237 Quotes About Translation

Writers make national literature, while translators make universal literature.

A translator is a reader, an interpreter and a creator all in one.

Isn’t all artwork—or all decent art—a mirror? Might a great painting not even reformulate the question what is it about to what am I about? Isn’t theory also in some sense always autobiography?

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

We are, in the main, 'word-blind' to Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent verse. This blindness results from a major change in habits of sensibility. Our contemporary sense of the poetic, our often unexamined presumptions about valid or spurious uses of figurative speech have developed from a conscious negation of fin de siécle ideals.

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.

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

That a text is untranslatable is too grandiose a statement to utter. But in the matter of translating the Qur’an, a translator – though competent and discriminating as he might be – shall find it a persuasively challenging undertaking if not an impossible one. Thesedifficulties stem from many factors including semantic, linguistic, syntactic and lexical ones.

God values the mother tongue, even for people who may know other languages.