Top 105 Translator Quotes & Sayings

To have the translator be a figure in the book's presentation seems like a big thing, especially for a book that's really popular.

I was my mother's translator until I was probably 12 years old, and I remember how people looked at her.

It is only logical for the translator to become a part of the world of the author.

Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.

A satisfactory translation is not always possible, but a good translator is never satisfied with it. It can usually be improved. (Newmark)

A translator is essentially a reader and we all read differently, except that a translator's reading remains in unchanging print

A translator is to be like his author; it is not his business to excel him.

The translator constantly learns new things about himself.

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.

If a translation doesn't have obvious writing problems, it may seem quite all right at first glance. We readers, after all, quickly adapt to the style of a translator, stop noticing it, and get caught up in the story.

I think of myself as a translator. I just change the dry, unfeeling language of data into a visual language that allows for feeling.

A poet is the translator of the silent language of nature to the world.

My mom is a translator for the school district in Delaware. She'd hear these different stories from working with families there. Those stories stuck with me.

Shibani Sharma got me a job as a translator in NDTV. Then NDTV India got launched and I worked on the desk for a while.

However, there is one great temptation and that is that you can forget that the aim of the writer was to reject all other worlds and to construct one of his own and that the aim of the translator is to re-embody himself into the world of the various writers.

The barrier of communication is terrible if you don't speak the language. You cannot reach a player with a translator.

I have always maintained that translation is essentially the closest reading one can possibly give a text. The translator cannot ignore "lesser" words, but must consider every jot and tittle.

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.

My mom's a translator, my dad's a woodworker; that's the world I grew up in, that's the world I'm most comfortable in. The whole idea of Hollywood or any of that other stuff that unfortunately goes along with film, that wasn't part of my upbringing, thankfully.

Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.

I never used a translator, never thought that the journalists might not understand.

Boys! Are they always this impossible? Do they always say cryptic, indecipherable things? (Note to self: work with Liz to adapt her boy-to-English translator into a more mobile form—like maybe a watch or necklace.)

My phone is my favorite travel gadget because it has my translator.

What is the task of the translator? I think the task depends on the book and on the translator.

In some sense the text and the translator are locked in struggle - 'I attacked that sentence, it resisted me, I attacked another, it eluded me' - a struggle in which, curiously, when the translator wins, the text wins too.

The translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival.

I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director. 'Poet' covers it all for me.

I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.

Now, every organization has to have a translator for the Hispanics on the teams, and that helps a lot.

An actor's life is the shadow of a cloud, the echo of a sound, the memory of a dream, nothing come of nothing. The finest actor does not create, he is but a translator of another man's work.

Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.

I see my role as a translator, telling the story that's in the book using the more visual language of film.

It was nice to be in my own country, where I didn't need a translator or a driver. Where I didn't need to figure out cultural references or what hijab I needed to wear to cover my hair.

You know it was really hard to do a set, or even to do interviews in English, because in Europe, we always had a translator with us.

It seems more than likely that the translating of poetry is going to rub off on the translator if he or she is a poet.

I'm a good communicator, and I'm a good translator. I can talk to engineers; I can talk to people for whom technology is not remotely interesting or even maybe scary - things like that.

The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred.

Sometimes it can be difficult when you're talking to a journo after the game, saying, 'Yeah mate, I was on the burst.' And then the translator is trying to translate that into Japanese, and apparently there is no actual translation.

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.

the translator, a lonely sort of acrobat, becomes confused in a labyrinth of paradox, or climbs a pyramid of dependent clauses and has to invent a way down from it in his own language.

It was an epiphany when I realized you don't have to call yourself a linguist, a translator, a poet. You can call yourself an artist and you can do all these things.

There is no such thing as a perfect, ideal, or 'correct' translation. A translator is always trying to extend his knowledge and improve his means of expression; he is always pursuing facts and words.

The CIA will only hire people with impeccable credentials to be a translator. 'Impeccable credentials' means you've never lived outside the United States.

It's important to get a translator who will ask the questions in a sensitive and thoughtful way. Knowing the ethnicity issues, the tribal issues in some places...who your translator is can mean a lot.

When a translator translates my book, it is no longer just my book. It is the translator's book, too. So the book in another language is almost the work of two people. And that is quite interesting to me.

To me a translator is very, very important. If the fixer is also the translator, so much the better. I have known photographers who didn't speak the language and would work in a place for weeks without one, getting by on common sense and smiles. But how many situations did they miss because they couldn't talk to someone and get the back story on details, small daily life things, etc.

I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.

In Japan they're definitely more over the top. They had four Boogie stacks and 20 guitars. But otherwise it's pretty much the same thing, except there's a translator. It's really nice.

The only problem was that I couldn't communicate with Dario. He speaks Italian and I don't. We had a translator the whole time. I just felt that something was lost with the go between. He was a delightful man, but I wish we could have spoken the same language.

What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.

I think every translator would tell you that when they look back at a poem they have translated, they want to pencil in changes. I know I do - though sometimes I also then remember all the reasons I made that choice in the first place.

I remember what it was like when my parents couldn't help me with my homework because they couldn't speak the language, or being a translator for my parents. I did that a lot.

As a true translator you will take care not to translate word for word.

The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!

I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much.

The translator has to be a good writer. The translator has to hear music too. And it might not be exactly your music because the translator needs to translate the music. And so, that is what you are hoping for: a translator who gets what you are doing but who also gets all the ways in which it won't work in the new language.

Please, never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.

For me, every translation is a new book, with the translator inevitably broadening the meaning of the original book in any translation.

When I act as a translator, I am really doing a performance for my fellow Anglophone readers in the West.

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.