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Translation

Language: English Studies in English
University website: www.gold.ac.uk
Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (not all languages do) between translating (a written text) and interpreting (oral or sign-language communication between users of different languages); under this distinction, translation can begin only after the appearance of writing within a language community.
Translation
Translations [into the German language], even the best ones, proceed from a mistaken premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. ... The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.
Rudolf Pannwitz, Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur (1917), as translated in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926 (1996), pp. 261-262.
Translation
Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Virginia Wolf, On Not Knowing Greek
Translation
You've often heard me say – perhaps too often – that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more.
Robert Frost, A Backward Look, by Louis Untermeyer (1964), p. 18.
When you think about the Earth’s oceans you probably imagine stretches of deep, dark water, exotic marine life and pristine waves. You probably don’t think of vast islands of plastic waste such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an expanse of rubbish which some say is bigger than the continental United States. It was feared that collections of plastic debris like this were growing in line with our increasing rates of plastic production over the past decades. However, scientists have recently discovered that these floating eyesores are mysteriously receding – and that’s actually not a good thing…
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