How many beautiful quotes about language and translation do you know? It’s likely you’ve come across at least a few. However, it definitely won’t hurt to learn several more, especially if you plan on including them in your marketing strategy.
In this article, we’ve selected a number of inspiring quotes about language and translation. We hope you’ll enjoy them!
INSPIRING QUOTES ABOUT LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION
All I know about grammar is its infinite power.
— Joan Didion
Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.
— Günter Grass
The past is always tense, the future perfect.
— Zadie Smith
A different language is a different vision of life.
— Federico Fellini
Words travel worlds. Translators do the driving.
— Anna Rusconi
Do you know what a foreign accent is? It’s a sign of bravery.
— Amy Chua
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
— Anthony Burgess
Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.
— Italo Calvino
Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.
— William Safire
The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.
— Leonardo Sciascia
Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence.
— George Steiner
A translator is a reader, an interpreter and a creator all in one.
— Bijay Kumar Das
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
— Nelson Mandela
The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own.
— Ned Rorem
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
There’s no shortage of remarkable ideas, what’s missing is the will to execute them.
— Seth Godin
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
Grammar, you’re the pickiest noun I know.
— Buffy Andrews
Language is wine upon the lips.
— Virginia Woolf
The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.
— Terry Pratchett
Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
— Benjamin Lee Whorf
You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.
— Jodi Picoult
Language comes first. It’s not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven’t got language, you can’t be conscious.
— Alan Moore
A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.
— Richard Bach
To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world.
— Chinese Proverb
With languages, you are at home anywhere.
— Edmund De Waal
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
— Charlemagne
Writers make national literature, while translators make universal literature.
— Jose Saramago
The translator is the author’s accomplice.
— Jorge Gonzalez Moore
Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?
— Melina Marchetta
