Book Translation Quotes

In the last 1,000 years, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year.

The religious establishment (of Saudi Arabia) makes sure that millions of Islamic books are translated into other languages each year, but very few books are translated into Arabic.

I always felt once it goes into movie land, the book belongs to someone else.

It's always tense when you move a character from a book to the screen. Always tense.

They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.

It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.

Sometimes I forget when I read a book that it didn't exist in English first.

Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world.

Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.

As far as books getting turned into movies, I fared very, very well.

I think a lot of writers are unrealistic about having their books translated into film.

Wayne Wang, the director of Because of Winn-Dixie the movie, understood the book and transferred as much of the feeling of the book onto film as humanly possible. I think he did a fabulous job. And also I'm thrilled because the movie brings people to the book - people that wouldn't know about the book - and that's a great thing.

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

Home to me is the world because my books have been translated into more than 30 languages.

I'd love to see a good script of one of my books, in these years of animations and comic book sequels, and had so many written over the years, but none quite clicked.

A lot of books, if you take them at face value, they're just not gonna work as films.

I'm interested in adapting books and all sorts of things.

When the whole world reads your books, is there any other happiness for a writer? I am happy that my books are read in 57 languages. But I am focused on Istanbul not because of Istanbul but because of humanity. Everyone is the same in the end.

People are usually so disappointed with book-to-movie translations.

'Out' was my real breakthrough, the novel that became a hit in Japan and sold a lot of books, so it was sort of an obvious choice for being the first book to be translated into English.

My books have been translated into various languages and sold in other countries, but I never have any contact with the foreign publishers and am so disconnected from that process that it seems almost imaginary. With 'How to Save a Life', I worked closely with Usborne editors and have been involved in the publicity.

I have friends who are writers who have had movies made of their books, and they are almost uniformly horrified about what's been done - or, at least, dissatisfied.

I've read all of Sarah Waters's novels which have been translated into Korean.

Visit any bookshop in Europe, and the shelves are filled with English novels and non-fiction books in translation - while British bookshops stock mainly English and American works.

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.