Elif Batuman Quotes

In Dortmund we had many players from abroad and when you want to put your thoughts in their heads, for example with Pierre-Emerick, you had to switch to English, which is the language most players understand.

It's rare to find an Indian who speaks Chinese. It's rare to find a Chinese who can speak any of the Indian languages. Neither of them at the trading level - I want to repeat this, at the trading level - can speak English, either.

Our leaders increasingly see fit to lecture the ethnic minorities on the need to integrate, including of course the need to speak English. What about the need, though, for Britain to integrate with the rest of the world?

My children speak very good Chinese, and they translate for our American friends.

This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

I never found it frustrating not speaking.

In Sweden, they broadcast the American shows in English with Swedish subtitles, whereas in many European countries they dub them. Watching those shows in English was big for me.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it's going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke.

The fact of the matter is that fewer people in Tokyo are able to do business in English than in many other big Asian cities, like Shanghai, Seoul or Bangkok.

I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

Many of the books I read, I had to read them in French, English, or Italian, because they hadn't been translated into Spanish.

Globalization has brought a proliferation of such environments, so that even monolinguals must increasingly learn to live and act multilingually.

My boyfriend - Matt Kaplan - is American, so any time I'm unsure of how to say something, I say, 'Hey how do you say this?' and he yells it out.

You know it was really hard to do a set, or even to do interviews in English, because in Europe, we always had a translator with us.

A lot of linguists in the market, especially interpreters of foreign languages, do not have a great command over the English language, especially if they are translating into English.

As a child, it was really hard because I'd be thrown into a new school and have to make new friends, or I'd sit in class for months without speaking the language, but as I got older, I welcomed the possibility of discovering new cultures and languages.

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.

I am used to being places where I don't speak the language. What I am not used to is being in a part of a country where few people speak my language. Call it ignorance, arrogance, or what have you, but most places I have visited, I was lucky enough to be able to get by with English.

I grew up learning Russian and translating English songs when I became a teenager, we got to listen to West Germany radio stations, and learning lyrics with picture book. These are my first experiences with the English language.

When I went to London, they told me I spoke with a funny accent - English with a Chinese accent.

Language doesn't seem to be a barrier for me to do films in the south.

When I came here I moved to London and I was meeting so many new people and had to speak only in English, which is not my native language.