Larry Gelbart Quotes

Even when well translated. can we really understand what other cultures are talking about?

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.

I don't really do Japanese interviews. I don't think there's much call for me in Japan.

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.

American audiences and European and Asian audiences are so different.

Sometimes it can be difficult when you're talking to a journo after the game, saying, 'Yeah mate, I was on the burst.' And then the translator is trying to translate that into Japanese, and apparently there is no actual translation.

I translated an Emile Zola book, 'The Belly of Paris,' because I didn't find an existing translation that captured his sense of humor. Humor is the first victim of translation.

Some words have multiple meanings. Scholastic, aware that I'm allergic to preservatives, kindly got someone to translate the phrase "I can only eat food without preservatives" into Italian. They warned me, however, as they taught me how to say it, that the Italian word for "preservatives" is the same as the word for "condom." So that I should be careful how I look when I say it.

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

[European audiences differ from American] they talk different. The ones in Holland speak Dutch. The ones in Switzerland speak Swiss. That's the only difference.

There's inherent cultural imbalance whenever you're translating from Chinese to English. Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references - history, language, culture, all this stuff - but to be well-versed in Western references as well.

Language is very deceiving. In certain languages, there is certain vocabulary that doesn't exist in other languages. It totally changes how people feel about things.

There are certain situations, when you're in America, when people understand you better without an Australian accent.

In Libya, I did well at school because I was clever. In Egyptian public school, I got the highest marks for the basest of reasons. And in the American school, I struggled. Everything - mathematics, the sciences, pottery, swimming - had to be conducted in a language I hardly knew and that was neither spoken in the streets nor at home.

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.

If you have a billion people running a phone in every corner of their lives, and all these third-party apps and all these countries and all these languages, there are going to be issues.

American and French culture are really, really different, but in a way it's funny.

To be a foreigner may be an advantage but disadvantage as well. It was advantage for me for sure.

I think that a lot of teams aren't as close-knit as we are because a lot of the Spanish speakers don't know English and some of the English guys don't care to try and learn Spanish and relate to Latin players.

We're actually more popular in the U.K.; they really get us, and in Australia. In the non-English speaking countries, they don't really get it.

It took me a while to figure out the U.S. sense of humor, a lot of trial and error. I would write down jokes to casually tell my American friend over Skype to see which ones he'd laugh at.

In China, because Chinese is a tonal language, it can be kind of hard to follow people's emotional tracks. There was one moment where a woman I was interviewing just sort of burst into tears, and I can usually sort of tell when things are coming on, and in that moment, it was very unexpected.

The last thing an Englishman wants to hear is a man from Brussels trying to imitate his language - you want to hear a different point of view. You may not be able to understand the details, but you can understand the feeling.

I wasn't searching for a common denominator - I started wondering about the challenge of working in other cultures. What I reached was the sudden acknowledgment of the universal aspect of filmmaking.

With support jobs moving to China and India, it's not surprising that English-speaking countries' top frustration revolves around the difficulty of understanding customer service representatives. However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers' growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries.