Maggie Stiefvater Quotes

Even when well translated. can we really understand what other cultures are talking about?

When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.

Sometimes it can be difficult when you're talking to a journo after the game, saying, 'Yeah mate, I was on the burst.' And then the translator is trying to translate that into Japanese, and apparently there is no actual translation.

Colloquialism is the toughest part of what we do, as foreign actors, because there are certain sayings that you guys have that absolutely don't make any sense.

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

There is always that age-old thing about England and America being divided by a common language. You think that because we speak English and you speak English that you're bound to understand and like everything that we do. And of course you don't.

When you arrive in L.A. as an Englishman, you might as well be on the moon. People just don't understand you if you speak too fast, and most people there think you're Australian. Ordering was incredibly complicated. I was speechless.

I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in translation.

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.

There are certain situations, when you're in America, when people understand you better without an Australian accent.

I'm always saying normal things, and people usually understand me, but they're like, 'Where are you from?!'

I think that a lot of teams aren't as close-knit as we are because a lot of the Spanish speakers don't know English and some of the English guys don't care to try and learn Spanish and relate to Latin players.

The last thing an Englishman wants to hear is a man from Brussels trying to imitate his language - you want to hear a different point of view. You may not be able to understand the details, but you can understand the feeling.

Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican.

With support jobs moving to China and India, it's not surprising that English-speaking countries' top frustration revolves around the difficulty of understanding customer service representatives. However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers' growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries.

I know how hard it can be to communicate in a different country, find your way around, and deal with the mentality of other people and different cultures.

For some reason I'm more appreciated in France than I am back home. The subtitles must be incredibly good.

You forget, when you're in the Scandinavian countries, you forget they don't speak English first and they speak better than I do.

The magic gets lost in translation.

When translating one must proceed up to the intranslatable; only then one becomes aware of the foreign nation and the foreign tongue.

Bilingual films come with a certain inbuilt practical problem with respect to the setting of the story and the dialect.

I am used to being places where I don't speak the language. What I am not used to is being in a part of a country where few people speak my language. Call it ignorance, arrogance, or what have you, but most places I have visited, I was lucky enough to be able to get by with English.

When I first went to Japan, I was wrestling under my real name. The Japanese people have a great amount of difficulty with the letters f, r and l. So three out of the six letters in my first name they couldn't say. It was a bit of a mouthful for those guys.

When I moved from Canada to Korea, I experienced a massive culture shock. I wasn't familiar with Korean culture at all and was very surprised at the hierarchical elements of Korean culture. However, at the time I was determined to succeed so I became a sponge and just soaked in everything I could.

Your mom is the first person you fall in love with, so it's loaded forever and carries all this baggage. There's almost always a communication barrier in place. In my case it's a language and cultural barrier, but other times, it's because your mother's love is conditional or because you're fundamentally different.