Like the ghostwriter, the translator must slip on a second skin. Sometimes this transition is gentle, unobtrusive, without violence. But sometimes the settling in is abrupt, loud, and even disagreeable. For me, “plunge deep” tactics that go beyond the mechanics of translation help: coaxing out references to reconstruct the author’s cultural touchstones (books, film, music); reading passages aloud, first in the original and then in translation, until hoarseness sets in; animating the author’s story through my senses, using my nose, my ears, my eyes, and my fingers; devouring every clue to imprint the range of the author’s voice (humor, anger, grief, detachment) on my translation. 

Lara Vergnaud

 There is no better lesson for a writer. Translation goes beyond reading; the act is visceral as opposed to merely intimate, and it impacts you, it teaches you in a different way. . . . Translation is more pleasurable to me than writing fiction, given that I am in an intense relationship with a text I profoundly admire, greedy to absorb all that it has to offer. I question what I am producing, but that dialogue with the original text stimulates me, keeps me company, keeps me afloat. 

Jhumpa Lahiri

 Three grades of evil can be discerned in the queer world of verbal transmigration. The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge. This is mere human frailty and thus excusable. The next step to Hell is taken by the translator who intentionally skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers; he accepts the blank look that his dictionary gives him without any qualms; or subjects scholarship to primness: he is as ready to know less than the author as he is to think he knows better. The third, and worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is a crime, to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days. 

Vladimir Nabokov

 Translators need to be invisible. They need to leave no trace, I reminded myself. They need to quietly live inside every word they’ve typed but didn’t write. They need to project, to reflect, not to mimic. They need to become someone else. They owe it to themselves to try. 

Elena Marcu

 We tend to think of translation in terms of dictionaries but that’s just the beginning. Literary precision includes the idea of effect, pace, register, intensity and much else. There isn’t always an exact equivalent for a word or phrase: it’s the effect of it that matters. Effect is partly a subjective judgment but so is writing. Nothing in English will capture the tone of Budapest slang. The word “melancholy” does not carry the association of the Hungarian bús (pronounced booosh), that conjures a whole literary period, so some equivalent sensation has to be found. 

George Szirtes

 The first rule of translation: make sure you know at least one of the bloody languages! 

Faiz Ahmad Faiz

 Writers make national literature, while translators make universal literature. 

José Saramago