Is That A Fish In Your Ear? by David Bellos, r. Nov. 2015

p. 145 When you have to pay attention to more than one dimension of an utterance - when your mind is engaged in multilevel pattern-matching pursuits - you find resources in your language you never knew were there.

p. 166 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.

p. 195 ...translation always takes the register and level of naturally written prose up a notch or two. Some degree of raising is and always has been characteristic of translated texts simply because translators are instinctively averse to the risk of being taken for less than fully cultivated writers of their target tongue. In important ways, translators are the guardians and, to a surprising degree, the creators of the standard form of the language they use.

p. 216 The solar structure of the global book world wasn't designed by anyone. With its all-powerful English sun, major planets called French and German, outer elliptical rings where Russian occasionally crosses the path of Spanish and Italian, and its myriad distant satellites no weightier than stardust, the system is all the mor remarkable for being in stark contradiction to the weblike network of cross-cultural relations that most people would like to see.

p. 239 As one lawyer working [at the EU] said to me when I visited, he never really thinks about which of his four languages he is speaking or writing at any given time - he switches without conscious effort, as if he were just shifting the weight of his shoulder bag from the left to the right side.

p. 253 Languages can always be squeezed and shaped to fit the needs that humans have...

p. 290 For Thirlwell, novelistic "style" is the name of a holistic entity that comes somewhere between "a writer's special way of looking at the world" and "a writer's own way of writing novels."

p. 293 There aren't many publishing executives in Britain and the United States who read foreign languages other than French.... the English translator is often the only person in the chain who really knows very much about the book or its author at all. It's a daunting position, with responsibilities going far beyond the already difficult business of producing an acceptable and effective translation.

p. 324 Like [the movie Avatar], 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 the suppositions, translation could not exist.... Translation is another name for the human condition.

p. 338 It's not poetry but community that is lost in translation. The community-building role of actual language use is simply not part of what translation does.