16 Quotes by David Bellos

speech is such an ephemeral thing - it's gone in a puff of warm air, which is all it is in a material sense

The words of law often look like words of the language you speak, but when they are legal terms, they are not.

Translation is the opposite of empire

A desire to believe (despite all evidence to the contrary) that words are at bottom the names of things is what makes the translator’s mission seem so impossible.

There are many different ways of teaching languages. The Ottomans rounded up youngsters in conquered lands and brought them back as slaves to be trained as dil oglan, or “language boys,” in Istanbul. Modern direct methods are gentler but rely on the same understanding of how languages are best learned—through total immersion in a bain linguistique, a kind of baptism of the brain.

It is translation, more than speech itself, which provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought. We should do more of it.

No opinions would be worth holding except by those who read works in the original.

Translation is another name for the human condition.

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