The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.

quote by Leonardo Sciascia
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A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

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

quote by Manuel Puig
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Body language loud
translates inner silences
unique within crowd.

haiku by Jonathan Robin (13 March 2005)
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A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.

quote by John Millington Synge
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One moment alone
translates [th]inklings' impression
far too few can clone

haiku by Jonathan Robin (16 September 2007)
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Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different.

classic quote by Goethe
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Translation is at best an echo.

quote by George Borrow
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I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning. A passage from some theological work for translation into the vernacular ought to be a compulsory paper in every ordination examination.

C.S. Lewis in The Grand Miracle
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As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.

quote by Boris Pasternak
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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.

quote by Fredrik Bajer
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The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

quote by Elfriede Jelinek
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I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

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

quote by Robert Fitzgerald
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Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

quote by Robert Frost
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Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.

quote by Yo-Yo Ma
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Cable would not translate into the public radio universe.

quote by Juan Williams
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I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.

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

quote by Manuel Puig
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Ballade adresse a Geoffrey Chaucer

O Socratès plains de philosophie,
Seneque en meurs, Auglius en pratique,
Ovides grans en ta poëtrie,
Briés en parler, saiges en rethorique . . .
Grant translateur, noble Geoffrey Chaucier.

O Socrates, filled with philosophy,
Seneca in morals, Aulus Gellius in practice,
Great Ovid of your poetry,
Brief in speech, wise in rhetoric,
Most high eagle, who by your science
Enlumined the realm of Æneas.
The Isle of giants, of Brut, who has
Sown the flowers and planted the rose bower
For those ignorant of French,
Great translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer.

You are the god of earthly love in Albion,
And of the Rose - in the Angelic land,
Which, from the Saxoness Angelica, has flourished

[...] Read more

poem by Eustache Deschamps
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