David Bellos Quotes & Sayings

But a world in which all intercultural communication was carried out in a single idiom would not diminish the variety of human tongues. It would just make native speakers of the international medium less sophisticated users of language than all others, since they alone would have only one language to think with. — David Bellos

I express not the word for the word but the sense for the sense. — David Bellos

To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts. — David Bellos

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

The difference between a translation and an original is not of the same order as the difference between powdered and steamed coffee. — David Bellos

In painting as in prose, a good eye is not enough to tell you whether what you see is real or fake. — David Bellos

The practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different: we speak different tongues, and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same - that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist. Nor could anything we would like to call social life. Translation is another name for the human condition. — David Bellos

Any utterance of more than trivial length has no one translation; all utterances have innumerably many acceptable translations — David Bellos

No opinions would be worth holding except by those who read works in the original. — David Bellos

Translating is a respectable, valuable, creative and worthwhile use of a human brain. — David Bellos