Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything Quotes

“It is translation, more than speech itself, which provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought.
We should do more of it.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“in Israel it is said that God himself would not get promotion in any science department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Why not? Because he has only one publication—​and it was not written in English.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“I express not the word for the word but the sense for the sense.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Would we have ever asked what it is that a translator ‘carries across’ the ‘language barrier’ if he or she were called a ‘turner’, ‘tongue-man’, or ‘exchanger’? Probably not.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“A desire to believe (despite all evidence to the contrary) that words are at bottom the names of things is what makes the translator’s mission seem so impossible.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Translation is the opposite of empire”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Pero la historia de una palabra no dice mucho sobre su significado real. [...] Las etimologías oscurecen verdades esenciales sobre la forma en que utilizamos la lengua y, entre ellas, verdades sobre la traducción.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Translation is not just one thing; how best to do it depends on what you are doing it for.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Translation-​based language teaching is no longer in fashion, but its ghost still inhabits a number of misconceptions about what translation is or should be.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“The expression “literal meaning,” taken literally, is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, and a nonsense.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“This way of dealing with an untranslatable by not translating it while making it pronounceable (sound translation, homophonic translation: see here) could be considered the primary, original meaning of the term literal translation.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“To try to capture “all the words of a language” is as futile as trying to capture all the drops of water in a flowing river.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“The real story is the other way around. Without translators, Western dictionaries would not exist.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“the semantics of words is an intellectual mess.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Translation is meaning.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“It can be done only by guessing what the context and genre of the utterance are.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Once again, the expression uttered (in speech or writing) is not the sole or even the primary object of translation when the force of an utterance is what matters, as it always does.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Most of the time, the symptomatic meaning of an utterance is just too obvious to be noticed.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“In many circumstances, formal education replaces the infant language with one that goes on to be used in adult life as the operative means of communication.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“The natural way to represent the foreignness of foreign utterances is to leave them in the original, in whole or in part.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“The survivor language, English, is not necessarily the best suited to the job; it’s just that nothing has yet happened to knock it out.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Among them we cannot possibly include the unfortunate but widespread idea that English is simpler than other languages.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“Few inhabitants of the subcontinent have ever been monoglot; citizens of India have traditionally spoken three, four, or five tongues.1”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“any utterance of more than trivial length has no one translation; all utterances have innumerably many acceptable translations.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“speech is such an ephemeral thing - it's gone in a puff of warm air, which is all it is in a material sense”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“The words of law often look like words of the language you speak, but when they are legal terms, they are not.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“There are many different ways of teaching languages. The Ottomans rounded up youngsters in conquered lands and brought them back as slaves to be trained as dil oglan, or “language boys,” in Istanbul. Modern direct methods are gentler but rely on the same understanding of how languages are best learned—through total immersion in a bain linguistique, a kind of baptism of the brain.”
― David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything