Creative Translation Quotes

As a writer, I think about films I work on in a traditional Hollywood kind of a way. I'm curious to see how it translates.

The past is always recycled. I'm just taking what the people I looked up to did and translating it for my generation.

Everything I've wanted to turn into a film becomes something new and different when it becomes a movie... Each time I work with an author, I say to them, 'A book and a movie are different things.'

Taking a comic strip character is very hard to write. Because comics are meant to work in one page, to work in frames with minimalistic dialogue. And a lot of it is left to the imagination of the reader. To do that in film, you've got to be a little more explanatory. And that requires a good screenplay and good dialogue.

Interestingly, I never thought I'd do an adaptation. I've also been quite against them. I think trying to translate one medium to another is wrong. I never really felt that books fitted into film. Generally people are disappointed, aren't they?

I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at-not copy it.

The better a novel is, in literary terms, the more you can't be faithful. The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else

Artists are the people that no matter what, pick up the pen, pick up a paintbrush. They take the time to translate what is happening to create something that resonates deeply with the rest of the people that are caught in the middle of their own reality.

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.

I was struggling to find a way to make evening clothes more deconstructed. I like to think that I translated the Latin concept in a more modern way. I don't think that I was that literal.

I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

I see my role as a translator, telling the story that's in the book using the more visual language of film.

People get very trapped where they are. When they hear "fashion" they get intimidated, particularly at the upper end because it's so elitist. If you can bring your own concept or your viewpoint and translate it not down but out, then you're really successful in the truest sense.

I couldn't portray a women in all her natural loveliness.. I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman.

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'

Translating is writing.

What works in one medium does not necessarily always work in the other.

The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again. I'm completely in awe of this skill, since I happen to be both bilingual and a writer, but nevertheless a lousy translator.

To me, the process of art is very much a process of translation, of borrowing.

Any man who does not have his inner world to translate is not an artist.

You know, it's a hugely difficult thing to take any work of art or drawing and say 'make that real.'

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.

I'm not a writer myself, so I'm forced to try to get what's a sort of an odour or a colour or something I feel in my head from a writer, and that's a... I don't have a recipe for that process. I don't know what it is... it's different every time.