Wasurenaide Translation Quotes

She thought of the revelations she held cradled against her chest, of how they could potentially serve up more discord, more upset and controversy. Would she be doing this society any good by revealing her new knowledge?
"I . . ." She swallowed hard. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to disturb you. Really, it's nothing that can't wait. Actually" - she stood up and extracted the scrolls from Noah's hold - "all I wanted was, uh . . . help with some interpretation. But you are busy . . ." She rounded the peculiar triangular table as casually as she could while she spoke, even turning to back out of the room while giving them a bright smile that she hoped did not look as fake as it felt. "You know, there are lots of books down there, and I bet there's a translation." She reached up to smack her palm into her forehead, chiding herself for not thinking properly.
Isabella reached for the door and closed it even faster than she had originally opened it.
Noah looked over at Jacob, one dark brow lifting toward his thick hairline.
"Does . . .?" He raised a hand to point to the door, looking utterly perplexed. "Does she have any idea what a lousy liar she is?"
"Apparently not," Jacob said with a long, low sigh. "I think that was my fault," he speculated wryly.
"Your fault?"
"Yeah . . . it is . . . a long story. We better get her."
"Relax," Noah chuckled. "She's leaning against the other side of the door, trying to catch her breath.
"I know. I just th ~ Jacquelyn Frank

Not everyone who knows how to write can be a writer. Not everyone who knows two languages can be a translator. ~ Nataly Kelly

Visit any bookshop in Europe, and the shelves are filled with English novels and non-fiction books in translation - while British bookshops stock mainly English and American works. ~ Kate Williams

What's that map?" I asked.
"Spells of Coming Forth by Day," he said. "Don't worry. It's a good copy."
I looked at Carter for a translation.
"Most people call it The Book of the Dead," he told me. "Rich Egyptians were always buried with a copy, so they could have directions through the Duat to the Land of the Dead. It's like an Idiot's Guide to the Afterlife."
The captain hummed indignantly. "I am no idiot, Lord Kane."
"No, no, I just meant ... " Carter's voice faltered. "Uh, what is that? ~ Rick Riordan

The translation process becomes a highly subjective thing - turning reds and blues into black-and-whiteness. It's really bizarre for me. ~ Robert Longo

It is natural for a translator to be prejudiced in favour of his adopted work. More impartial readers may not be so much struck with the beauties of this piece as I was. Yet I am not blind to my author's defects. ~ Horace Walpole

...It is the one time Dante calls such explicit attention to the idea of contrapasso-a word for which we have no exact translation, no precise definition in English, because the word in itself is its definition... Well, my dear Longfellow, I would say countersuffering ... the notion that each sinner must be punished by continuing the damage of his own sin against him... just as these Schismatics are cut apart... ~ Matthew Pearl

Boys," Lindsay agreed, nodding. "What doesn't get lost in translation?"
"Things with the letter X in front of them," Rachel posited. "Like X-Box. And X-rated movies. ~ Nenia Campbell

Often touching ... Monumental Propaganda is a novel that slashes and rips ... In his translation, Andrew Bromfield deftly shifts his tone and tools as required, remaining true to Voinovich's Vonnegut-like playfulness and appreciation of the absurb. ~ Ken Kalfus

I was one of those girls that were repeatedly told, "You have such a pretty face." (I suspected that was said to every fat girl.) Translation: If I weren't so fat, I'd be pretty. Gratzi! ~ Misti D. Mosteller

Daemon spoke in his language. The lyrical quality of his words made no sense to me.
"What did you say?" I asked.
"There's really no translation for it," he said, "but the closest human words would be, you are beautiful to me. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful. ~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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

I think that translating is the most profound, most intimate way of reading. A translation is a wonderful, dynamic encounter between two languages, two texts, two writers. It entails a doubling, a renewal ... It was a way of getting close to different languages, of feeling connected to writers very distant from me in space and time. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Our words are often only vague, inadequate descriptions of our thoughts. Something gets lost in translation every time we try to express our thoughts in words. And when the other person hears our words, something gets lost in translation again, because words mean different things to different people. "A long time" may mean 10 hours to one person, but 10 days to another. So when a thought is formed in my brain, and my mouth expresses it in words, and your ears hear it, and your brain processes it, your brain and my brain never truly see exactly the same thing. Communication is always just an approximation. ~ Oliver Gaspirtz

Inferior translation, which consequently we may define as the inaccurate transmission of an inessential content. ~ Walter Benjamin

It's impossible to make a movie out of 'Naked Lunch.' A literal translation just wouldn't work. It would cost $400 million to make and would be banned in every country of the world. ~ David Cronenberg

Naturally, translators who dare to complain about these mistakes [e.g. false friends] are labelled hairsplitters and pedants (FR: pédants pinailleurs), but it is a badge we should wear with pride. ~ Emma Wagner

One experience that led Jung to this conclusion took place in 1906 and involved the hallucination of a young man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One day while making his rounds Jung found the young man standing at a window and staring up at the sun. The man was also moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. When Jung asked him what he was doing he explained that he was looking at the sun's penis, and when he moved his head from side to side, the sun's penis moved and caused the wind to blow. At the time Jung viewed the man's assertion as the product of a hallucination. But several years later he came across a translation of a two-thousand-year-old Persian religious text that changed his mind. The text consisted of a series of rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions. It described one of the visions and said that if the participant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man had had contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man's vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself. Jung called such images archetypes and believed they were so ancient it's as if each of us has the memory of a two-million-year-old man lurking somewhere in the depths of our unconscious minds ~ Michael Talbot

De wijze heeft geen onwrikbare beginselen. Hij past zich aan anderen aan.
(Free translation into English: The wise man has no firm principles. He adapts to others.) ~ Lao-Tzu

I'm not a statistician, but it doesn't take a genious to work out that 100 million children being denied an education is ridiculous. There is nothing lost in translation here, it's obvious that's wrong. ~ Scarlett Johansson

Sometimes I long to forget ... It is painful to be conscious of two worlds. ~ Eva Hoffman

A song is like a smile. If you meet people from another country, even if you don't speak the same language, you know what a smile means. A song works the same way. Music produces feelings that need no translation. ~ Clay Aiken

Strength of creative writing lies in the skill of handling words and articulating artistic expression of feelings ~ Suman Pokhrel

Translation means that a translator has picked one word above all the others: one winner, with all the finalists gone from the page forever. Translation always calls upon the translator to make a judgement call, and what the reader hears, then, is a judgement ~ Aviya Kushner

He said he "admired our courage" but didn't want to see us do anything to "damage our promising futures." He felt "proud as an American" that we had "exercised our right to peaceful free expression." But if we did it again, he didn't "know what action the state board of education might take against individual students."
Translation: You've had your fun. Now sit down, shut up, and take the freakin' test. Or else. ~ Jordan Sonnenblick

Rnesh karr slithis, I hissed back, which was Draconic for eat your own tail, the dragon version of go screw yourself. No extra translation needed. ~ Julie Kagawa

In 2003, Meryl Streep won a career achievement César Award, the French equivalent of an Oscar. Streep's words (my translation) acknowledged the enduring interest of French audiences in women's lives and women's stories:
"I have always wanted to present stories of women who are rather difficult. Difficult to love, difficult to understand, difficult to look at sometimes. I am very cognizant that the French public is receptive to these complex and contradictory women. As an actress I have understood for a long time that lies are simple, seductive and often easy to pass off. But the truth - the truth is always very very very complicated, often unpleasant, nuanced or difficult to accept."

In France, an actress can work steadily from her teens through old age - she can start out in stories of youthful rebellion and end up, fifty years later, a screen matriarch. And in the process, her career will end up telling the story of a life - her own life, in a sense, with the films serving, as Valeria Bruni Tedeschi puts it, as a "journal intime," or diary, of one woman's emotions and growth. No wonder so many French actresses are beautiful. They're radiant with living in a cinematic culture that values them, and values them as women. And they are radiant with living in a culture - albeit one with flaws of its own - in which women are half of who decides what gets valued in the first place. Their films transcend national and language barriers and are the best vehicles for c ~ Mick LaSalle

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

Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation. ~ John Denham

I read the Bible to myself; I'll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is. ~ Maya Angelou

North Koreans have two stories running in their heads at all times, like trains on parallel tracks. One is what you are taught to believe; the other is what you see with your own eyes. It wasn't until I escaped to South Korea and read a translation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four that I found a word for this peculiar condition: doublethink. This is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time - and somehow not go crazy. This "doublethink" is how you can shout slogans denouncing capitalism in the morning, then browse through the market in the afternoon to buy smuggled South Korean cosmetics. It ~ Yeonmi Park

Be as vigilantly on guard against translating such a sentence into the passive voice as you would against committing murder. ~ Jay Rubin

It's not a natural translation, transition, to take something from stage to screen. Onstage your action is communicated through the spoken word primarily, and on screen it's communicated through pictures. So it's always been kind of unnatural to take something that lives on the stage and turn it into moving pictures. ~ Tracy Letts

The nights in Billancourt were soft and sweet, enlivened now and again by those childish airplane or zeppelin alarms which provided the civilian population with thrills and self-justification. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine