#translation

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#european-novelists #literary-tradition #literature-in-translation #art

Nowadays we are fond of literal translations...That would have seemed a crime to translators in ages past...They wanted to prove that the vernacular was as capable of a great poem as the original. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#translations #age

Du skal bare huske at det ikke er en perfekt krig i en perfekt verden. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#freedom #frihed #translation #freedom

Det var det der holdt mig vågen om natten," sagde Walter. "Den her opsplitning af landet. For det er det samme problem overalt. Det er ligesådan med internettet eller kabel-tv - der er aldrig noget centrum, der er ingen fælles enighed, der er bare en billion forskellige distraherende støjkilder. Vi kan aldrig sætte os og føre en vedvarende samtale, det er bare billigt skrammel og en lorteudvikling, det hele. Alt det ægte, alt det autentiske, alt det ærlige dør ud. Intellektuelt og kulturelt bliver vi kastet omkring som tilfældige billiardkugler og reagerer på den seneste tilfældige stimulans. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#freedom #frihed #oversættelse #translation #freedom

Reading a poem in translation," wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil"; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications. ↗

— Anne Michaels

#life

In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops. ↗

— Nataly Kelly

#language #linguistics #translation #iraq

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. ↗

— Paul Auster

#bread #contemporary #earn #food #french

It has since been agreed that speeches given in English will be translated into French and vice versa, and even into German and Italian when necessary. No doubt translations into Esperanto will also soon be in demand. ↗

— Fredrik Bajer

#also #been #demand #doubt #english

Translation is the art of failure. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#failure #translation

I don't know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people's websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries. ↗

— Tim Berners Lee

#browse #countries #different #different countries #enough