Robert Fitzgerald Quotes

It's funny because I'm so used to acting in English that any time I have these moments where I have to speak Russian, it definitely takes a different part of my brain to pull it off, but it's always nice and fun.

Foreign languages was the only thing that interested me when I was at school, so playing in another language... it is quite demanding because if it is not your mother tongue, you are missing some connotations and some emotional depth of certain things.

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.

It is very difficult to work in another language, and it is also very challenging.

This will sound really funny, but I'm so used to shooting in Hindi that shooting in English took a while to get used to.

I am used to being places where I don't speak the language. What I am not used to is being in a part of a country where few people speak my language. Call it ignorance, arrogance, or what have you, but most places I have visited, I was lucky enough to be able to get by with English.

My children speak very good Chinese, and they translate for our American friends.

What's always a challenge for me is that my Spanish is not the level of my English. Nor do I read in Spanish the way I read in English.

Whenever I come across an Arabic word mired in English text, I am momentarily shocked out of the narrative.

I consider myself a pretty good conversationalist, but you wind up being downgraded to idiot status when you don't speak the language!

I don't speak Filipino or Spanish, but I've sung in both.

Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable.

My first year in Japan was very tough, just like my first year in the minors. But at least there I had a lot of Dominican people and Latin people I can talk to. If you don't have anybody to talk to, you can get depressed. But if you find someone who talks your language, it's easier.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

For me, at least, much of the German I see and hear sounds stranger than Swedish, a language of which I unfortunately understand very little.

I'm a professor of comparative literature, among other things, so I'm able to read in a couple of other languages, and I understand that not everyone is, not everyone can, although it is quite stunning how many people do read Spanish in the United States, but moving between languages is also extremely helpful.

Yes, translation is by definition an inadequate substitute for being able to read a masterpiece in the original.

When you work in a different language you are not so attached to the words.

Everyone knows English is my second language and my vocabulary is not as broad as it is in Spanish, and because of this, sometimes I use the wrong words to express myself.

I could never see a book written in a foreign language without the most ardent desire to read it.

Back home, almost everything I did, I did in Hebrew. I went to drama school in Hebrew, my whole career was in Hebrew, and to switch languages was something that was fascinating and more complicated than I expected it to be, even though I've been speaking English since I could speak.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

Unlike Conrad or Nabokov, I didn't have circumstances which would have coerced me out of my native tongue altogether.

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.

Switching languages is a form of conversion. And like all conversions, whether it's judged a failure or a success, it excites the desire to leave, go elsewhere, adopt a new language and start all over again. It also means that a conscious effort is demanded to remain still.