Translation Quotes
A curated collection of the best quotes about Translation.
Top Quotes
“Translation is at best an echo.”
“Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”
“Nor ought a genius less than his that writ
Attempt translation.”
“A translator is to be like his author; it is not his business to excel him.”
“Such is our pride, our folly, or our fate,
That few but such as cannot write, translate.”
“Wikipedia: Translation”
“A scribe who does not know how to grasp the meaning -- from where will he produce a translation?”
“A good poet is no more like himself in a dull translation than his carcass would be to his living body.”
“Many things which go under my name are badly translated from the German or are invented by other people.”
“It is frustrating to be translating other people's autobiographies whilst mine is lying unpublished, banned by the Home Office.”
“Whenever someone suggests "how much is lost in translation!" I want to say, "Perhaps but how much is gained!" A new world of readers, for one thing.”
“For Pound, translation opens up possibilities for creating a new compound out of old elements; for Nabokov it is a grudgingly admitted, inevitable evil.”
“A translation must speak for itself. As a rule, it only requires a commentary where it is not directly convincing, and where the translator does not feel secure.”
“In literary translations, it is this very articulation of expressions that matters the most to bring home to the readers the full essence of the original text in question.”
“Chance of source language influencing the target language and that of the translator intervening onto the style of original writer are major challenges in literary translation.”
“The translator of a poem is only a transient mediator... in time all translations fall away, fade, become literary curiosities, time-bound and largely of scholarly rather than literary interest.”
“There exists a chance of every poem getting changed while reaching every reader. This ‘getting changed’ is a form of ‘getting translated’, in a way. So, every assimilation of any poem is a translation.”
“Translation of poetry into poetry is difficult, because the translator must give a brilliancy to his language without that warmth of original conception, from which such brilliancy would follow of its own accord.”
“Literary translation is not merely an act of picking words from one language and keeping it by dipping in the vessel of another language. Those words need to be rinsed, washed, carved and decorated as much as possible.”