Stephen Kinzer Quotes

When you do a film in a foreign language, you know there's a cost in it, that you know, unfortunately, the audiences of foreign language films have not been cultivated. There's a market, but the market has been reduced, unfortunately, and you know that when you're making a foreign language film, you're making a choice.

The English book world is relatively closed to translation, so only a small amount of foreign language work can come in.

I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write - with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.

My new play 'Chinglish,' which will go to Broadway, is about a white American businessman who goes to a provincial capital in China, hoping to make a deal there. It's bilingual. And it's about trying to communicate across language and cultural barriers.

If you're a Norwegian writer, you are not visible in the world. The door of the English language is very hard to open for a Norwegian writer.

The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language.

The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it.

My dream is that Participant is producing content in every language in every part of the world.

Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner, because English is the language that's spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication.

It's kind of cool that I know of all this great science fiction being written in China, and most of it is not really well-known in the West.

Language should not be a barrier for an actor; I want the world to see my work and not limit it to Hindi-speaking audiences.

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.

I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment.

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.

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.

It's one thing to be writing in South or Latin America, where, except for Brazil, every country, however small and hard to find on a map, speaks Spanish, but quite another to be writing in, say, Hungary, a landlocked nation of 10 million people, with a language that very few people outside Hungary can read or speak.

You never know how you're going to go down as an English commentator in Australia.

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.

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 felt like the Germans were being mean to me at training, but they were actually just trying to help. I learned really quick - which made me a better player. I'm appreciative of the way they treated me. It's just the language and, of course, as an American, I had to learn that. No offense to them; I love them to death, and I love my teammates.

As an American married to an Englishman and living in France, I've spent much of my adult life trying to decode the rules of conversation in three countries. Paradoxically, these rules are almost always unspoken.

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.

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

I am not concerned about my foreign audience.