237 Quotes About Translation

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

The fact is, we need prisons that are more like schools, and schools that are less like prisons. But for this to happen, the teachers also need freedom.

When you finish anything, people want you to then talk about it. And I think it’s almost like a crime. A film or a painting – each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language – it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose.

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

Books are born from guts, from the need of writing them, and are read in the same way, in the angst to read them, from a primite need.

When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)

Je kunt niet zomaar iets uit een vers halen, zonder eerst de context te bepalen.(Dutch for: You can't easily get something from a verse, without determining it's context first)

Speaking in Creation's tongues, hearing Creation's voices, the boundary of our soul expands. Earth has many voices. Those who understand that Earth is a living being know this because they have translated themselves to the humble grasses and old trees. They know that Earth is a community that is constantly talking to itself; a communicating universe. And whether we know it or not, we are participating in the web of this community.