Elfriede Jelinek Quotes

Translation is the art of failure.

Translation is at best an echo.

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.

Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.

Grandma frowned and yelled something in Russian. She could have been saying, 'Open up, your best friend is here.' On the other hand, it could have been, 'America is a great country because of canned ravioli.

Something may have been lost in translation, but it certainly wasn't love

Algebra looked like Chinese characters to me, and I could never get into reading Shakespeare. I just did not get it.

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 should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

I want my words to survive translation.

I like anything that is like an obstruction, something that I have to act through is good.

Man is used to the fact that there are languages which he does not at first understand and which must be learned, but because art is primarily visual he expects that he should get the message immediately and is apt to be affronted if he doesn't.

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

If it were easy it would have happened already.

I discovered that it's not really about the language. It's about how the words are pronounced and the delivery. We have plenty of good English-speaking comedians. It's O.K. if I have my accent, my gestures, my way of speaking.

My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.

Interviewing people is hard.

Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican.

Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.

Ethics seems a morass which we have to cross, but get hopelessly bogged in when we make the attempt.

This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit, trickiness cubed.

A difficulty for every solution.

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

One of the hardest things in the world is to convey a meaning accurately from one mind to another.

I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment.