Interpretation Challenges Quotes

I've made movies that were adaptations and I've been kind of frustrated by the process because, you know that old axiom, 'It's never as good as the book'? It's often true because nothing competes with your own imagination. When you're reading a book and you imagine something in your head, nothing's going to compete with that.

The magic gets lost in translation.

What's this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?

In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!

The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities.

It seems to me that it was well said by Madama Serenissima, and insisted on by your reverence, that the Holy Scripture cannot err, and that the decrees therein contained are absolutely true and inviolable. But I should have in your place added that, though Scripture cannot err, its expounders and interpreters are liable to err in many ways; and one error in particular would be most grave and most frequent, if we always stopped short at the literal signification of the words.

The sentences in the book of providence are sometimes long, and you must read a great way before you understand their meaning.

That very document [Constitution] does little to serve people when Supreme Court decisions are written so that even high-priced lawyers can't figure them out.

Beware! Freedom of speech also includes the freedom to be misunderstood.

Something gets lost when you translate. It's hard to keep straight. Perspective is every thing.

Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.

With a role like Hedda Gabler, which is incredibly complicated, you often feel that you haven't even scratched the surface the first time around, so you relish the opportunity to do it again, particularly with an ensemble of actors and the company we assembled. But when you do that in films you somehow have to make some attempt to uncross people's arms and you have to justify why you're doing it.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.

It is often hard to secure unanimity about the borders of legislative power, but that is much easier than to decide how far a particular adjustment diverges from what the judges deem tolerable. On such issues experience has over and over again shown the difficulty of securing unanimity. This is disastrous because disunity cancels the impact of monolithic solidarity on which the authority of a bench of judges so largely depends.

In Russia, as I sat there day after day wearing headphones, listening to the interpreter struggle to make our words relevant, I wondered if we could establish meaningful rapport with a nation that had never seen raisins dance in dark glasses on TV...never had a garage sale.

I'm not good at reading reviews and things like that.

All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original.

So much gets lost in the translation. Even if you sat there listening to it with a microscope, there's no way you're gonna find out what it means.

Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!

If you do not know his language, you will never understand a foreigner's silence.

Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.

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.

It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.

But full sequencing? No. Very hard to interpret. At some point probably we'll all have that opportunity but most of what's there will be stuff that we don't know what to say much about. So it's a great research tool, but for clinical purposes to advise somebody to practice better health maintenance, it's not necessarily gonna be a big one for a while.