Joe Lando Quotes

My mother tongue, Mende, is very expressive, very figurative, and when I write, I always struggle to find the English equivalent of things that I really want to say in Mende. For example, in Mende, you wouldn't say 'night came suddenly'; you would say 'the sky rolled over and changed its sides.'

I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation.

I thought that subtitles are boring because they're there generally to serve us with information to make you understand what people are saying in a different language.

Some words, you know, it's amazing but some words would come only in French, and when I speak French, it would only come in English. And so the adjustment is very difficult sometimes.

I'm trying to talk to my kids in Japanese, because I'm not a pro English speaker. My wife speaks to them in English. That's her first language. I don't want my kids to feel the same as me when I was studying English. It was so frustrating.

I remember from my earliest years people speaking, you know, in a certain kind of rhythm and telling stories and sharing experiences in a way that was different in Indian country than it was other places. And I was really struck by this and obviously very affected by it, because it's always come out in my songs.

My parents were both Spanish-speakers and they used to speak to me and my siblings in Spanish and we'd answer them in English.

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

Yes, I'm half Italian. So my grandfather speaks heavy Italian... and I couldn't understand a word he said.

My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.

I had grandparents who were native Irish speakers, and also, two of the four grandparents were illiterate.

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.

For me, it's a big challenge to translate everything in English.

I was my mother's translator until I was probably 12 years old, and I remember how people looked at her.

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.

We used to speak Irish - Gaelic Irish - around the dinner table, but over the years, we lost that.

Spanish is my first language.

For me, Malayalam is a difficult language. It has got a lot of tongue-twisting words.

Sometimes I don't use the words 'will' and 'want' in the right way. The German word 'will' is the English word 'want,' so that's a little bit of the problem.

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 earliest memory is having my grandfather, who was born in 1899, read the newspaper to me in a foreign language. I was utterly captivated by the fact that he took the time to read it to me. I didn't know what he saying, it was in a completely different language. I think it was in French. But I was just so honored that he was with me and talking to me. It's extraordinary that you know someone from that time, and also someone that's willing to give you the time of day, who's lived through so much.

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

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

Translation from one language to another is like viewing a piece of tapestry on the wrong side where though the figures are distinguishable yet there are so many ends and threads that the beauty and exactness of the work is obscured.

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