Alessandra Bottazzin

Pictures rule, but words define, explain, express, direct, and hold together our thoughts and what we know. They lead us into new ideas and back to older ones. In the beginning was the Word. Don Watson

The translator’s task is much harder than that of the original author. For the original author to express his experience or thought, he has many words available in his own language and he can choose one of those words easily. But the translator has to opt for the nearest equivalent, taking into consideration the probable …

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La traduzione è come una donna. Se è bella non è fedele. Se è fedele, certamente non è bella. Yevgeny Yevtushenko [trad.]

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations. Ezra Pound

Human language is local and changeable, and is therefore incapable of being used as the means of unchangeable and universal information. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794

All translation is a compromise – the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic. Benjamin Jowett

Une langue ne se fixe pas. L’esprit humain est toujours en marche, ou, si l’on veut, en mouvement, et les langues avec lui. Victor Hugo

Language is an archeological vehicle. The language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history. Russell Hoban

To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style …

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In its communicative function, language is a set of tools with which we attempt to guide another mind to create within itself a mental representation that approximates the one we have. Scott DeLancey