A Quote by Christian Wiman
I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation.
Related Quotes
True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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.
Many people do not know that Jesus did not speak Latin or English or Hebrew; he spoke Aramaic. But nobody knows that language. So we're talking about the Bible itself being a translation of a translation of a translation. And, in reality, it has affected people's lives in history.
In translation studies we talk about domestication - translation styles that make something familiar - or estrangement - translation styles that make something radically different. I use a lot of both in my translation, and modernism does both. For instance, if you look at the way James Joyce presents Ulysses, is that domesticating a classic? Think of it as an experiment in relation to a well-known text in another language.
The main issue when it comes to hiring someone from Asia is the language barrier. It's difficult to book someone when they don't speak the language and they can't deliver the lines or even speak to the director. But in terms of Asian-American actresses, we all speak it fluently!
The original language of Christianity is translation.
In its happiest efforts, translation is but approximation, and its efforts are not often happy. A translation may be good as translation, but it cannot be an adequate reproduction of the original.
I always think if you speak to someone in their second language, you speak to their head. If you speak in their first, you speak to their heart. I've always tried to let players see that.
Though I have seldom done anything to my own satisfaction, I am better satisfied with the translation of the New Testament than I ever expected to be. The language is, I believe, simple, plain, intelligible; and I have endeavored, I hope successfully, to make every sentence a faithful representation of the original.
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.
The oldest cliché in the world is about "what's lost in translation," but you don't very often read much intelligent about what's gained by translation, and the answer is everything. Our language is a compendium of translation.
Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.
My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author's voice really is.
Mathematics to me is like a language I don’t speak though I admire its literature in translation.
Each language has its own take on the world. That's why a translation can never be absolutely exact, and therefore, when you enter another language and speak with its speakers, you become a slightly different person; you learn a different sort of world.
It seemed to me that the real philosophical breakthroughs of the 20th century were in terms of the understanding of language. What is language? Where does it come from, how does it work, what does it do?
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