A Quote by Vernor Vinge

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

Vernor Vinge

Quote Topics

Close Effective Languages Natural Program Sentient Translation Translator

Quote Author

Vernor Vinge
American - Writer
Born: February 10, 1944

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

Agustin Fernandez Mallo

I feel French is very close to Urdu. Both languages are beautiful. Sadly, their beauty is lost in translation.

Amisha Patel

Walter Benjamin used to think that languages expand their register thanks to translation, because translation forces ways of using words and structures that were alien to the original speaker of the target language.

Alvaro Enrigue

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.

Sam Lipsyte

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

Peter Newmark

I don't speak any languages well enough to make an expert assessment on writing in translation, but since I'm interested in awkwardness in prose, I find I like the way translated texts can sometimes acquire awkwardness in the process of translation. There's a discordance translation can create which I think is sometimes seen as a weakness but which I think can be a really interesting aspect of the text.

Katie Kitamura

But what after all, behind appearances, is this seeming mystery? We can see that it is the Consciousness which had lost itself returning again to itself, emerging out of its giant self-forgetfulness, slowly, painfully, as a Life that is would be sentient, half-sentient, dimly sentient, wholly sentient and finally struggles to be more than sentient, to be again divinely selfconscious, free, infinite, immortal.

Sri Aurobindo

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.

Italo Calvino

Just as you have the instinctive natural desire to be happy and overcome suffering, so do all sentient beings; just as you have the right to fulfill this innate aspiration, so do all sentient beings. So on what exact grounds do you discriminate?

Dalai Lama

Contrary to conventional wisdom, dance is not a universal 'language' but many languages and dialects. There are close to 6000 verbal languages, and probably that many dance languages.

Judith Lynne Hanna

If it takes several billion years to develop the building blocks which you need, like RNA and DNA, and then those can build multicellular life and then multicellular life can be honed with natural selection to a point where it becomes sentient like us, then at some point that sentient being can begin to manipulate the matter around it to build better sentient life.

Neill Blomkamp

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.

Nick Cummins

Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.

Anne Michaels

I have done literary translation because the University of Arkansas, where I did my MFA, was program of creative writing and translation, and it's a very different experience. You're trying to honor the writer. You shouldn't allow yourself, for example, to encounter a sentence that's three lines long and break it up into four smaller sentences.

Miroslav Penkov

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.