French To English Translation Quotes & Sayings

I'm a Russian and all I know of Russia is what I've read. I yearn for the broad fields of golden corn and the forests of silver beech that I've read of in books and though I try and try, I can't see them with my mind's eye. I know Moscow from what I've seen of it at the cinema. I sometimes rack my brain to picture to myself a Russian village, the straggling village of log houses with their thatched roofs that you read about in Chekov, and it's no good, I know that what I see isn't that at all. I'm a Russian and I speak my native language worse than I speak English and French. When I read Tolstoi and Dostoievsky it is easier for me to read them in a translation. I'm just as much a foreigner to my own people as I am to the English and French. You who've got a home and a country, people who love you, people whose ways are your ways, whom you understand without knowing them - how can you tell what it is to belong nowhere? — W. Somerset Maugham

(Claude and Marcel LeFever were speaking in French. This simultaneous English translation is being beamed to the reader via literary satellite.) — Tom Robbins

In a French accent developed through a lifetime of using English I said, 'Hello sir, I would like to row the English Channel in a bath please.'
What actually arrived in the ear of the French Navy man was, 'Hello sire, I would like to fight a condom across a bath if you please. — Tim FitzHigham

The French expression 'cul-de-sac' describes what the Baudelaire orphans found when they reached the end of the dark hallway, and like all French expressions, it is most easily understood when you translate each French word into English. The word 'de,' for instance is a very common French world, I would be certain that 'de' means 'of.' The word 'sac' is less common, but I can fairly certain that it means something like 'mysterious circumstances.' And the word 'cul' is such a rare French word that I am forced to guess at its translation, and my guess is that in this case it would mean 'At the end of the dark hallway, the Baudelaire children found an assortment,' so that the expression 'cul-de-sac' here means 'At the end of the dark hallway, the Baudelaire children found an assortment of mysterious circumstances. — Lemony Snicket

I have many, many editions of the books, and they are all rather different. In the end, the one I used was the most recent French translation. French suits the tales well, and it's a beautiful translation. The Italian one is good as well ... English has fallen short. — Marina Warner

Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55) — Gilbert Highet