Languages Quotes
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Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.
Edith Grossman
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And nobody knew. The Japanese pulled all of their hair out trying to decipher the code. But it's one of the hardest languages to learn, that's why it was never decoded or deciphered.
Chester Nez
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A special skill, like speaking several languages, or keeping your mouth shut in one.
Evan Esar
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The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich.
James Loeb
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Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed.
Chuck Thompson
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They were always like two people talking to each other in different languages. But she loved him so much, when he withdrew as he had now done, it was like the warm sun going down and leaving her in chilly twilight dews.
Margaret Mitchell
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Which meant I spent my spare time learning theory, studying dead languages and reading books like Essays on The Metaphysical by John "never saw a polysyllabic word he didn't like" Cartwright.
Ben Aaronovitch
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One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
George Saintsbury
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That sort of detailed filmmaking is one, hard to do and not have it be pretentious, and two, have it tell the story, which is what you're taught, that cinema is the language of images and you really should be able to make a film with no dialogue and tell a story.
Nicole Kidman
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By such innovations are languages enriched, when the words are adopted by the multitude, and naturalized by custom.
Miguel de Cervantes
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In Europe, kids learn at least four languages before they're out of high school. But our education system is so underfunded, they go to school to buy heroin and an AK-47.
Eddie Griffin
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It is my huge pleasure that my novels are translated into languages that are read among small numbers of people.
Haruki Murakami
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Love will find its way through all languages on its own.
Rumi
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Plurality of languages: [...] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.
Hannah Arendt
