Scott Aukerman Quotes

I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.

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

I have less to do with 'The Simpsons' every season, but I stick my nose in here and there. Basically, it's just trying to keep the characters consistent and making sure the show has a soul.

The writing I do makes great demands on translators.

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.

'Translations Through Speakers' was literally, I'm translating very spottily what my aspirations are.

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.

A dubbing artiste does a lot of repair work for an artiste who doesn't naturally speak the language they are acting in.

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.

The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.

Of course my books are translated into many languages. I have here, in my home, translations on my shelf of my books into forty-five different languages. Almost none of them I can read. I can read only the English editions. But, I know that a translation of a work of literature is like playing a violin concerto on the piano. You can do this. You can do this very successfully on one strict condition: never try to force the piano to produce the sounds of the violin. This will be grotesque. So, different musical instruments provide for different music.

You know, they say in France that translation is like a woman: she is either beautiful or faithful.

Judd Apatow, together with me and Lena, we're all the showrunners of 'Girls.'

There simply isn't a way to do the show without investing in a bunch more companies.

Doing a series of 'Facejacker' takes about nine months. It's pretty intense.

I loved all the people involved with '30 Rock.'

We miss 'House of Fools' a lot. We always enjoyed doing that; it felt a bit like a different and fresh show for British TV, so we always feel attached to those sort of things.

My mother had no interest in cartoons. I remember thinking, 'I am never going to grow into that person.' Which is so ironic - now I get to work on 'Family Guy' and 'The Simpsons' and 'Futurama', all of these great animated series! TV was my passion.

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.

Having translated two plays by Chekhov, and not speaking Russian myself - I cannot say one sentence. This may shock people... However, I am not shocked, as it is not hard to find out what the words mean.

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

For the most part, when you're on set, you know everything's fake. You're very aware of the fact that you're shooting a television show.

I don't speak any languages well enough to make an expert assessment on writing in translation, but since I'm interested in awkwardness in prose, I find I like the way translated texts can sometimes acquire awkwardness in the process of translation. There's a discordance translation can create which I think is sometimes seen as a weakness but which I think can be a really interesting aspect of the text.

I'm old enough to remember the days when you spoke to one person from one outlet and that was the conversation. But now what happens is you speak to people and what you say gets translated into Portuguese, then into Mandarin, through a German prism and then back into English and bears little to no resemblance between - to the exchange or - that you had initially with the journalist or to what you originally said.