Translation Difficulty 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.

What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.

Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation.

My thought process is in Malayalam. So, every time I have to work outside Malayalam, the process is a little stressful. I have to translate my Malayalam thoughts into English and back to Tamil.

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.

The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!

A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.

All translation is a compromise - the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic.

Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.