Translating Quotes

Many amateurs believe that plants and animals reproduce on a one-way route toward perfection. Translating the idea in social terms, they believe that companies and organizations are, thanks to competition (and the discipline of the quarterly report), irreversibly heading toward betterment. The strongest will survive; the weakest will become extinct. As to investors and traders, they believe that by letting them compete, the best will prosper and the worst will go learn a new craft (like pumping gas or, sometimes, dentistry). Things are not as simple as that. We will ignore the basic misuse of Darwinian ideas in the fact that organizations do not reproduce like living members of nature - Darwinian ideas are about reproductive fitness, not about survival. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It's not about the pace, it's about the direction we've set. The pace is of course a function of many factors, including the magnitude of the supply shock. But what's probably more important is the probability of the supply shock translating into sustainable embedded inflation. ~ Marek Belka

On translating text into the new language as it is in source language, there is a chance of it being emerged as an absurd sentence in the target language making no sense at all. In the attempt to make the translation meaningful to the target language, there exists a risk of the original work getting meddled by the translator's style. ~ Suman Pokhrel

Learning is really about translating knowing what to do into doing what we know. ~ John G. Miller

There are two generic and invariable features that characterize utopias. One is the content: the authors of utopias paint what they consider to be ideal societies; translating this into the language of mathematics, we might say that utopias bear a + sign. The other feature, organically growing out of the content, is to be found in the form: a utopia is always static; it is always descriptive and has no, of almost no, plot dynamics. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

What this also suggests, intriguingly, is that the task of translating (or writing) literary novels cannot be broken into parts and done by a succession of different humans either - not by wikis, nor crowdsourcing, nor ghostwriters. Stability of point of view and consistency of style are too important. What's truly strange, then, is the fact that we do seem to make a lot of art this way. ~ Brian Christian

We in the West have been at the mercy of those who where supposed to translate and explain an entire ideology but instead sanitized it and camouflaged it. The same applies on the other side. In western culture, democracy is being taught in the classroom, but it is a historically understood concept. The intellectual translation into Arab Muslim culture depends on the "translating party." In those cultures, its real meaning has been complicated and altered in the madrassas (Islamic religious schools) or when taught by antidemocracy teachers. ~ Walid Phares

Writing by myself, I spread that out more. I'll spend more time on a song then. I'm more critical about it, because there's no one else in the room to tell me, 'That's really not translating. I'm not getting what you're saying.' So, I'm constantly rewriting it, thinking, 'No, that's fine,' and going back. ~ Hunter Hayes

Translator's Note: When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same "music", the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano. ~ John Ciardi

For me, therapy is partly translation therapy, the talking cure a second-language cure. My going to a shrink is, among other things, a rite of initiation: initiation into the language of the subculture within which I happen to live, into a way of explaining myself to myself. But gradually, it becomes a project of translating backward.
The way to jump over my Great Divine is to crawl backward over it in English. It's only when I retell my whole story, back to the beginning, and from the beginning onward, in one language, that I can reconcile the voices within me with each other; it is only then that the person who judges the voices and tells the stories begins to emerge. ~ Eva Hoffman

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. ~ Jay L. Garfield

When God creates Eve, he calls her an ezer kenegdo. 'It is not good for the man to be alone, I shall make him [an ezer kenegdo]' (Gen. 2:18 Alter). Hebrew scholar Robert Alter, who has spent years translating the book of Genesis, says that this phrase is 'notoriously difficult to translate.' The various attempts we have in English are "helper" or "companion" or the notorious "help meet." Why are these translations so incredibly wimpy, boring, flat ... disappointing? What is a help meet, anyway? What little girl dances through the house singing "One day I shall be a help meet?" Companion? A dog can be a companion. Helper? Sounds like Hamburger Helper. Alter is getting close when he translates it "sustainer beside him"
The word ezer is used only twenty other places in the entire Old Testament. And in every other instance the person being described is God himself, when you need him to come through for you desperately. ~ Stasi Eldredge

Clairvoyants can see flashes of colour, constantly changing, in the aura that surrounds every person: each thought, each feeling, thus translating itself in the astral world, visible to the astral sight. ~ Annie Besant

thoughts which go out from one's mind, also imbed themselves deeply in one's subconscious mind, where they serve as a magnet, pattern, or blueprint by which the subconscious mind is influenced while translating them into their physical equivalent. ~ Napoleon Hill

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went. ~ Paul Auster

The very qualities that had led to Johnson's political and legislative success were precisely those that now operated to destroy him: his inward insistence that the world adapt itself to his goals; his faith in the nation's limitless capacity; his tendency to evaluate all human activity in terms of its political significance; his insistence on translating every disruptive situation into one where bargaining was possible; his reliance on personal touch; his ability to speak to each of his constituent groups on its own terms. All these gifts, instead of sustaining him, now conspired to destroy him. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

I've found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new things: that is things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new. ~ P.D. Ouspensky

Some empathy must be learned and then imagined, by perceiving the suffering of others and translating it into one's own experience of suffering and thereby suffering a little with then. Empathy can be a story you tell yourself about what it must be like to be that other person; but its lack can also arrive from narrative, about why the sufferer deserved it, or why that person or those people have nothing to do with you. Whole societies can be taught to deaden feeling, to dissociate from their marginal and minority members, just as people can and do erase the humanity of those close to them.
Empathy makes you imagine the sensation of the torture, of the hunger, of the loss. You make that person into yourself, you inscribe their suffering on your own body or heart or mind, and then you respond to their suffering as though it were your own. Identification, we say, to mean that I extend solidarity to you, and who and what you identify with builds your own identity. Physical pain defines the physical boundaries of the self but these identifications define a larger self, a map of affections and alliances, and the limits of this psychic self are nothing more or less than the limits of love. Which is to say love enlarges; it annexes affectionately; at its utmost it dissolves all boundaries. ~ Rebecca Solnit

This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed by translating it into all tongues. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Have you ever stopped to think that maybe you were wrong? Maybe, you only saw your point of view and you never once put yourself in the other person's shoes. Maybe, walking away from the senseless drama and spiteful criticism isn't the best thing to do. Maybe, for just once in your life you could wear another person's confusion, pain or misunderstanding. Maybe, your future doesn't require explaining yourself or offering an explanation for your indifference, but your character and reputation does. What if one day you find out that you didn't have all the information you thought you did? What if you find out that your presence was needed for healing? What if you only knew half of it and the other half was just your fear and anger translating everything you experienced? What if you were wrong? What if the same thing happened to you? ~ Shannon L. Alder

The key decision for a statesman is whether to commit his nation or not. There is no middle course. Once a great nation commits itself, it must prevail. It will acquire no kudos for translating its inner doubts into hesitation. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

There are dozens of ways of failing to make money. It is one thing to fail to make money because your single talent happens to be a flair amounting to genius for translating the plays of Aristophanes. It is quite another thing to fail to make money because you are black, or a child, or a woman. ~ Margaret Halsey

The tight link that Protestants perceive between Scripture and salvation explains the great energy they have poured into studying, distributing, and translating the Scriptures, as well as producing the never-ending deluge of printed material explaining, mediating, parsing, debating, exploring, and riffing on the Bible. ~ Mark A. Noll

I mainly wanted non-english writing poets, because I loved the idea that I was translating translations. ~ Simone Muench

The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book. ~ Paul Auster

I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is not, of course, translated into another language but it is a translation from the images in the author's mind to that which he is able to put down on paper. Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write. It's one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it's transcendent, it's brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire. But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it's never the book that you'd hoped to write. It's smaller than the book you'd hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire. It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work. The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation. ~ Michael Cunningham

For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of the death of the believer; not a matter of translating the world but of transforming the world; not a matter of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death. The self is not made content; the self is made toast. ~ Ken Wilber

Dave Stark has taken the best of recent marketplace management concepts and married them to timeless biblical principles of leadership, translating business jargon into ministry language. The combination is an encouraging and practical guide to Christ-centered ministry leadership. This book will be helpful to anyone involved in leading a church or serious about modeling servant leadership. ~ Jonathan Reckford

People are voting for Conservatives in greater numbers, but it's not translating into Conservative seats. ~ Allan Gregg

Overly literal translations, far from being faithful, actually distort meaning by obscuring sense. ~ Ken Liu

The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program. ~ Mitch Kapor

What is the central core of the subject [computer science]? What is it that distinguishes it from the separate subjects with which it is related? What is the linking thread which gathers these disparate branches into a single discipline. My answer to these questions is simple -it is the art of programming a computer. It is the art of designing efficient and elegant methods of getting a computer to solve problems, theoretical or practical, small or large, simple or complex. It is the art of translating this design into an effective and accurate computer program. ~ Tony Hoare

Thought experiment is in any case a necessary precondition for physical experiment. Every experimenter and inventor must have the planned arrangement in his head before translating it into fact. ~ Ernst Mach

I rest my forehead against hers, and we sit in a comfortable silence, translating our love through touch. The Princess and the Warrior, I decide in my head. When they tell the story of tomorrow, that is what they shall call it. ~ Tomi Adeyemi

From this process has emerged a parallel process of translating traditional working and living values into a new political and economic power - a power increasingly based upon the strength of money and those material things money can purchase. ~ Alex Campbell

Most animals are like the unfortunate Gregor Samsa after metamorphosis. They are Kafka-creatures, organisms with rich thoughts and emotions but no system for translating what they think into something that they can express to others. ~ Marc Hauser

I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much. ~ Haruki Murakami

I'm always in awe of people who are artists in their fields - people who understand that simply by taking ideas and translating them into reality, they've created value in the world. ~ Kevin Systrom

I feel clobbered by the impossibility of translating into words as much of this enormous world we live in with its subtly complex and sprawling Periodic Table of emotions. To quote Freddie Mercury, I want it all. ~ David Mitchell

Cinema isn't just a good medium for translating graphic novels. It's specifically a good medium for superheroes. On a fundamental, emotional level, superheroes, whether in print or on film, serve the same function for their audience as Golden Age movie stars did for theirs: they create glamour. ~ Virginia Postrel

Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same. Say to them "It is not improbable that a period may arrive when the narrow if once useful distinction between the anthropoid homo and the other
animals, which has been modified on so many moral points, may be modified also even in regard to the important question of the extension of human diet"; say this to them, and beauty born of murmuring sound will pass into their face. But say to them, in a simple, manly, hearty way "Let's eat a man!" and their surprise is quite surprising. Yet the sentences say just the same thing. ~ G.K. Chesterton

A book is actually a place, a place where we, as adults, still have the chance to engage in active imagining, translating word into image, connecting these images to memories, dreams and larger ideas. Television, film, even the stage play, have already been imagined for us, but the book, in whatever form we choose to interact with it, forces us to complete it ... The fact that books provide us the place to imagine is critically important, as it is there, in the imagination, that all sense of possibility rests. ~ Joe Meno

Why would she pick tunics you don't like?"

"Because they had to ruin them," she said, running her hand over her bare shoulder.

Fitz cleared his throat. "I... wouldn't call that ruined."

He didn't say what he would call it, though, and it made her with her Polyglot ability worked for translating Cute Boy so she could figure out if that was suppose to be a compliment.

It kinda felt like one. ~ Shannon Messenger

Comics know that time plus pain equals humor and that we can redeem even awful moments from the past by translating them into a shared experience. ~ Gina Barreca

Everything ok here ?"
Ryan grunted urging her with a hand on her lower back.
"He thinks you should mind your own business,"Makenna told the Beta,translating the grunt.
Dominic cocked his head."You understand his grunts?"
She lifted her chin."I thought it was crystal clear."
Dominic turned to Ryan."Marry her."
Ryan grunted again before heading for the door.
"What did he say?"Dominic asked her.
"Fuck off,"she translated. ~ Suzanne Wright

People will come up to me at shows and tell me that a song touched them in a completely different way than I wrote it. That's fun. Fans translating it in their own way. ~ Tori Kelly

I have voices in my head
I'm a slave to imaginary people
I feel what they feel
I experience what they experience
I live in their world
And I'm devoted to translating their stories
I'm not crazy, I'm a writer ~ Charisse Spiers

You don't want to lose the foreign feel of a book entirely, but for me the prime requisite is to get it sounding good in English. If it sounds clumsy, readers will pounce on it of course. ~ Anthea Bell

We need to raise the level of our game in terms of explaining the planetary warming by infrared absorption of CO2 etc. The missing area of understanding seems to be the actual physical mechanism. Lets target an explanation at an audience that has taken 1 year each of undergraduate physics and chemistry, plus calculus. Once we have something that is convincing at this level, we can work on how to communicate this to the interested public (i.e. those that hang out in the climate blogosphere). Willis Eschenbach's help is needed in translating this for the WUWT crowd. ~ Judith Curry

...only the dreamers of a dream are capable of translating their dreams into worthy practical endeavors that are devoid of haunting errors. After all, they are the ones who carefully observed the link between their dreams and reality; they are the ones who worked consciously to blend them into one. ~ Janvier Chouteu-Chando

Because of their sacred gift of translating and embodying energy, empaths are able to spot their soul mates or twin flames a mile away. ~ Aletheia Luna

Music possesses much richer means of expression and it is a more subtle medium for translating the 1000 shifting moments of the feelings of the soul. ~ Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

People who reported having a terrible traumatic experience and who kept the experience a secret had far more health problems than people who openly talked about their traumas. Why would keeping a secret be so toxic? More importantly, if you asked people to disclose emotionally powerful secrets, would their health improve? The answer, my students and I soon discovered, was yes.
We began running experiments where people were asked to write about traumatic experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for three to four consecutive days. Compared to people who were told to write about nonemotional topics, those who wrote about trauma evidenced improved physical health. Later studies found that emotional writing boosted immune function, brought about drops in blood pressure, and reduced feelings of depression and elevated daily moods. Now, over twenty-five years after the first writing experiment, more than two hundred similar writing studies have been conducted all over the world. While the effects are often modest, the mere act of translating emotional upheavals into words is consistently associated with improvements in physical and mental health. ~ James W. Pennebaker

black eyes need no translating; the mind itself throws a shadow upon them. In them thought opens or shuts, shines forth or goes out in darkness, hangs steadfast like the setting moon or like the swift and restless lightning illumines all quarters of the sky. They who from birth have had no other speech than the trembling of their lips learn a language of the eyes, endless in expression, deep as the sea, clear as the heavens, wherein play dawn and sunset, light and shadow. The ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Translating how that latter fact came to life in the studio, engineer Chuck Zwicky explained from his own observations during the recording of the album that "the way that Prince's music comes together has everything to do with how he views the individual instruments, and for example, when he's sitting down at the drums, he's derivatively thinking about Dave Gerbaldi, the drummer from Tower of Power, and that's a real fascile and funky drummer; and when he plays keyboards, he's thinking about James Brown's horn player, on one aspect; and when he's playing guitar, other elements creep in, because he loves Carlos Santana, and Jimi Hendrix, and this other guitar player named Bill Nelson, a rock guitar player from the 70s. And so these aspects all come together to make this unique sound that is Prince, and it's not rock, it's not funk, it's not jazz, it's not blues - it's just his own kind of music. I remember there was one particular moment when he started playing this keyboard line, and I'm thinking 'He can't play that, that's Gary Newman.' And at that moment, he stops the tape, and turns and looks at me and asks 'Do you like Gary Newman?' And I said 'You know, the album Replica never left my turntable in Jr. High School after my sister bought it for me. I listened to it until it wore out.' And he said 'There are people still trying to figure out what a genius he is. ~ Jake Brown

Translation is not a matter of words only; it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture. ~ Anthony Burgess

The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication. ~ Hans-Georg Gadamer

In the trees the night wind stirs, bringing the leaves to life, endowing them with speech; the electric lights illuminate the green branches from the under side, translating them into a new language. ~ E.B. White

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader pres ~ Ayn Rand

If we human beings are information processing machines, reading X's & O's and translating that information into what people oh so breathlessly call "experience", & if I had not only the information but the artistry to shape that information using the computer inside my brain, then, technically speaking, was I not having all the same experiences those other people were having? ~ Jennifer Egan

Late at night, when she and Ferro had waited on the ridge or had ridden on horseback into the steep canyons to wait for a drop, she had watched the meteor showers. They would begin shortly after midnight and continue until two A. M. On those nights it seemed as if the sky had overtaken the earth and was closing over it, so that the volcanic rocks and soil themselves reflected light like the surface of the moon. At those moments she could not think of any other place on the earth that she would rather be. She thought about the old ones and Yoeme and how they watched the sky relentlessly, translating sudden bursts of light into lengthy messages concerning the future and the past. ~ Leslie Marmon Silko

Two great
contemporary scholars at the antipodes of the cultural spread of Hellenism,
Boethius in Rome (d. 525) and Sergius of Re¯ˇsayna in northern Mesopotamia ¯
(d. 536), conceived of the grand idea of translating all of Aristotle into Latin
and Syriac respectively.5 The conception is to their credit as individual thinkers
for their noble intentions; their failure indicates that the receiving cultures in
which they worked had not developed the need for this enterprise. Philosophy
in Latin was to develop, even if on some of the foundations laid by Boethius,
much later,6 while in Syriac it reached its highest point with BarHebraeus in the thirteenth century only after it had developed in Arabic and was translated
from it. ~ Dimitri Gutas

Translating any insights I have for strangers' lives into positive action in my own has proved a challenge. While I've learned a lot about what everyone else is thinking, I fail miserably to use such knowledge in my private relationships. ~ Mariella Frostrup

You'd never be able to convince someone to give you money to do a bilingual story where you're not translating half of it - you'd drive people crazy. But in comics, you can do whatever your heart desires. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

I almost never do drawings, because I have found over the years that doing something in one medium and translating into another doesn't work. I like to conceive a painting in real scale and in color. ~ Nelson Shanks

Translating is a respectable, valuable, creative and worthwhile use of a human brain. ~ David Bellos

If creative fiction writing is a process of translating an abstraction into the concrete, there are three possible grades of such writing: translating an old (known) abstraction (theme or thesis) through the medium of old fiction means (that is, characters, events or situations used before for that same purpose, that same translation) -- this is most of the popular trash; translating an old abstraction through new, original fiction means -- this is most of the good literature; creating a new, original abstraction and translating it through new, original means. This, as far as I know, is only me -- my kind of fiction writing. ~ Ayn Rand

I have no idea why one of our most original filmmakers would want to spend two years of his life translating someone else's movie from Spanish into English. And it wasn't such a good film in Spanish, either. ~ Joel Siegel

In order to understand the sequence of VIP canapés, we were taught a little etymology 101. At the French Laundry and Per Se, the whole range of amuse-bouches (literally translating to 'mouth amusers'), from soups to blini, is referred to as canapés. This is, however, not technically accurate. The word canapé comes from the French word for couch, and actually refers to the specific practice of resting a savory topping on a piece of toast or cracker like Mr. Bichalot's slippered feet on his chaise lounge, only infinitely more savory. ~ Phoebe Damrosch

I've had enough
I'm sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody

Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me
Right?

I explain my mother to my father
my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother
my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks
the Black church folks to the ex-hippies
the ex-hippies to the Black separatists
the Black separatists to the artists
the artists to my friends' parents…

Then
I've got to explain myself
To everybody

I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.

Forget it
I'm sick of it.

I'm sick of filling in your gaps

Sick of being your insurance against
the isolation of your self-imposed limitations

Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners

Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches

Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people

Find another connection to the rest of the world
Find something else to make you legitimate
Find some other way to be political and hip

I will not be the bridge to your womanhood
Your manhood
Your humanness

I'm sick of reminding you not to
Close off too tight for too long

I'm sick of mediati ~ Kate Rushin

Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

When a mathematician engaged in investigating physical actions and results has arrived at his own conclusions, may they not be expressed in common language as fully, clearly, and definitely as in mathematical formulae? If so, would it not be a great boon to such as well to express them so
translating them out of their hieroglyphics that we might also work upon them by experiment? ~ Michael Faraday

This is how [the] sport has contributed to my personality, toughness and discipline. I have a plan, and I work on it. I was going to add [the] before the word sport since I thought was either a typo or a problem translating what she said, but then I thought it made sense without it too , so I left it as is. Just know that that's not a typo on my part. ~ Svetlana Khorkina

On Translating Eugene Onegin


1
What is translation? On a platter
A poet's pale and glaring head,
A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:
I traveled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose--
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.


2
Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana's earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man's mistake,
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task--a poet's patience
And scholastic passion blent:
Dove-droppings on your monument. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space ... ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

I had to find my way of translating the excitement you get when you're reading comic books to the big screen. ~ Ang Lee

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

Sappho isn't really meant to be read. It's meant to be sung and there were dances for the songs, also. Sappho was a performance artist, and now she exists as a textual project. She was saved by her critics, and by people who wrote of her in letters to each other. As the morning sun lathers the pool through the long windows and stripes the opposite walls in gold, I look at the fragment translations. She's paper, too. A paper poet for a paper boy. People claim to be translating her but they don't, really, they use her to write poems from as they fill in the gaps in the fragments. A duet. She may have meant for these to be solos but they're duets now, though the second singer blends in with the first. The first singer in this case is offstage, like in the old days of stars who couldn't sing, a real singer hidden behind a curtain, which is the velvet drape of history. ~ Alexander Chee

I haven't been in the film world long enough to really understand the gravity of 'Big Hero's' success. I'm just happy that it is translating well internationally and that the story and the characters are loved by audiences around the world, and everything that's come after that has been secondary to the initial response. ~ Ryan Potter

In the broad sense design means thinking about what the function or purpose of things or processes are, and translating that into action. ~ Howard Rheingold

In my own research when I'm working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I'm doing if I'm solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I'm constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind's-eye picture. ~ Brian Greene

All translating seems to me to be simply an attempt to accomplish an impossible task. ~ Wilhelm Von Humboldt

I have more than thirty thousand hours of family and relationship counseling experience under my belt. Over the years, I have seen changes in relationship trends walk through my therapy office doors. My richest gifts are translating the complexities of love and desire in modern relationships into something simple and accessible. I can offer informed advice that makes people feel comfortable, knowledgeable, and confident. ~ Esther Perel

Your power is a function of velocity, that is to say, your power is a function of the rate at which you translate intention into reality. Most of us disempower ourselves by finding a way to slow, impede, or make more complex than necessary the process of translating intention into reality. ~ Werner Erhard

Thinking is translating 'prosaic-ideas' without accessories" since ideas (in brain) do not follow any metrical composition. ~ Md. Ziaul Haque

No higher duty, or more solemn responsibility, rests upon this Court than that of translating into living law and maintaining this constitutional shield deliberately planned and inscribed for the benefit of every human being subject to our Constitution-of whatever race, creed or persuasion. ~ Hugo Black

Erotic literarature is literature in which eroticism is the novel. It focuses on that. It also implies a certain degree of description, a certain hard core. And to find novels in which you have plot, character, literary quality, plus detailed and real moving descriptions of fucking is a rarity.


There is a vibration which takes place in the erotic realm, which translating it into something else, demeans it and destroys it. You need real poetry to talk about that sort of thing. ~ Marco Vassi

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating. ~ John Fowles

I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person. ~ Hilary Mantel

The boundaries between us had been breached for good, we gave a new meaning t the notion that man and wife were one flesh. You could track back this kind of alchemy in books: '...intimately to mix and melt and to be melted together with his beloved, so that one should be made out of two.' This is Shelley translating Plato, who was putting words into the mouth of Aristophanes, who's the only defender of heterosexual sex in the Symposium, although he makes it sound perverse. ~ Lorna Sage

Even though I'm usually not conscious of it, I think drawing has always served a sort of therapeutic purpose in my life. There's something about the process of translating the messy chaos of real life into a clean, simple drawing that's always been comforting to me. ~ Adrian Tomine

Not to say that corporations are perfect today, but even grand corporations like Dupont have made immense progress in translating some of their past environmentally damaging practices into new profit opportunities. ~ Maurice Strong

contextualization is inevitable. As soon as you choose a language to speak in and particular words to use within that language, the culture-laden nature of words comes into play. We often think that translating words from one language to another is simple - it's just a matter of locating the synonym in the other language. But there are few true synonyms. The word God is translated into German as Gott - simple enough. But the cultural history of German speakers is such that the word Gott strikes German ears differently than the English word God strikes the ears of English speakers. It means something different to them. You may need to do more explanation if you are to give German speakers the same biblical concept of God that the word conveys to English speakers. ~ Timothy J. Keller

Listen, if you walk into a whorehouse and find yourself getting sucked off, it's because you put some money on the counter, not because the gods transported a pair of lips to your cock.' 'That's . . . a really incredible metaphor, Jean, but I think I could use some help translating it.' 'What I'm saying is, we have a duty to accept on faith, but also a duty to weigh and judge. Once you insist that some mundane thing was actually the miraculous hand of the gods, why not treat everything that way? When you start finding messages from the heavens in your breakfast sausages, you've thrown aside your responsibility to use your head. If the gods wanted credulous idiots for priests, why wouldn't they make you that way when you were chosen? ~ Scott Lynch

Huiann swallowed, her hands clasped together and her eyes glassy with tears, then she spoke some more.
"Her heart is full of feeling for you, but she knows it is wrong for her to stay with you. She wishes for you to find a white woman who will fit into your life and be the wife you need."
Alan started shaking his head before Dong Li even finished translating. "No. Tell her she makes me happy. She is exactly the wife I need." He breathed deeply, steadying the quaver in his voice. "Ask Chua Huiann if she will do me the honor of marrying me."
Dong clicked his tongue, but offered Alan's proposal.
Huiann's eyes opened wide and she spoke rapidly.
"How would your family and your people react to you marrying a foreign bride? You would be ostracized. It cannot be." Dong added his own thoughts to the translation. "The girl speaks sense and sees more clearly than you."
Alan frowned. He couldn't promise his family would accept Huiann or ever welcome them home as a couple, but he didn't care. Maybe she was seeing reason, but he was only seeing her. ~ Bonnie Dee

What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion. ~ H.L. Mencken

The president's economic plan doesn't do enough to create new jobs and that has to be a national priority. While there are some signs the economy is improving, it is not translating into jobs. ~ Jay Rockefeller

Knowing what to do is not usually the problem; the elusive goal becomes translating intentions into action and resolutions into results. ~ Dan Millman

They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also re-member. Why would they ever develop language? Why would they ever learn to read and write? How would they know what reading and writing were if they saw them? Or signals? Or numbers? Or anything that we use to communicate? This isn't just a matter of translating from one language to another. They don't have a language at all. We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don't even have the machinery to know we're signaling. And maybe they've been trying to think to us, and they can't understand why we don't respond. ~ Orson Scott Card