Cultural Translation Quotes

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Shakespeare has been adapted by Akira Kurosawa. 'Dangerous Liaisons' has been adapted into a Chinese movie. 'Blood Simple', the Coen brothers movie, was adapted by Zhang Yimou.

There is a new venue for theory, necessarily impure, where it emerges in and as the very event of cultural translation. This is not the displacement of theory by historicism, nor a simple historicization of theory that exposes the contingent limits of its more generalizable claims.

Everyone wants a hug and kiss. It translates into any language.

I've been lucky enough in 20 years in the media to have a nice soap box that put me in a position to describe to an American viewership that Tuscany is different from Umbria, and it's different from Emilia-Romagna and, not that that was news, but it was never presented to them in a way that was, "Hey, look. This is a different plate from that different place." And although we all think of "spaghetti, lasagna, ciao," as what Italy is all about, there's all of this great stuff... I was merely an interpreter. I wasn't the developer of the content.

Every Age has its own peculiar faith. Any attempt to translate into facts the mission of one Age with the machinery of another, can only end in an indefinite series of abortive efforts. Defeated by the utter want of proportion between the means and the end, such attempts might produce martyrs, but never lead to victory.

Chevrolet was puzzled when they discovered that their sales for the Chevy Nova were off the charts everywhere but in Latin America. They finally realized that "Nova" in Spanish translates to "no go." Not the best name for a car... anywhere "no va."

An idea does not pass from one language to another without change.

What works in the States doesn't easily translate to the Korean market.

For me, being able to work with somebody who I don't have to translate my experience to all the time - that's important, because I'm not ­having to walk someone down the path of racial understanding to tell a story about a woman of color.

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.

To be able to translate the customs, ideas and appearance of my times as I see them - in a word, to create a living art - this has been my aim.

I have a personal relationship with Dizzee Rascal - I know him, he's cool - so this is no disrespect to him or any other British rappers who tried to make it in America, like Wiley and Tinie Tempah, but the type of music they were making to be accepted over there - it doesn't translate.

It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we'd read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.

Nothing translates worse than comedy into the printed word.

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.

It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.

Though most of my titles are translated into about 7 to 8 languages, I feel that translations, to some extent, can lose the flavour of the colloquial words used otherwise in the regional narrative.

When I act as a translator, I am really doing a performance for my fellow Anglophone readers in the West.

The language in New Mexico is very different. At first when you hear the speech here, you don't really know what to do with it, but then I just went with it, because as a writer as well as a translator I do believe that translated words are not different names for the same thing. They're different names for different things. I tried to stay as true as I could, so I used Ruben Cobos' dictionary of Southwestern Spanish, and when I went into Spanish I never assumed the word I would use would be the word a nuevomexicano would use.

Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.