A Quote by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

What is translated from English and into English - and in what quantities - is a question of power.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

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English Power Question Translated

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Ngugi wa Thiong'o
English - Writer
Born: January 5, 1938

In fact, many of the quotes in my books are quotes which were translated from English and that I read already translated into Spanish. I'm not really concerned with what the original version in English was, because the important thing for me is that I received them already translated, and they've influenced my original worldview as translations, not as original quotations.

Agustin Fernandez Mallo

Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner, because English is the language that's spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication.

Olga Tokarczuk

There was - there still is - a big shortage of good Chinese-English literary translators. So for two years in London, I was stuck waiting, not writing, with several Chinese books I couldn't get translated. That's when I decided to write in English, since I had been living here and had decided to reconstruct my life here. Even if I wrote in broken English, it was better than getting bored and weary and bitter on the long queue of authors waiting to be translated by a stranger.

Xiaolu Guo

In Korean, my lyrics are witty and have twists. But translated into English, it doesn't come over. I've tried writing in English, just for me, but it doesn't work. I've got to know everything about a culture, and I don't.

Psy

A lot of the demos I write are all in English, so releasing music in English isn't translating to English, it's just keeping them in English.

Henry Lau

My English is closer to the literary English, and I'm not very familiar with jokes in English or with, you know, with small talk in English.

J. M. G. Le Clezio

English is no problem for me because I am actually English. My whole family are English; I was brought up listening to various forms of the English accent.

Guy Pearce

My fitness trainer's English, my physio's English, some of my friends are English. I don't have a problem with English people at all.

Andy Murray

So is the English Parliament provincial. Mere country bumpkins, they betray themselves, when any more important question arises for them to settle, the Irish question, for instance,--the English question why did I not say? Their natures are subdued to what they work in. Their "good breeding" respects only secondary objects.

Henry David Thoreau

What the public wants is called 'politically unrealistic.' Translated into English, that means power and privilege are opposed to it.

Noam Chomsky

The Saga of Dharmapuri is one of the great works of modern Indian literature. (...) Set against Vijayan's heroic and scatological Candide -- originally written in Malayalam and finely translated into English by the author -- the timidity of our own English talent for political satire is embarrassingly laid bare. For this is dangerous stuff, and cut close to the bone. (...) Fiercest of all is Vijayan's Voltairean recoil from Indian cringing to power.

David Selbourne

Translated literature can be fascinating. There's something so intriguing about reading the text second hand - a piece of prose that has already been through an extra filter, another consciousness, in the guise of the translator. Some of my favorite writers who have written in English were doing so without English being their first language, so there's a sense of distance or of distortion there, too. Conrad. Nabokov. These writers were employing English in interesting ways.

Katie Kitamura

On the one hand, there is no question that English - frequently bad English - has become the universal language of scholarship. It is clearly a tremendous handicap for people outside of the United States, Britain, and Australia and a few other countries because few of them are native speakers, but we demand that they present and publish in English.

Henry Rosovsky

The English, the English, The English are best: So Up with the English and Down with the Rest!

Michael Flanders

Not long time ago there was a striking example of the extent to which English has diverged: a television company put out a programme filmed in the English city of Newcastle, where the local variety of English is famously divergent and difficult, and the televised version was accompanied by English subtitles!

Larry Trask

The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument.

Amos Oz

A Quote by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

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