Language Interpretation Quotes

In English, there is one word for sister. In Chinese, there are two separate words, for elder and younger sister. This is actually a translation problem because if you see the word sister, you don't know how to translate it to Chinese because you don't know if it's an elder sister or younger.

The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.

When a translation is very good, it is fascinating to see how the book changes and yet stays the same. I think 'Out Stealing Horses' sounds more American for Americans than it does in Norway, and still, it is all there, everything that I wrote. It's amazing.

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word "crisis." One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.

For the version of this CD released in Japan, a translation of the English lyrics is included, but there are lots of places where meanings are lost in the process of translation.

We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

A definition is nothing else but an explication of the meaning of a word, by words whose meaning is already known. Hence it is evident that every word cannot be defined; for the definition must consist of words; and there could be no definition, if there were not words previously understood without definition.

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.

If we are to look only at the words, then we inquire, not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker.

Hector Torrez, how can you communicate with Enzo Hernandez when he speaks Spanish and you speak Mexican?

I have voices in my head, but they're all speaking Spanish, and I have NO idea what they're saying.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

Unlike the ambiguity of life, the ambiguity of language does reach a limit.

I'm Language Gal. I can speak any language presented to me. And I look exactly like Halle Berry.

There were no ill language, if it were not ill taken.

I arrived in the middle of a press conference - as boring a thing to sit through if you don't know the language as it is if you do.

I have some English words on the first album, but any time I try to do it, you miss something. You think it's just a simple translation from French to English, but it's so different as far as the understanding.

Computers will understand sarcasm before Americans do.

Two Chinamen visiting Europe went to the theatre for the first time. One of them occupied himself with trying to understand the theatrical machinery, which he succeeded in doing. The other, despite his ignorance of the language, sought to unravel the meaning of the play. The former is like the astronomer, the latter the philosopher.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

Words also are filters. They have to be translated. Even in the original language, there is interpretation and some ambiguity. If there's a cultural difference between the writer and the reader, that might come out in words. But with pictures, there's more efficiency.

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

The cool thing about doing a voice-over into a different language is that you get to bring the character of your own culture into it.

Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.