Top 86 Translations Quotes & Sayings

I think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original.

To work with Kaz on this kind of project is a fascinating process...He seems to be Dogen himself when offering the translations that we Western collaborators then refine with him.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

Take a look at the number of Bibles on your shelf. Think how grateful you are for the help you've received from various Bible translations and editions over the years.

The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.

People are usually so disappointed with book-to-movie translations.

Though most of my titles are translated into about 7 to 8 languages, I feel that translations, to some extent, can lose the flavour of the colloquial words used otherwise in the regional narrative.

I think translations should convey the feelings expressed in the original work. This is what I have believed in and practised.

Many pictures turn out to be limp translations of the known world instead of vital objects which create an intrinsic world of their own. There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.

'The Tin Drum' is one of my favourite books of all time - I've probably got 12 or 15 copies with different covers, different translations - but it's also just about my favourite film.

And after I started working for the Bureau, most of my translation duties included translations of documents and investigations that actually started way before 9/11.

I wasn't happy with Tagore's own translations in English. Maybe he was, but I wasn't, so I took it upon myself to do it.

Secular intellectuals may wax eloquent about 'true Islam' being humane and peaceful, on TV programmes, but it is clear that they have not read any authoritative translations of the Koran, the Sira, and the Hadith.

My books have been published all over Europe. They read me there, and I want to read them back. I also spend a lot of time in Europe, often meeting writers, and I'm sick of apologizing for the embarrassing shortage of translations in America.

Translations are very important these days, since an average person can only know 2-3 three languages. We have so many languages in India and poems are being written in as many of them.

By the 1880s, English translations of both the French and the Russian editions were available, and Americans began to read 'War and Peace.'

Wherever modern translations of marked excellence were already in existence efforts were made to secure them for the Library, but in a number of instances copyright could not be obtained.

It has since been agreed that speeches given in English will be translated into French and vice versa, and even into German and Italian when necessary. No doubt translations into Esperanto will also soon be in demand.

Refined, intense, wise, stiring, immediate, subtile, all the charmed qualities gather in Dropping the Bow. These translations are precious jewels. Like the erotic moods they investigate, these versions shimmer and startle with a palpable desire to be heard, and a mystical sense of impermanence. This is a transmission of a vital, extraordinary tradition.

I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.

The best translations cannot convey to us the strength and exquisite delicacy of thought in its native garb, and he to whom such books are shut flounders about in outer darkness.

Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't all successful, but as a whole it's incredibly successful, moving us away from familiar forms and indicating other forms we might think in or express in.

'Translations Through Speakers' was literally, I'm translating very spottily what my aspirations are.

Good translations are one of the vital necessities of our time.

Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.

I had the advantage, that I know Swedish. So I had the Swedish book and I had a lot of English translations, and German translations, and I did everything to make the best English translation of August Strindberg's Miss Julie I could. And then, there I went. "Oh! I think she's thinking this, but I think she should say it!" And so on. It's wonderful to do that.

The Bible has been through at least half a dozen translations by the time you read it. Plus, when the word of God is infected by the hand of man, that is, written down, it is tainted.

I read the different translations of the Bible they had and really just dove into it, almost so I could prove it all right.

I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.

I often visit Maria Tatar's 'The Grimm Reader' for a cold dose of courage. Her translations come from the Brothers Grimm, whose now-famous collection of 'Kinder- und Hausmarchen' ('Children's and Household Tales') was first published in 1812. The book was not intended for young readers.

I thought that strange syntax was the language of story books. I didn't realize those were poor translations... English from Edwardian times.

In early 2010, we launched our first localized version of 'WhatsApp' for iPhone. It included Spanish and German language translations, to name a couple.

Gaiaguys are free to think for themselves, and since their translations of our texts - even if these are of a preliminary nature - are sought for by many people, we see no reason for withdrawing our permission.

The Christian "doctrines" are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection

Regarding R. H. Blyth: For translations, the best books are still those by R. H. Blyth. . . .

The journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet. NOTE: Other translations exist, such as:Great trees grow from the smallest shoots;a terraced garden, from a pile of earth,and a journey of a thousand milesbegins by taking the initial step.

Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn't occur to people - or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original.

I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment.

As strange as this may sound, I very seldom read fiction. Because my novels require so much research, almost everything I read is non - fiction - histories, biographies, translations of ancient texts.

It was real Cheyenne. I would get the translations the night before, but it was very difficult because it was not like any other language you would be familiar with.

Opens up a whole new view of Beckett. The strong mutual attraction between Beckett and Cunard may help explain the leftist political views he expressed both in these superb and long-neglected translations for Negro and elsewhere in his work.

What's wonderful is to read the different translations - some done in 1600 and some in 1900 - of the same passage. It's fascinating to watch the same tale repeated in such a different way by two different centuries.

Be on guard against any tampering with the Word, whether disguised as a search for truth, or a scholarly attempt at apparently hidden meanings; and beware of the confusion created by the senseless rash of new versions, translations, editions, and improvements upon the tried and tested Bible of our fathers and grandfathers.

Translations increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties.

The best translations are always the ones in the language the author can't read.

I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

Since my schooldays, I've read the translations of Bengali writers. I'm Punjabi, but I read a lot of Bengali and Urdu literature.

There aren't really rules for painting, but there’s certain facts and fictions about painting. Part of what I do is document another surface and sort of translate it. They’re like translations, and then part of it is fiction, which is invention.

I mainly wanted non-english writing poets, because I loved the idea that I was translating translations.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

Even when she was alive, Esther Kreitman's novels, short stories and translations received far less attention than the work of her famous brothers, I. J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.

Prophecy is rash, but it may be that the publication of D.T. Suzuki's first Essays in Zen Buddhism in 1927 will seem to future generations as great an intellectual event as William of Moerbeke's Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century or Marsiglio Ficino's of Plato in the fifteenth.

One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.

Of course we may have any number of translations of a given text - the more the better, really.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.

I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.

I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.