George Steiner Quotes

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.

'Being Cyrus' is very young in language or grammar. I am not saying that these things can't be achieved in Hindi. All I am saying is that it would not be the same.

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.

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

It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.

All translation is a compromise - the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic.

I can be a very sarcastic person, and sometimes people take every word I say literally.

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.'

Don't hate the word, playa; hate the dictionary.

Lots of English people say exactly the opposite of what they mean.

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

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.

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

Sort of like, I have to make the Japanese lyrics really deep.

I'm from the South, and there's a different understanding of how to chop. There's a syllable play. It's a delicate art. Your accent has a lot to do with it. If you're from a certain area, words don't roll of your tongue as slick.

The writing I do makes great demands on translators.

In German, if a situation is tense, you say 'unter strom' - under electricity.

The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart.

A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

The English language is more complex than calculus because numbers don't have nuances.

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.

Meanings are translatable. Words are untranslatable… More briefly – a word is translatable, its sound is not.

Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written. The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument.