Etgar Keret Quotes

I tried to write 'Trainspotting' in standard English, but people weren't talking like that.

Ebonics is me. I'm the king of slang, hands down.

Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.

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 wouldn't exclude writing another song in German, but I don't want to translate songs anymore. We used to sit down and literally translate every song word for word - it was very technical, and the songs would lose so much along the way.

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.

My best friend Madison keeps a list on her phone of all of the different English slang that I say, so she has kind of like a translator so she can understand without having to ask me, "What on Earth are you talking about when you say 'nackered'?"

A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.

Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.

When my works are being translated, I always get this question from my translators: Up or down? Which means, should it sound biblical and highbrow, or should we take it all down to sound colloquial? In Hebrew, it's both all the time. People in Israel would write in a high register, they wouldn't write colloquial speech. I do a special take on colloquial speech.

There's a way that white people and black people spoke in the '70s that is nothing like how they speak now. They spoke from a soul, actually. There's a singsongy way of walking and talking that's just different now.

At acting school people didn't speak like me. It was all received pronunciation - 'ow now brown cow.'

I found a great book called 'Slang Through the Ages' by Jonathon Green. It's basically a thesaurus of historical slang, and had lots of great old uses.

People love to drop in 'you betcha' as often as they can.

The only thing that kept us from going bigger worldwide was the language barrier. All the corn that we did on 'Hee Haw,' it was hard to translate into their slang.

When I write in Italian - this is just the metaphor that came to me immediately, and I really think this is what it is - I feel like I'm writing with my left hand. Because of that weakness, there is this enormous freedom that comes with it.

My characters don't talk necessarily in a normal American way of talking. They talk a little different.

The writing I do makes great demands on translators.

There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.

I would always talk with my friends in English and Spanglish, but it was more like slang. It was more like, 'Yo, what's up, dog?' But in Spanish, I know what's proper, and what's ghetto. I know the difference.

I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.

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.

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.

No one can understand my accent!

Language is essentially tribal, so jargon can actually be a really good thing because it unites people.