Amos Oz Quotes

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

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.

Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.

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

The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.

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

Most of us do not, in fact, read another language, and so when we read a translation, we have no way of knowing what has been changed or added.

It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy 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.

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git.

The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.

There are things that Scotsmen get and other people don't get in the dialogue. Scottish characters can be pinpointed by a phrase, targeted very quickly.

The difficulty that many foreign authors face in having their works translated into English has effects far beyond the United States.

It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist.

No common education has served to remove and soften the differences of origin and language.

One of the nice things about the United States is that, wherever you go, people speak the same language. So native New Yorkers can move to San Francisco, Houston, or Milwaukee and still understand and be understood by everyone they meet. Right? Well, not exactly. Or, as a native New Yorker might put it, 'Wrong!'

It's one thing to be writing in South or Latin America, where, except for Brazil, every country, however small and hard to find on a map, speaks Spanish, but quite another to be writing in, say, Hungary, a landlocked nation of 10 million people, with a language that very few people outside Hungary can read or speak.

You know it was really hard to do a set, or even to do interviews in English, because in Europe, we always had a translator with us.

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.

There's inherent cultural imbalance whenever you're translating from Chinese to English. Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references - history, language, culture, all this stuff - but to be well-versed in Western references as well.

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

I translated an Emile Zola book, 'The Belly of Paris,' because I didn't find an existing translation that captured his sense of humor. Humor is the first victim of translation.

Come now: Do we really think that the gods are everywhere called by the same names by which they are addressed by us? But the gods have as many names as there are languages among humans. For it is not with the gods as with you: you are Velleius wherever you go, but Vulcan is not Vulcan in Italy and in Africa and in Spain.