invariably reveals more about the interpreter than about the interpreted. The gap between intention and interpretation is always rife with wrongs, especially when writer and reader occupy vastly different strata of emotional maturity and intellectual sophistication. ~ Maria Popova

For her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her; but converse with her had an irresistible charm, and her presence, combined with the persuasiveness of her discourse and the character which was somehow diffused about her behaviour towards others, had something stimulating about it. 3 There was sweetness also in the tones of her voice; and her tongue, like an instrument of many strings, she could readily turn to whatever language she pleased, so that in her interviews with Barbarians she very seldom had need of an interpreter, but made her replies to most of them herself and unassisted, whether they were Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes or Parthians. 4 Nay, it is said that she knew the speech of many other peoples also, although the kings of Egypt before her had not even made an effort to learn the native language, and some actually gave up their Macedonian dialect. ~ Plutarch

I'm an interpreter of stories. When I perform it's like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories. ~ Nat King Cole

the "gift of interpretation" is considered on a par with the "gift of tongues," and indeed is thought of as the companion gift that must be sought along with tongues. An "interpretation" purports to give the content of the message just delivered in an unknown tongue, differing from a translation in that the interpreter no more understands the tongue than the speaker does. ~ John Sherrill

A good interpreter can take a piece of bad music and make it sound pretty decent, while a bad interpreter can take good music and make it sound cheap. I can tell that some people have a bad taste, and unlike on the piano, they smear around a lot, that is bad taste. ~ Ruggiero Ricci