Judith Butler Quotes

Most of us do not, in fact, read another language, and so when we read a translation, we have no way of knowing what has been changed or added.

Some words have multiple meanings. Scholastic, aware that I'm allergic to preservatives, kindly got someone to translate the phrase "I can only eat food without preservatives" into Italian. They warned me, however, as they taught me how to say it, that the Italian word for "preservatives" is the same as the word for "condom." So that I should be careful how I look when I say it.

There is, I think, humor here which does not translate well from English into sanity.

When translating one must proceed up to the intranslatable; only then one becomes aware of the foreign nation and the foreign tongue.

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

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

Movies without meaningful dialogue play well all over the world. The Apostle is probably the best movie of the year, but it won't do squat in Korea.

Oh that's very English, that's probably why. They just go 'LOL' in America.

The difficulty that many foreign authors face in having their works translated into English has effects far beyond the United States.

I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, 'cause I've got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one... now a British one. I think it'd be pretty good to have an American phrase book.

I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in translation.

Even when well translated. can we really understand what other cultures are talking about?

The writing I do makes great demands on translators.

In Korean, my lyrics are witty and have twists. But translated into English, it doesn't come over. I've tried writing in English, just for me, but it doesn't work. I've got to know everything about a culture, and I don't.

A lot of British comedy feels foreign rather than feeling universal.

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.

I have some English words on the first album, but any time I try to do it, you miss something. You think it's just a simple translation from French to English, but it's so different as far as the understanding.

Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language... It is to say, 'My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours.'

Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.

The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower.

There are certain concepts, which exist in english, and are unthinkable, untranslatable into Hebrew and vice versa.

There are certain concepts, which exist in English, and are unthinkable, untranslatable into Hebrew and vice versa. Hebrew has a system of tenses, which is, in a big way, different from the English system of tenses, probably different than any European system of tenses, which means a different sense of reality, which means a different concept of time. So, things can be translated, but they become different.

It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.

Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.

In India nearly everybody spoke metaphorically except the English who spoke bluntly and could make their most transparent lies look honest as a consequence; whereas any truth contained in these metaphorical rigmaroles was so deviously presented that it looked devious itself.