Translation Quotes

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Robert Frost

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.
Havelock Ellis

Life, Beautiful, Moving

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

Beautiful, Woman, Faithful

What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Good, Best, Lost

Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
Leonard Cohen

Prayer, Child, Himself

Translation is the art of failure.
Umberto Eco

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
Robert Morgan

Poetry, Through, Interest

The original is unfaithful to the translation.
Jorge Luis Borges

Unfaithful, Original

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.
Rene Magritte

Life, Dream, Waking

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.
Edward Sapir

Time, Money, Business

For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
Cyril Connolly

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
Jonathan Lethem

Writing, English, Fantastic

And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.
Cornelia Funke

Read, English, Example

I love the song 'El Rey.' And for years, I never knew what the song was totally about. It was something new for me. I'd never sung a song in Spanish before. Then I got the translation and saw what a really cool song it was.
George Strait

Love, Cool, Before

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
Marilyn Hacker

Time, Poetry, Different

Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable.
David Mitchell

May, Faithful, Language

A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.
John Millington Synge

Music, Words, Give

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
Robert Morgan

Poetry, Important, Read

I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in translation.
Pharrell Williams

Funny, Design, End

By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.
Brian Ferneyhough

Reason, Read, Weird

I don't know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people's websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries.
Tim Berners Lee

Good, Live, Different

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.
Boris Pasternak

Writing, Easy, Far

I feel sometimes that I'm in a constant state of being lost in translation, and I guess that why I write songs.
Laura Marling

Lost, Why, Sometimes

The US and the European Union needs to help in the translation of the demand for democracy into a political will.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Help, Political, Democracy

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.
Marilyn Hacker

Writing, Together, Different

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.
Jonathan Miller

Made, Makes, Literature

For the version of this CD released in Japan, a translation of the English lyrics is included, but there are lots of places where meanings are lost in the process of translation.
Utada Hikaru

Lost, Process, English

The Japanese version comes with a translation, but that's different from the lyrics, so people could look things up and find a translation of their own if they're interested.
Utada Hikaru

Different, Find, Interested

The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.
Leonardo Sciascia

Best, Said, Side

If I make a speech, I need a translator. But music does not need a translation. People understand me through the sound. That I think is very important. This is just one planet, like one family.
Mstislav Rostropovich

Music, Family, Important

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